Will Hurd and the Crisis of the Moderate Republicans

An illustrated portrait of Will Hurd with a CIA crest on the background.
Will Hurd, of Texas, the lone African-American in the House Republican caucus, will not be running for reëlection, but he seems likely to play a role in the coming impeachment inquiry.Illustration by Claire Merchlinsky

One quiet obstacle to the impeachment of President Trump is temperamental. The Republicans most likely to turn against the President are the moderates—Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and their fellow-travellers—but as a general rule they are also the institutionalists, figures of the caucus room rather than the lonely crusade. During the past few weeks, there has been a slightly comical gap between how willing they have been to denounce the President’s bumbling, potentially deadly intervention in the Syrian conflict, which is not part of the impeachment inquiry, and the highly reticent manner in which they have approached his intrusions in Ukraine, policy meddling that has put his Presidency at risk. For several weeks, most of the moderates have called for further investigation into the Ukraine affair, while some of them have also joined the rest of the Republican Party in criticizing the House Democrats for staging their initial hearings behind closed doors. The focus has been on process. But, on Thursday, the House voted to authorize a public impeachment inquiry. All of the Republicans, even those wary of the President, opposed it, but the vote brought closer the day when the moderates in the Senate and the House, who could signal that a national consensus has turned against the President, will need to drop the veil of process and decide.

Last week, I was on Capitol Hill and paid a visit to the office of Will Hurd, a moderate Republican from Texas, who is among the most pivotal congresspeople on the matter of impeachment and certainly the most closely observed. (As I walked into his office, another journalist, wearing a Politico lanyard, was ducking out, part of a little assembly line of writers bearing tape recorders.) Hurd, a forty-two-year-old former C.I.A. officer who sits on the Intelligence Committee, announced in August that he will not be running for reëlection, which made him, ostensibly, something of a free agent. Hurd, the lone African-American in the House Republican caucus, and the rare member of his party to have declined to endorse Trump in 2016 and to have opposed Trump’s immigration policies, has found himself on television an awful lot as the impeachment process has gained momentum. Yet he has been cautious, cautious. On CNN, he allowed that the President begging China to dig up dirt on Joe Biden was “outrageous”; on CBS, he said that he wanted to know what Ukrainian officials had understood about their conversation with President Trump. When I was ushered in to meet Hurd, he had a remote control in his hand and was watching a C-SPAN broadcast of a House vote, just beginning on the floor. I mentioned that it had been a pretty crazy day on the Hill. “Unfortunately, you gotta be a little more specific,” Hurd said, eyes on the TV. “There’s all kinds of wild stuff going on.”

The stuff going on that day was a little wilder than usual. That morning, about two or three dozen loyalist Republican members of Congress, led by the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz and his magnificent crest of gelled black hair, marched into the secure room in the Capitol where the three committees central to the inquiry were hearing closed testimony, and refused to leave until the hearings were made public. (Trump has said that Gaetz is “a machine,” that he’s “handsome,” and that he is “going places,” which Gaetz memorialized in his Twitter bio.) Gaetz’s crew ordered pizza, ostensibly to prove that they planned to stick around. The demonstration had the short-sighted, heavy-footed bumbling character of many pro-Trump performances; a congressman from West Virginia carried his phone into the secure room, which is definitely not allowed, and proceeded to broadcast a recording he made while inside. Many retired intelligence officers (lately an active group on Twitter) were aghast. What if the Russians or the Chinese hacked that phone and, through it, accessed the room where the deepest secrets of the intelligence community were relayed to Congress?

Hurd, who is well over six feet tall, with wiry hair gelled and brushed straight back, glasses, and a casual, slightly fidgety manner, made it clear that he wasn’t clutching any pearls over this. Instead, with an arm casually flung over the back of his office couch, he expressed some sympathy for the principle of Gaetz’s raid. Many members of Congress have “literally no information about what’s going on,” he told me. The rules governing the inquiry were that members of the Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, or Oversight Committees were allowed into the SCIF to attend the hearings, but, if they had to be somewhere else, they needed to make an appointment with the majority staff to view the transcripts. This had led to a fair amount of griping from Republicans; Hurd complained to me that it had taken him three weeks to learn exactly what Ambassador Kurt Volker had said about the informal line to the Ukrainian government that Rudy Giuliani had opened on the President’s behalf. “So that’s just uncommon, right?” Hurd asked. “This is not an impeachment inquiry—the last few times this has happened, there’s been a vote on the floor. This is oversight.”

Now he will have to find a new position. If the Trump partisans have argued that there is nothing wrong with what the President has done, some more responsible Republicans have been circling the position that questioning what the President has done is too important to be sullied by a partisan process like impeachment. This seemed, at least, to be Hurd’s position. What had happened between President Trump and his circle and the Ukrainian President and his circle, Hurd said, seemed to be reflective of a whole swath of foreign-policymaking, in which the White House opened up its own informal channels of communication with other governments, for reasons that were often kept from the professionals of the intelligence community, military, and foreign service. Hurd said, “You shouldn’t have two efforts, right? You shouldn’t have the formal effort and the informal effort.” There was a pattern, he said, that clearly went beyond Ukraine. “I think this is indicative of the broader Administration.” He went on, “I was in the French Ministry of Defense fifteen hours after the tweets about getting out of Syria. Our allies were unaware of our position. They had no idea.”

We were speaking before the complications of the past few days, in which American Special Forces assassinated the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But it was clear that the President’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria, so that the Turkish military could advance against the Syrian Kurds, has had a kind of unleashing effect on Trump-skeptical Republicans. The decision involves no high crimes or misdemeanors (at least, it doesn’t yet), but it exposes our allies, the Kurds, to slaughter and risks unleashing ISIS. The Syria issue has become a kind of safe space for Republicans to vent their genuine outrage at Trump without too directly risking the position of their party. “People have forgotten about the beheadings,” Hurd said. “People have forgotten about all the people being set on fire.” Hurd’s career in intelligence began shortly before the September 11th attacks, and was framed almost entirely by the war on terror. “If you had told me then that there would be no major attack on the homeland for eighteen years, I would have said you were crazy,” he said. “And the reason there hasn’t been is because the men and women of the intelligence community, our diplomatic corps, our military, are still operating as if it’s September 12, 2001.”

The congressman did not sound emotional as he ran through the damage that Trump had done in Syria, just matter-of-fact. By pulling out and allowing the Russians and the Turks to be responsible, he said that “we are injecting a level of instability in that region that is going to be used by ISIS to take advantage of the situation.” He mentioned that a State Department envoy to the Syria crisis, James F. Jeffrey, had testified that morning that the U.S. was investigating reports that “the freaking Turks use white phosphorus, right? And then who is going to make sure that the Turks are not committing human-rights abuses—the Russians? That’s crazy.” (Turkey has denied using white phosphorus, which is a chemical weapon that leaves victims with severe burns.) On the matter of impeaching Trump over his efforts to get Ukrainian help in the upcoming election, plenty of Republicans in Congress were on a war footing—they were staging sit-ins in the SCIF. On Syria, things were different. “It’s very visceral for people to understand that we stabbed our friends in the back,” Hurd said. “No one’s throwing ticker-tape parades.”

For years, Hurd was, somewhat wishfully, described as “the future of the G.O.P.” Part of this has to do with his district, a vast swath of the Texas border that is sixty-nine-per-cent Hispanic and trending blue. After Hurd narrowly won reëlection in 2018, he became one of only three Republicans in this Congress to represent a district won by Hillary Clinton. But it also has to do with his biography, which marks him not just as a member of the Republican establishment but as something like a star pupil. He was the student-body president at Texas A. & M. during a singular moment in that school’s history, when a dozen students died after a bonfire collapsed, in 1999. When reporters arrived in the aftermath of the tragedy, they noticed Will Hurd. “Just the way he sits in a chair communicates gravitas,” the great Texas journalist Paul Burka wrote, in Texas Monthly. The dean of the university’s public-service-and-government school at the time was the former C.I.A. director Robert Gates, who was impressed by Hurd and helped recruit him. Hurd left the agency in 2009 and lost in a Republican primary before going to on to work for a cybersecurity firm. In 2014, he made another attempt, with Gates’s endorsement, and won in the general. Two years ago, Gates told a Politico reporter that Hurd “has the character and the integrity and the leadership skills for higher office.”

Voting on impeachment may be Hurd’s last significant decision in Congress, but likely not in politics. “Everybody keeps saying I’m retiring,” he said during an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival, in September. “I’m forty-two. I’m just getting started.” The exit interviews with Hurd this month have taken in not just impeachment but the partisan future of Texas and the political path of the Republican Party. He seems likely to have a role to play in each of them. To Will, he made the case that Texas was a purple state already; at the Texas Tribune Festival interview, he said that unless his party changes its course he “will think about” running for President in 2024, though that sounded more like a way to sharpen his complaint than an actual plan. The political change in Texas is very clear to Hurd. “When you look at the trends from 2018, especially vis-à-vis 2016,” he told me, “with a minority population, people under the age of twenty-nine, and women in the suburbs growing as the largest groups of voters, and you look at statewide Republican officials only getting fifty-one per cent of the vote. . . . those are some trends that are going to need to be addressed.”

On the C-SPAN broadcast from the House floor, the vote totals were creeping higher, so Hurd needed to go before he missed his chance to vote. He stood up and slipped a suit jacket on. The future of the Republican Party, he insisted, wasn’t with the populists. “It’s unfortunate that the conventional wisdom is that the way you win elections is by turning out the base, and that has been the conventional wisdom over the last, probably, two decades,” he said. “The opportunity is actually with Independents, and with Democrats, because they’re concerned with the direction that their party is going, as well. Because most people think the way you solve problems in the future is the way you solved problems in the past, by empowering people, not empowering the government. They think the way you help people move up the economic ladder is through more free markets, not less, and not through socialism.” Hurd had a sketch of the future in his mind: “I actually think the opportunity is in talking to the majority of Americans and inspiring them, and that’s where my plan to take the Republican Party is going, because that’s what’s going to allow us to have success in the future.” As a political program, it sounded both vague and familiar—after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, the Republican leadership developed a plan to moderate their tone on immigration in the hopes of appealing to more minority voters. The weakness of this argument matters not just for the Party’s future but for its present. One sign that Republican moderates are not yet ready to dispense with the President is that none of them can convincingly articulate a future for the Party that does not include him.

An earlier version of this post misidentified the committees with access to the SCIF.