I've made no secret, at least on the internet as a whole, that I support Brandon Herrera in the TX-23 Republican primary. Rep. Tony Gonzales went on an anti-gun tear in the wake of Uvalde and did serious harm to the Second Amendment cause.
It's why I resented the hell out of the GOP backing him yet again. Even President Trump endorsed him.
I get that a safe seat is always welcome, so why shake things up? But as was pointed out two years ago, what good is a safe Republican seat when the guy sitting in it is barely a Republican? Now, I focus on gun rights here, but since Tony Gonzales has been rather notorious for supporting gun control, it seems a fair question.
District 23 has been a competitive seat for Republicans. Since January 2021, Tony Gonzales, a San Antonio native and Navy veteran, has represented District 23 in the House. Gonzales is a centrist-moderate Republican.
In May 2022, the wheels came off. The tragedy at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde sent Texas gun-grabbers into a frenzy, promoting the gun control snake oil like the fast-talking hustlers from the old-time medicine shows. With all the tears and lurid details about the victims, it should have been a sure thing.
The “blame-it-on-the-guns” strategy failed when much of the furor and outrage instead targeted the army of law enforcement officers that was not deployed while the killer was still active.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Texas Senator John Cornyn led a group of Republicans into an alliance with Democrats led by Connecticut Senator and gun-control zealot Chris Murphy to produce legislation to make it look like Congress was doing something
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 (BSCA) was the result. Joe Biden praised the bill and began perverting it as soon as his signature was dry.
Tony Gonzales was the only Texas Republican to vote in favor of the BSCA. He also voted against the Border Safety and Security Act.
In 2023, Texas Republicans censured Gonzales for his votes. He was only the second person to be censured by the party.
Not great from our standpoint.
But things have gotten even spicier of late, because while the Republican establishment backed Gonzales despite his anti-gun record, that's starting to change.
Last year, a 9-1-1 call was made. A woman had reportedly set herself on fire in an apparent suicide attempt. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, she died. The woman, Regina Santos-Aviles, was a staffer for Tony Gonzales. In and of itself, this would just be a tragic coincidence, except that word soon broke of allegations of an affair between Gonzales and Santos-Aviles.
Gonzales is married with six children.
Now, an affair, in and of itself, is one of those things that some people will shrug off and others won't. The fact that whatever happened was bad enough that Santos-Aviles not just killed herself, but did it in a way that was sure to make a spectacle of her death. Assuming, of course, that the ruling of a suicide is accurate, though many people are skeptical of that.
But then, earlier this week, some text messages were released that suggest that the affair wasn't quite what we thought.
The text messages indicate Gonzales pushed a sexual relationship with Santos-Aviles despite House rules, passed in 2018, prohibiting relationships between lawmakers and their staff.
The messages, sent weeks ahead of Gonzales’ runoff election against Herrera in May 2024, show the congressman repeatedly pushing the conversation in a sexual direction, even as Santos-Aviles tried to deter him. After requesting an explicit photo, which she declined to provide, he asked her “favorite position.” She asked for his first, and he said, “on top pinning your legs.”
“This is going too far boss,” she replied. He continued to push, but eventually, the conversation turned to setting up an in-person liaison. Two days later, the pair were alone for several hours at a cabin owned by a former staffer’s family, the staffer told the Express-News.
Now, many Republicans are backing Herrera.
Look, ordinarily, I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own homes, just so long as no one gets hurt. This looks to me like Gonzales didn't just have an affair with Santos-Aviles, but pressured her into going beyond her comfort zone with what started out as some harmless flirting.
So we've got a man who couldn't stand for the Constitution he'd sworn multiple times to support and defend, couldn't stand for his marriage vows, and couldn't stand for House ethics rules.
How anyone can still back the man is beyond me.
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