What Actually Gets Congress's Attention

"When I have small business owners who come up to me and they're like, 'Look, I employ 10 people, 50 people. This is really hurting me.' That is going to get my attention."

Rep. Beth Van Duyne moved out on her own at 17 and worked two and three jobs at a time to pay rent, some weeks eating on the $20 checks AT&T mailed to anyone who switched long-distance carriers. She applied to one college, Cornell, signed for loans that took her 10 years to repay, and graduated magna cum laude. After four Ithaca winters the only place she wanted to be was Texas.

She got into politics over shade. Her daughter had nine eye surgeries as a baby and covered her eye in the sun, so Rep. Van Duyne asked the parks board for shade at the neighborhood park, ended up its chairman, and raised a couple hundred thousand dollars to rebuild it. When a zoning fight put her neighborhood across from a city councilman nobody wanted to run against, she ran with a two-year-old and a five-year-old at home, was outspent 8 to 1, and won by asking five people for support and asking each of them for five more. She went on to become the first woman elected mayor of Irving, served at HUD under Secretary Ben Carson, and won her seat in Congress in 2020. She now sits on Ways and Means and chairs the Small Business Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Tax, and Capital Access.

The North Texas Job Fair started because employers could not find workers during COVID. The first one was booked for a library and moved to the Irving Convention Center within a week; 6,000 people came. Then 12,000, 25,000 and 35,000. This year 50,000 job seekers filled Globe Life Field until the parking ran out, and 670 employers were hiring for 68,000 jobs. Her office organizes and pays for it, and 97 elected officials from both parties helped promote it.

Asked whether a mayor or a member of Congress has more economic impact, she does not hesitate: local. Congress sets tax and trade policy, but companies deciding where to relocate look at schools, roads, flights out of DFW, housing and whether they can hire, and the city that sells itself hardest wins. As mayor she ran an economic development forum with the airport's CEO at the table to chase the direct flights employers asked for.

She walks through how a bill actually moves: co-sponsors on the committee of jurisdiction, a hearing, a markup, then the fight to reach the floor. Her small business regulation bill, which makes agencies identify what new rules cost small businesses and cut existing rules by at least that much, took three sessions to pass the House and has stalled in the Senate. She explains why she sends back checks from donors who expect a vote, why the most effective thing an executive can do is tell her how a policy hits the people they employ in her district, and how business tours, like a radiology clinic where paperwork had turned patient care into typing, shape the bills she writes. A former receptionist who went from $12 an hour to $65 an hour after HVAC training makes her case for the skilled trades, Forge Now and Dallas College.