Marisa Lagos: That’s right. We’re thrilled to bring you our conversation with Representative John Duarte. He’s a longtime player in the state’s agricultural sector, and he won the 13th Congressional District in 2022 in a very close race against former state Assemblyman Adam Gray. Voters can expect a rematch between the two moderates next year. But we got to talk to him about immigration, abortion and other hot button issues. So stick around for that. It was a great conversation.
Guy Marzorati: Yeah good conversation with him.
Marisa Lagos: But first Guy it’s end of session in Sacramento, the time of year when the legislature has to finish up its business this year by midnight on September 14th and the shenanigans have begun. I feel like there is a big kind of growing I mean, existing, but growing maybe to a head tension between the business community and Democrats in the legislature, as well as a number of other groups. There’s a couple of big kind of labor fights, a bill that would allow striking workers to get unemployment benefits. Of course, those are paid for by companies. It’s not a thing the business community likes to hear about. Another proposal to increase the number of guaranteed six days per year from 3 to 7. But I feel like all of this is being slightly overshadowed by a burgeoning fight over next year’s ballot measures.
So I guess to back up a second, we have a ballot measure put on next November’s ballot by the business community that’s going to make it a lot harder for the state and locals to assess taxes and fees on voters. And what we saw last week was the new Assembly speaker reflects a little muscle, introducing a measure that would kind of undercut that business ballot measure.
Guy Marzorati: Right. Basically, the Democratic-backed measure that the legislature is hoping to get done in the next few weeks, potentially put it on the March ballot. So get it on before this business measure goes on in November. That would say, look, if you know, these business groups want to increase the threshold to pass taxes, basically their measure would make any tax have to be passed by the legislature and then go before voters. It would say if you want to raise the threshold and raise some local threshold to two-thirds, your own measure on the state ballot would need to get two-thirds of the statewide vote. So both sides have accused each other of kind of changing the rules of the game on the fly. But this is, as you say, just an ongoing escalation between business groups in California, a lot of the labor backed Democrats in the state capitol. I think of almost like rational deterrence, right? These groups are just arming up so much on either side that it almost seems like we could be headed toward some kind of compromise.
We’ve seen this before where a ballot measure like the one business groups have qualified can be taken off. It doesn’t have to go on the November ballot. There can be a deal reached between now and then. And I think as you’re seeing so much escalation on both sides, it could point to that. The question is at what price for Democrats? Because we’ve seen this before, where they’ve had to negotiate with the business community to get a measure off the ballot. A couple of years ago, it meant that they had to basically put a halt on all local soda taxes. What’s the price this time to stop this measure from getting on the ballot that really, and we can talk about some of the details. I think it’s a fair comparison to something like Prop 13, maybe not with the immediate financial impact, but just the reach.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, I mean, it is really extreme. And I think that that is one area that I’m going to be interested to watch this kind of positioning occur because you mentioned sort of labor versus business. I think that the tax measure the Business Roundtable put on next fall’s ballot goes way beyond that normal kind of breakdown because it does so clearly go after local jurisdictions and their ability to raise revenue. I think you’re going to have a really interesting group if this stays on the ballot of bedfellows, because it’s going to affect red, you know, Central Valley cities and counties, special districts just as much as blue ones. And at the end of the day, a lot of the services that are provided by government are not controversial or political. We’re talking police and fire and, you know, in some cases, you know, picking up the streets. I mean, I really think that if this is an attempt by the new speaker and Democrats and labor and, you know, the League of California Cities and all these other groups to kind of push this off the ballot, they will be flexing that muscle in a kind of bigger coalition than we’ve seen. And I think just generally, it’s going to be a fascinating campaign on both sides to kind of see how they try to take what just took me like an hour to just go through this measure and understand it.
Guy Marzorati: Oh, there’s so much, look we’re going to spend a lot of time, I anticipate unpacking this business tax measure. But one of the impacts we talked about today was just on local measures that have already passed. There’s a retroactive element to this that would basically say measures passed in the 2022 election if they didn’t really specify a timetable for the taxation, they would be wiped out. And you’d have there’s plenty of local taxes here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, many in the South Bay —
Marisa Lagos: We’re talking billions of dollars of revenue —
Guy Marzorati: That would be thrown out by this, potentially.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, I looked at this. I mean on the list that might actually go down is a $20 million a year tax in Oakland, $10 million a year tax in Culver City, that is real money for these jurisdictions. So, as you said, we’ll be watching this really closely. I think the other question is just going to be the potential for litigation and just the kind of, you know, hornet’s nest —
Guy Marzorati: Oh, city attorney’s nightmare.
Marisa Lagos: City attorney’s nightmare for sure. All right. So we’re going to take a short break now. We will talk about this plenty in the months ahead. When we come back, our conversation Wednesday with Central Valley Congressman John Duarte. You’re listening to Political Breakdown from KQED Public Radio.
Marisa Lagos: Welcome back to Political Breakdown. I’m Marisa Lagos here with Guy Marzorati and we are excited to be in Turlock today in the office of Central Valley Republican Congressman John Duarte. He was elected in a very close race in 2022 to represent Congressional District 13. It runs down the I-5 corridor from around Modesto to the area west of Fresno. Congressman, welcome to the Breakdown.
John Duarte: Good to be here Marisa.
Marisa Lagos: Thanks for taking some time. So as we said, we’re in Turlock. And I wondered if you would just start by telling listeners a little bit about your district, what gets grown here versus other parts of the Central Valley further south?
John Duarte: Excellent. Well, this district, as you said, goes from Lathrop up just west of Stockton, all the way down the Highway 5 corridor includes West Modesto, which is one of the richest, most heritage farm areas in America, all the way down to Coalinga on the very south and west end, Riverdale. And so as you go up through the valley, we have more almond acreage in this district than any other district in America, probably any other political district in the world, for that matter, because when you’re number one on California in almonds, you’re number one.
Guy Marzorati: Tell us a little bit about your family business. This is something that your parents started, is that right?
John Duarte: Well, yeah. Duarte Nursery, Duarte Trees & Vines is a business we have here in Hughson, California that was begun by my parents in 1988. I joined them in ’89, kind of co-founded the business with them, my brother Jeff and my mom and dad, Jim and Anita all started it, built it up kind of out of the ashes of previous nursery companies my parents had had. And it was a real privilege to come out of college and be able to just be able to bootstrap a company together and kind of grow it with my parents, with my brother Jeff, and now my wife Alexandra and my son Isaac are full time employees at the nursery. Isaac just came back out of Cal Poly with a horticulture degree. So we’re very pleased, very family —
Marisa Lagos: Three generations.
Guy Marzorati: Your parents — tough bosses?
John Duarte: [laughs] Well, we were you know, my brother and I owned half the company from the beginning. And so my dad was the president. He’s retired since ’06, I became president of the company in 2006. And now my brother Jeff is running it, I’ve kind of dumped it on him —
Marisa Lagos: You have another job —
John Duarte: [laughs] Yeah I’ve got some things to do.
Marisa Lagos: I want to ask, though, I think you majored in finance. Was numbers kind of always your forte? Were you thinking about this burgeoning business venture when you did that?
John Duarte: Yeah. I’ve always known I wanted to run my own business, be have my own business. Even as a young kid, my dad was always entrepreneurial and that’s the experience we had growing up. And I had no doubt that I didn’t want to work for somebody else, per say. So at San Diego State, I chose finance just because the classes looked more interesting as an undergraduate business program and looked at the management, looked at the marketing, looked at accounting, looked at, you know, real estate emphasis and chose finance because it just looked to be the most analytical, insightful, and then came to work at the nursery for five years from ’89 through ’94 and then started the MBA program at University of the Pacific.
Marisa Lagos: Oh, wow.
John Duarte: So I’m actually a ’97 graduate of the Eberhardt School of Business, also with an MBA. So that’s plenty of education for a nursery guy and a farmer.
Guy Marzorati: And what seems unique about the nursery business is a lot of your clients are other growers. So it seems like you’re constantly kind of in communication with growers in this area, farmers, probably got to know a lot of people through that business.
John Duarte: Absolutely. So when I came out of college in finance, I grew up in San Diego, Chula Vista area, came back to Modesto having been born here but not grown up. And my dad says “We’re starting the grapevine nursery. Glad to see you. You’re the sales department.” And so I got to go out and take my finance degree, which had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to selling grapevines.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, sales is a different —
John Duarte: So I had to, you know, go study grape vines and grape pests and genetics and you know, I think I became a relative expert in that in a few years. I was presenting at conferences. At our peak, you know, the nursing goes up and down, peak years we’re serving about 3000 agriculture clients. So we know agriculture very, very well and agriculture knows the Duarte family and myself very, very well.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah I mean, propagation and the stuff you’re talking about is actually pretty scientific too.
John Duarte: Yeah, we were the first of the tree nurseries, we started in grapevines and expanded into almonds and pistachios and walnuts, and really solved a couple of major environmental issues through our technology. We invested in Ph.D. research and we have a 11,000 square foot biotechnology laboratory on-site at the nursery. We really approached the nursery in a way that was integrated in a way nobody had approached a tree and vine nursery in the world before. We started micro-propagation. We started doing transgenic work with Monsanto. We actually, in the 1990s had an apple that wouldn’t get worms with the same Bt gene in the apple tree that has been in the corn and eliminates insecticides. That became a question for the marketplace that didn’t pan out. So we had to abandon it. But one thing we’ve done is we’re cloned root stocks, meaning that instead of planting seeds to make trees, we make sure the trees are genetically identical, both top and bottom. And so those advancements have led for better water utilization, more salt tolerance.
We’re able to grow almonds in areas in the delta and down in the south valley where the water quality — where they’re inundated with too much water at times or the water’s too salty or has too much boron. And we can help growers adapt — almond growing, pistachio growing, walnut growing to areas where it wasn’t feasible prior to that. So we like to invest in research, but that’s not why we’re here today.
Marisa Lagos: Very interesting, we won’t just ask you gardening questions, I promise. Even though that’s kind of tempting.
Guy Marzorati: You, you know, through all these years was politics at all of interest to your family? Was that a conversation around the dinner table? How did that —
John Duarte: You know, the Duarte family and I’ll just go back to my dad because that’s the example I grew up with, is never afraid of a fight. You know, I remember when you were down in San Diego, we had then mayor of San Diego, Roger Hedgecock, great guy out on Otay Mesa in the middle of nowhere talking about water and issues at the time that my dad was dealing with. We came up here, we had planning and zoning issues and building permit issues, just trying to build a greenhouse operation, which was ridiculous that we had to struggle through. And we’ve always been moderate Republicans, but very partisan Republicans. We’ve always believed that the Republican Party really had the answers for business, freedom, opportunity, affordability. And so we’ve always been in the Republican Party, but never, never on the fringe of it.
Guy Marzorati: It seems like the nature of the business, you’re constantly interacting with government, whether it’s about water, you know —
John Duarte: Well I tell a lot of farmer friends I have had, you know, like all of u, most of the time, all seen people. “I don’t want to deal with politics.” Well, if you don’t deal with politics and policy, it comes to you anyways. You’re going to be dealing with it. You’re going to be dealing with results that you didn’t have a part in developing. And so, I think more out of necessity than anything we’ve been engaged in in politics, fundraising for different candidates over the years. We’ve been very engaged on policy. We got played a major role in getting the tractor tax taken off of tractors. We played a very lead role in getting the sales tax taken off of the trees and vines that we and other nurseries sell under the food exemption in 1997. So when I went to Farm Bureau for endorsement, saying, “Hey, look, I’ve got I’ve got more deliverables as a civilian than some of my opponents did after, you know, in some cases having a career in politics.”
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, well, you got a lot of notoriety for a long running battle you actually had with the federal government. This was, I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but it was essentially over the way you plowed a piece of land that you owned in Northern California. You ended up settling the case. I’m curious, like, did that make you more likely to run for this job? Did it draw you into politics more? What did you learn from that experience?
John Duarte: It’s hard to say, retrospectively, that set me up to do this. But remember, I was the guy that sued the government to begin with. [laughs] So I wasn’t you know, I was open for a challenge, you know. So I don’t know if that struggle —
Marisa Lagos: Chicken or the egg kind of thing?
John Duarte: Or if I’m just that guy. And I saw America just, you know it last year we were heading toward socialism. I personally, from my values, think that is bad. I think that working families will be crushed by socialism. I think we need to get water on the farms, drill American oil, expand affordability and opportunity so that the American dream is alive for new immigrants, for families that are struggling to break out of, break out of their their day jobs and accomplish something for themselves. And that was being shut down.
So I don’t know that the struggles and losses of the past drove me, other than I really believed I could win this seat and that this seat would be a very important seat to win, to keep America from drifting further left than than I thought it should, and realigning it back towards a centrist, you know, somewhat conservative, free market opportunity society that I think is important to many people in this district particularly.
Marisa Lagos: If you’re just joining us, you’re listening to a Political breakdown from KQED Public Radio. I’m Marisa Lagos with Guy Marzorati, we are in the office of Central Valley Republican Congressman John Duarte.
So you said socialist several times. What does that mean to you? What do you what are you talking about when you talk about the country going socialist?
John Duarte: Ultimately it means that government becomes the prime state of the entire society. It’s no longer that family, which I believe is the prime estate. You know, we start teaching our kids what we want to teach them in school. We teach them that government is the only force that can protect them from bigotry and discrimination and that their identity is a problem one way or another and they need government to arbitrate, you know, how they relate to other people. So socialist means the government takes on this kind of social welfare role, over all family issues and cultural issues within our society. That’s just wrong.
And then more familiarly to a lot of people, it means the government starts to decide which companies are successful. It starts to decide which farmer gets prosecuted for planting wheat in a wheat field that other farmers farm just fine. You you start to see government used as a cudgel against that farmer who stands up to the government and simply asks for a hearing to show them, I’m just planting wheat, you guys are idiots. So socialism to me means an overbearing government that starts to really push down on individual liberty and opportunity. And then as we see play out now, affordability is gone.
Guy Marzorati: I mean, but cultural issues aside, without the government intervention, what would this valley be?
John Duarte: Without the government intervention?
Guy Marzorati: I mean in terms of water delivery, I mean, isn’t that isn’t that kind of central to how the agricultural business operates?
John Duarte: Well, let’s realize that here we’re sitting in Turlock. This is the first municipal irrigation district in the country. The farmers in Turlock Irrigation District, and then a year later Modesto Irrigation District taxed themselves back to the 1880s. Right? Taxed themselves to build the diversion at La Grange and begin the water infrastructure that we have. These canals that we drive by were dug with horses. Right? No diesel power. And that was the first irrigation districts in California. Then we built out of local money the first Don Pedro Reservoir that provided — so if you look around Modesto, you say, wow — I was just at Del Monte Cannery this morning. We were celebrating the Del Monte Peach growers. You can go to Gallo Winery. You can you can go through the whole Beard industrial tract and look at how Modesto has a disproportionate number of state secretaries of agriculture, national secretaries of agriculture. You look at Modesto’s got the biggest canneries, the biggest wineries in the world. My family’s in the nursery business. Duarte Nursery — I’ll say that one first — but Burchell Nursery, Wilson Nursery, Green Tree Nursery, Driver Nursery. All right, here.
So when left to our own devices with local resources and local leadership. We built this oasis without the federal government. And so to say that while the federal government’s doing everything well, maybe they’re doing a lot of things, but maybe there’s not enough freedom for local communities to solve their own problems. And I don’t believe for a moment that we couldn’t solve water and infrastructure with better, more local control and without federal interference and some resources.
Marisa Lagos: But it does require some collectivism to your point.
John Duarte: Oh, we need a government. I’m in the U.S. Congress, I’m very proud to walk up the steps and see the Capitol building and participate in the government we have. It just doesn’t need to get bigger at the exclusion of family, of local control, of individual initiative, free enterprise, opportunity and affordability.
Guy Marzorati: Well, we want to talk to you also about immigration. You made some headlines. You were one of a few Republicans earlier this year to vote against a GOP backed immigration bill. This would have funded construction of the border wall. It would have limited the asylum system. What was kind of your thinking going into that, ultimately why you decided to vote against the bill?
John Duarte: Sure. Well, first of all, it was a bill that passed Congress that said, “Let’s build the border wall.” Do we see the border security? No, we don’t see the border security, even though it passed despite me voting against it. It’s not doing anything. It was just a messaging bill. Because there was nothing in it for the other side. So I was suggesting, hey, I really do want a secure border, you know, And if you want to put the border security in place, we need a DACA fix, we need a DACA fix right now. If you want a secure border and you want to ramp up E-Verify, which is a major problem I had with that bill. If you want to force me to become a policeman at my own company with families who have been relying on working at my company for decades, and you wanna do the same thing to every other family and every company throughout the Central Valley greatly. Then let’s talk about a guest worker program. Let’s talk about bringing our working families out of the shadows. Let’s talk about getting a DACA fix done. And if we talk about those things along with border security, then we might actually get these problems fixed. If all you want to do is pass a messaging bill that if passed, would disenfranchise working families, would disenfranchise employers. It’s not going to pass. It’s not going to do anything. If it does just do those things and not solve DACA, have a guest worker program, fix some long term lingering immigration issues — that are becoming public safety issues, these families can’t come out of the shadows — then you’re just messaging and I’m not interested in that message.
Marisa Lagos: I mean, your party has moved pretty far to the right, and a lot of the things you’re talking about are kind of outside of the mainstream for for the Republican Party. What are those conversations like with folks within your caucus? How are you making that case to them?
John Duarte: Well, in some cases successfully and in some cases unsuccessfully. I mean, obviously, you know, if you go to the Judiciary Committee and you go to the subcommittee on immigration, that’s a fairly conservative group of Republicans in there, and they have their own perspectives. But if you go to the, you know, other bills I’m on, we’ve got, you know, Maria Salazar from Florida. She’s got the Dignity Act, I’m on board with her on that, I’m one of the one of the few Republican co-sponsors with her there. If you go to Lori Chavez-DeRemer, she’s got the DREAM Act dealing with the Dreamers. I’m one of a few Republicans on that with her. So there’s a number of bipartisan immigration efforts going along. I think they’re viable if we get leadership. Right now, we have border chaos. You know, down at the border is complete chaos. And our current president’s been sending his vice president down there to deal with it, look at it. She has lunch about 80 miles from the border and comes home.
Marisa Lagos: You’re talking about the Texas border?
John Duarte: Yeah, Texas.
Marisa Lagos: Do you think the California border is a mess?
John Duarte: Yeah, the whole the whole border is a mess. And we’re not doing anything about it. There’s been no legislation change. Nothing’s been legislated. We simply have an executive, you know, President Biden who doesn’t want to deal with the problem down there for whatever reason, and it’s making it a huge mess.
Guy Marzorati: So what do you see as the roadblocks? I mean, let’s take specifically you’ve been working on a bill around migrant farm workers. That’s something supported by Democrats and Republicans in California. What’s holding that back? I mean, that’s passed the House before. What’s the roadblock there?
John Duarte: Well, the biggest roadblock to anything happening in immigration the last 20, 30 years, really since 1986, when Reagan did the big amnesty program…that bill had border security in it. That 86 immigration bill had border security in it. So until we pass border security and get it implemented, there’s been a lot of reluctance towards anything else. Now, if we want to do it step wise and say we will secure the border, then we will vote now also to solve these problems. That would be great.
Guy Marzorati: But that seems, I mean it’s been ten years since the last big compromise reform on that. It seems like Republican voters have moved to the right, Democratic voters have moved to the left on this issue. You’re still, you still have hope?
John Duarte: I have a lot of hope. Because I’m looking at, you know, this is a Voting Rights Act district. This is a desert, California 13, that is 60% Hispanic by voter. Right? So this is a Voting Rights Act district. There’s going to be more of these come to play. And Hispanic families are starting to look at the same problems we’re all looking at. They’re not you know, we don’t want to pass laws that are, you know, insulting that would disenfranchise them if implemented, which the border security bill and the E-Verify clause of it would have. But they’re staring at the same issues we’re staring at. And so I want to make sure that that in the Republican Party, we’ve got an enticing message for Hispanic families to look at Republican candidates like myself and say, you know what? Maybe there’s some people in that party that that aren’t with us on everything, but there’s a lot of people in the Democrat Party that are hurting us. You know, we’re not drilling American oil. We’re not getting water on the farms. We have border chaos. We have groups that want to defund the police. So, you know, there’s real decisions to be made. And I want to put up an offering of a moderate Republican agenda that really solves problems for working families and shows them that the American dream is still alive and that we’re fighting for their access to the American dream.
Marisa Lagos: Well, switching gears a little bit, talking about a couple of other votes you’ve taken. So you were the only Republican that voted against amendments to the defense bill that would have blocked the Department of Defense from paying for abortions and sex reassignment surgeries. Why that vote? Is that about tying those issues to defense authorization or, you know, talk about that.
John Duarte: That was the Hyde Amendment. The major problem I had with that was when I ran, I said I’m a moderate on abortion. All right? A, it’s a state issue. I believe women should have access to first trimester abortion. And I will vote against any effort to federalize abortion law. So that was simply fulfilling a campaign promise. Now, we never get to choose exactly how these things are packaged up, right? You know, sometimes you get a narrow abortion amendment. Sometimes it’s packaged in an appropriations bill.
But, you know, women go in the military and they may be stationed wherever the military stations them. It could be a state with very restrictive abortion laws. And it’s a medical service that the military, you know, provides. It should not be a woman’s cost to bear if she has to go to another state to get medical services that are available where she needs them just because she’s in the military. I don’t want women not enlisting because we restrict their access to certain medical services based on what state they’re in.
Guy Marzorati: The state party’s actually considering removing opposition to a federally protected right to abortion from the party platform. What do you make of that?
John Duarte: I really want to keep abortion a state’s issue. Now, I think in California, I will starkly disagree with some of the extreme left end of that with full term and elective late-term. Those things I disagree with. But we’ve argued for years, decades now that abortion is a state’s rights issue, and I think that’s where it belongs.
Marisa Lagos: All right, just a couple more questions. The first Republican debate is tonight. We’re taping this Wednesday. I’m curious who you’re supporting next year and what you’re looking for in these debates and this just campaign moving forward.
John Duarte: Well, I want my party to retake government and I’m looking at the debate without any opinion on the individual players. I’m going to vote Republican. It’s baked in. I’m going to support the Republican candidate for president. But I want that candidate to be whoever can deliver us the biggest win, whoever can appeal to the moderate voters and bring us victory in the White House, also the Senate, also Congress. And so I’m just looking for whoever successfully resonates with the most Americans possible, which probably means a more moderate candidate. But I’m not picking any names. I just, I want to win and I want to get America back to affordability opportunity and the American dream.
Marisa Lagos: Does a Trump nomination make your job more hard next fall?
John Duarte: I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a turnout model. It’s lots of moving parts. All I know is I can do my job well. I can vote my district. I can be accessible and engage in my district and hope people know what I’m about. And if that’s not what the people want, then I’ll go make some trees and vines.
Marisa Lagos: Alright, when he’s not voting in Congress he’s running the poinsettia farm. Congressman Duarte, thank you so much for having us.
Guy Marzorati: Appreciate it.
John Duarte: Well, Marisa, Guy thank you for having me, great speaking to you here today.
Marisa Lagos: That is going to do it for this edition of Political Breakdown. We are a production of KQED Public Radio.
Guy Marzorati: Our engineer today is Christopher Beale. I’m Guy Marzorati.
