INTERVIEW: Freshman Class President Rep. Brandon Gill aims to codify Trump’s executive orders
The Lowdown:
Rep. Brandon Gill (R., Texas), the House GOP’s freshman class president, said the GOP is unified to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda in Congress;
Gill said his top priority, if he could “boil it down to one concept, would be codifying and making permanent President [Donald] Trump’s executive orders that he has been signing”;
Gill said he is developing “great” relationships with his fellow lawmakers and that “it makes a big difference” that everyone is on the same page behind Trump’s agenda.
Dallas, Texas, is home to many wonderful things that bring joy to the lives of those around the world: good food, good culture, and good people. Today’s journey takes us to the latter, and shows just how influential and impactful Dallas conservatives are on the national level. In fact, Dallas conservatives are so impactful on the national zeitgeist that one of them is the House of Representative’s freshman GOP class president: Rep. Brandon Gill (R., Texas).
Gill, who took the reins of Texas’s 26th Congressional District after the retirement of longtime Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas), hopped on the phone with the Washington Reporter to talk about his first term in Congress, his priorities, budget reconciliation, and more.
“The first term has been great,” Gill said. “We have an incredible freshman class coming in. Everybody in my class is unified to execute on the Trump agenda, something we all ran on. It’s something we are all serious about.”
“So that’s refreshing,” Gill added. “And I can say the Republican conference as a whole has been great, as well.”
Gill said America is in a “very different world” from where we were just eight years ago in 2017. The Texas Republican said that “there are no Liz Cheneys and there are no Adam Kinzingers in the Republican Conference now” and that there are a lot of opportunities “to get a lot of things done here.”
Gill said his top priorities, if he could “boil it down to one concept, would be codifying and making permanent President [Donald] Trump’s executive orders that he has been signing.”
“He has been doing exactly what he was elected to do, signing executive orders left and right,” Gill said. “And all of those are great, and they’re what we want to see and what voters want to see.”
“But I think we saw what happened during the Biden administration where he, basically as soon as he got into the White House, issued 70 to 80 executive orders to pretty much try to undo everything Trump did in his first term,” the Texas Republican continued. “That was particularly true on the border. We’ve got to make sure that never happens again.”
“So my biggest priority is codifying these into law,” he added, noting his focus is on immigration and that he has legislation in the House right now, the Remain in Mexico Act, that would make Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” executive order into law. Trump’s Remain in Mexico order required aliens claiming asylum and encountered at the southern border to remain in Mexico until their asylum court date.
Gill said he is developing “great” relationships with his fellow lawmakers and that “it makes a big difference” that everyone is on the same page behind Trump’s agenda.
“I ran on the Trump agenda. I’m a huge, huge supporter of the president. I love what he’s done to the party,” Gill said. “I love that he has made the Republican Party the party of the working class. And the fact that everybody else is on board with that is exactly what the American people want to see.”
Gill said he believes he brings “a bit of a new perspective” to the table as one of Congress’s youngest lawmakers because he thinks “of the America he grew up in” as “fundamentally different” than those his older colleagues “grew up in.”
“And that’s to say that, for my entire life, we’ve had an economy addicted to deficit spending and trade manipulation. We’ve had a border crisis my entire life, other than the four years of President Trump’s first administration, regardless of who is in the White House,” Gill said, also highlighting the Left’s takeover “of all of society” on “taxpayer dollars.”
“But whether that’s the America you’ve experienced and lived in, you realize how hard we’re going to have to fight to get this country back on track,” Gill said. “So I have no illusions about where we are or about how bad our situation is, and I think that creates a little bit more fight.”
On the subject of reconciliation, Gill, a member of the House Budget Committee, noted that his committee passed the budget instructions out of the committee but said “there is a little bit of disagreement” on procedural moves going forward, but those they will “figure out with time.”
Gill praised both Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) for their leadership on the budget front, calling the speaker’s work “phenomenal.”
When it comes to illegal fentanyl and nicotine vapes flowing into America, the Texas freshman said that his Remain in Mexico Act — which has over 100 cosponsors including support from two Democrats — is “a good first step” to stopping the flow.
“Perhaps that is something we can add to the reconciliation bill,” Gill said. “But whenever you look at the flow of illegal drugs and illegal people, they sort of come in tandem.”
“Which is another way of saying that, once we secure the border, once we stop this massive deluge of illegal aliens pouring into our communities, murdering, raping, slaughtering, pillaging our people, that will go a long way in stopping the drug trafficking. I mean, for four years, our government under Joe Biden has been facilitating the largest human and sex and drug trafficking operation in the world. We brought in enough fentanyl to kill the population of our country multiple times over. This is a huge national crisis.”
“And it all comes down to, to put it almost simplistically, but it’s true, it all comes down to securing the border,” he added.