Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ) was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 and represents the 5th District of Arizona, a centrally located region of Arizona located outside of Phoenix. He serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
The following has been edited for context and clarity.
Federal Newswire:
We have the recent reports that the Inspector General at Customs and Border Protection was ordering folks to not offer up registration numbers to folks who are coming into the country, so now we have no way of tracking who knows how many people.
Representative Andy Biggs:
Yeah. We could actually spend hours talking about it, but let's just talk about what's happening today. Reports, 203,000 encounters. Most people don't realize what an encounter is. An encounter in the border is where somebody has been arrested or surrendered and 203,000. Every day in the small town of Yuma, a thousand people are encountered, and so this is what you see happening, but something that's really dangerous that we're not really reporting on enough is this year, over half a million known got aways. And then it's estimated another half a million, unknown got aways. So what that boils down to is you've got a million people that we don't even know where they're coming from, what their intentions are, where they're going, but the bottom line is most of the people that are coming in, the 2 million people that came in the last 12 months, we don't know where they are either.
Federal Newswire:
If you have large swatches of land and wilderness areas that are owned by the federal government, the federal government doesn't patrol them, does it give illegals unfettered access to interstates?
Representative Andy Biggs:
So until about a year and a half ago... Actually, under the Trump administration, they started allowing it. There was a wilderness preserve sitting right on the border. And what would happen is illegal aliens would come in. We won't get into how many ways they would come in, but they would drive their vehicles and they cut roads into this pristine wilderness. And at that time, our CBP agents were not allowed to even go on there because they're wilderness areas, so now for a while there they had to ask permission to chase, and my understanding is now they can go on. But the problem is, let's take Arizona for instance. You've got over 60 linear miles of a native reservation. And so that reservation, we get to patrol a little bit, but there's no fencing there, and it's a huge corridor for drug and human trafficking, and so anytime you've got these open areas where the federal government is controlling the land, maybe they're leasing land to ranchers, but it's federally owned. And they just might have a two or three strand barbed wire fence there. Well, it is a trafficking hub.
Federal Newswire:
You take people down to the border to watch this. How do these work?
Representative Andy Biggs:
Every few months, I take members of Congress down and I go down all the time myself, but I will also invite some to come with me now and then, and we've taken dozens and dozens of members. Last time was just a couple weeks ago in Yuma, so I'll give you the way it works. Right now, the super highway of illegal crossings is really running midnight to about 6:30-7:00 AM. Why? It's hotter than heck. So I had them down there and it's 116 degrees, middle of the day. That's just the way the tour had worked out. And I said, "Oh look, you're not going to see anybody crossing you guys." Nobody's coming across. But sure enough, there are people coming across. In fact, there's a family from Russia, three people from Russia, mom, dad, daughter, what's the first words or almost the first words they say? "We want asylum." So it is nonstop you see it. And the reason I do this is because until people see it, it's hard to understand. It's hard to preach.
Federal Newswire:
Now you were just telling me about a recent hearing talking about election issues in Congress. We're talking about disclosure issues in Congress. How does this relate to the illegal immigration issue?
Representative Andy Biggs:
Well, so a lot of people say to me, "Why?" Obviously this is overtly intentional on the part of this administration to open the border. People say, "Well, why is that?" Well, so recently we had a hearing. We had a hearing in judiciary and it was a voting rights deal. And so we said, "Well, we want to clarify that nothing you're doing here..." Because their language would allow any person to vote. And we said, "We want to clarify that only it'd be US citizens would vote." They voted that down on a party line vote, so they unintentionally reveal their hand constantly that this is about, oh, they want more voters. They think they're going to get more voters by incentivizing people to come here and giving them benefits, social welfare benefits.
Federal Newswire:
Let's talk about the federal lands issue and the work of the Western caucus. What is it, 86% owned by the federal government? Your district is roughly in the center of the state.
Representative Andy Biggs:
Yeah, absolutely, so Phoenix metro area is 5 million people. And so people think, "Oh, Arizona's just Phoenix." But it's not. Arizona is the fifth geographically largest state in the country, and of that, roughly 82% of it is controlled by a government, either federal or state.
Yeah. So what happens is, it impacts everything from how do you fund schools? Well, most states and Arizona included, uses state property taxes to fund. When you don't have... You can't expand your property tax phase because we don't own the land. So what happens then is the federal government steps in and as they do, they screw it up and they underfund.
Federal Newswire:
The payments and low taxes and till payments.
Representative Andy Biggs:
That's right till payments. So they step in. Those are underfunded, but then we don't have enough money to expand it anyway, and so everybody gets to be underfunded, and then there's mismanagement. So you have things like in California they're throwing out over a hundred thousand acre feet of water every year that their state needs. We need some. If they're going to throw it out, send it to Arizona. So you got the water mismanagement. You got forest mismanagement. So you get tremendous erosion and then you also have lots of wildfires in the west, and those wildfires would be far more easily managed if you would allow people to go in and manage the forest the way they used to. But right now the federal government encroaches on all of this stuff.
Federal Newswire:
So before you came to Congress, you were president of the state Senate, right?
Representative Andy Biggs:
Exactly right, and what a great way of putting it that the federal government back east is a poor neighborhood for the local government. That's a great way of putting because it really is. That really is the problem.
Federal Newswire:
You are concerned about a runaway constitutional convention.
Representative Andy Biggs:
Yeah, and that's why I wrote the book because I took that position and I ended up debating all over the country. And people would say, "Well, why? How can they possibly be against it?" Well, here's why. There's two ways to amend the constitution. One is a convention. They call it the Convention of the States, but in order to get that convention going, you still have to involve Congress. You petition Congress and you get 3/4th of the states to petition and they come in and Congress issues the call. Now people say, "Oh, it's just a ministerial function." It is not just a ministerial function. Congress can set up whatever parameters. They get to set the date, the time, the location. And they could say, "You're going to cover these areas. Other areas would not count." Well, there's no way with the money and the media that's out there, there is no way you can have a convention like you had in 1787 with the founders. Because what happened there is they could close up the doors and they could keep everybody there and nothing would get out, and it didn't get out. That wouldn't happen today, and it would be manipulated. And I will just tell you, people on the right get ticked at me, but people on the left get ticked at me too because believe me, just as many people on the left have constitutional amendments that they want to propose as people on the right.
Everything from marriage, you name it. I've got it sourced in my book. All this stuff, but the bottom line is this, Andrew, it's always the question that they can't answer to me. I always ask them, "Is it the people who are in power that fail to follow the Constitution? Or is the Constitution the problem?" Which is the problem? It's not the Constitution, I guarantee you. It is the people that ignore the Constitution, but we have the mechanism as people of the United States to enforce that, and it isn't necessarily changing the constitution. It is actually changing the people.
Federal Newswire:
Talk about the problem of politics and vague legislative language and giving the agencies all of this [regulatory] power.
Representative Andy Biggs:
First of all, we should not be delegating rule making authority to these agencies because here's the deal. They make the rules. They then enforce the rules and investigate what they perceive to be wrongdoing. So they abuse that power and then they adjudicate that. That's what James Madison said is the quintessential definition of tyranny is all those powers combined in one place. We've done that over and over again for a hundred years now. The second thing is, and I actually heard a congressman say this once, that the purpose that they do this vague language and delegate authority is so members of Congress are not held accountable.
So they can stand up and say, "Well, that's the EPA's doing. It's not me. I'll work on, see what we can do to fix..." That is bogus.
And the third thing is we have basically allowed them to run away with no oversight. We don't defund. I ran a bill four years ago to get rid of an agency that everyone agreed was duplicative. I lost four Republican votes in the committee and I couldn't even get out of the committee when it was a Republican majority.
Federal Newswire:
Any hope of seeing in a Republican Congress with a Republican president down the road, some way of codifying that kind of language?
Representative Andy Biggs:
Well, I would hope so. I know that many of my colleagues agree with that a hundred percent. In fact, I would say most Republicans, if not all, agree with that in Congress. But you got to have the courage and the political will. And then the other problem is we're a bicameral body and it'll take 60 votes in the Senate, which unless... But there are ways to get around that. And the senators have to say that that's a priority. And if we're going to save the country, I believe you got to devolve power away from the center and back to the States. And one of the ways you do that is you start dismantling the federal bureaucratic state. And if you do that, then the states like Arizona, when I was there, we had to fight OSHA on a particular standard that our state standard produced better results than the federal standard. The data was clear. And we'd say, "Well, but here we are." And they would say, "We want you to do this." We had to fight them on dust and air pollution. And they'd say, "Well, you got too much pollutants in the air. Dust is your number one particulate." "Okay, well how would you have us solve dust in a desert?" "Water," they would say. And so I said, "Well you want us to do water?" And then the other half of the EPA would say, "You guys are wasting water."
And that's why you have to start taking this apart, and members in Congress, I think, quite frankly, a lot of them live in a bubble. They don't appreciate it. They'll go back and say "hi," and they'll do a chamber event and eat breakfast with them. The reality is you have to take a hard look at what we're doing here and how it impacts the locals.
Federal Newswire:
You were in the State Senate for 14 years?
Representative Andy Biggs:
Senate for six, House for eight.
Federal Newswire:
So how different is the Federal Congress from your experience in the state legislature? Not the first person to ask that question.
Representative Andy Biggs:
No, no you're not. In fact, I was on the floor sitting with a colleague of mine who is serving the state legislature with me, and we were lamenting that in the state legislature, first of all, even when you had disagreements with the governor, you worked with the governor. Even if you had disagreements, you could move stuff through much more quickly and much more substantive, and it would have immediate impact and you would see that stuff. In Congress with this administration, I've never seen Joe Biden there for sure. And then the Democrats have changed the rules. The first rule they changed is they said, "You can't remove Nancy Pelosi as speaker if you got the votes you don’t have." So they do all that stuff and they slow it down on one hand and then when they want to do something, they'll speed it up, jam it through without debate. In a state legislature, you have regular debates where everybody gets to get and have the debate.
