Targeted Texan had good first year

WASHINGTON — Rep. Lizzie Fletcher’s first bill — a measure meant to cut away federal red tape and speed up disaster recovery funding — passed the House nearly unanimously, with just seven votes against it and some of the chamber’s most conservative members joining the freshman Democrat in pushing the legislation forward.

The next day, Fletcher voted to impeach President Donald Trump — a move Republicans are dead-set on making sure overshadows all else Fletcher has done in her rather effective first year in Congress.

It was a fitting end to the year for Fletcher, a moderate from West Houston seen by some as the most vulnerable Democrat in Texas in 2020.

Fletcher mostly has kept her head down and tried to get work done, often side by side with Republicans, rather than draw the spotlight in an increasingly chaotic Congress.

She sought out committee assignments — transportation, science — that matter to Houston, but rarely generate much attention.

“She’s pretty much the antithesis of AOC and the rest of the Squad,” Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones said, referencing the liberal firebrand from New York, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Fletcher “doesn’t seek the headlines,” he said. “She’s focused on constituent services, the nitty gritty of committees, passing legislation.”

But despite her efforts to reach across the aisle and stay above the fray, Fletcher — who represents a broad group of freshly elected moderate Democrats, many of them women, who helped the party take the House in 2018 — nonetheless was key to helping House leadership move impeachment forward in the first place.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the impeachment inquiry after moderates in swing districts voiced support for it. And those moderates, Fletcher included, largely held the party line when it came time to vote.

Within minutes of her casting it, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is targeting her seat in 2020, issued a statement saying, “Lizzie Fletcher’s vote to impeach President Trump destroys any chance she has for reelection and shows Texas voters she’s exactly like the rest of the socialist Democrats.”

But Fletcher didn’t come to Congress to impeach the president, and she wants her colleagues to know that.

The day after the vote, Fletcher approached U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, a Houston-area Republican, after a science committee hearing to explain her impeachment stance and let him know she still was looking forward to working with him on the energy subcommittee next year.

She had a similar exchange earlier in the year when she ran into U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican from The Woodlands, in the Washington airport and brought up the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement.

“Unlike some of my other colleagues who’ve been here a long time, I am here just this year,” Fletcher said in an interview. “And I am engaged in part because I felt like we could do better up here and … that I thought, you know, bringing this Houston attitude of being collaborative and innovative and more bipartisan would help.”

“I put my name on the ballot because I want things to be different. I put my name on the ballot to make change,” she said. “And I think there are a lot of good people here that I’ve gotten to work with who were here for those reasons .”

‘Nuts-and-bolts issues’

Within days of flipping a district long held by Republican John Culberson in 2018, Fletcher joined Rep. Pete Olson, a Fort Bend Republican, to meet with Houston and Harris County officials to ask what they wanted her to do in Congress.

At the top of local leaders’ wish list: Help getting much-needed disaster recovery funding faster. One easy way to do that, they said, was to scrap a Federal Emergency Management Agency rule that was delaying funding for projects in the city meant to guard against future flooding.

Under the rule, the city couldn’t do anything until it got the green light from FEMA — or risk losing the federal match. That means the city couldn’t even start buying the properties it needed to clear the way for projects until it had heard from FEMA — a process that takes months.

It was causing major delays in some big projects the city launched after Hurricane Harvey, including more than a year’s stalling of work on a canal where White Oak and Buffalo bayous meet, designed to curb flooding downtown. It’s the biggest mitigation project in the state with a $131 million price tag, $46 million of which the federal government is set to cover.

So Fletcher got to work on legislation that Olson cosponsored that would scrap those rules and allow local governments to get started. She got the rest of the Texas delegation on board and went even beyond that, drafting ultra-conservative North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows — an unlikely ally for a Democrat — as a co-sponsor of the bill.

Fletcher and Meadows both are on the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee, and Fletcher had heard Meadows, who represents a state that has also been wracked by natural disasters, rail against FEMA.