The Issues
Grijalva’s legislative record is heavy on environmental protection and support of minorities, workers and other disadvantaged groups. He voted with his party 97 percent of the time in the 111th Congress.
Health-Care Reform
As a leader of the Congressional Prorgessive Caucus, Grijalva was up-front about his displeasure at Barack Obama’s willingness to concede on the health-care public option.
“Maybe I was still in rapture,” said Grijalva, “or maybe I was naïve, but I believed we were on the same page on what government’s role is in the delivery of health care and how to make the private insurances accounted.”
The lack of a public option is one of his complaints about the version of the bill that approved by the Senate Finance Committee in October 2009, a bill that he said "does not address the most pressing issues facing health care today."
Grijalva also has consistently supported authorization and funding of the S-CHIP program for uninsured children.
The Economy
Grijalva has a pro-labor record. He supported minimum-wage increases and legislation to protect the rights of workers who want to unionize and discouraged employers from harassing or intimidating organized workers.
Grijalva is cautious on free trade. In October 2007, he introduced a bill to pemranently remove duties on certain clothing and textile goods imported from Costa Rica. The following month, however, he voted against a Peru trade deal on the grounds that it did not go far enough to protect the rights of Peruvian workers.
Grijalva has been notably active thorughout the years on Native American affairs. He is a consistent protector of tribal- land rights. In February 2005, he helped the Colorado River Indian reservation regain a 16,000-acre tract of land that it had lost in 1915 when the Wilson administration’s Interior Department confiscated it. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law in August 2005.
In January 2009, the Arizona Democrat introduced a bill authorizing the Interior Department to take seven parcels of land—totalling 423 acres—prviously purchased by the Cocopah Indian Tribe of Yuma County, Ariz., into trust for the benefit of the Cocopah Tribe reservation (“in trust” means that the tribe now owns it and they can operate it as a sovereign territory, exempt from state and local taxes and with leeway to decide the laws of the land). The bill carried one condition: that the land not be used for gambling. It passed the House in April 2009.
Education
Given that he is a former school-board chairman, it should come as no surprise that Grijalva is interested in bettering education. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, he has lobbied enthusiastically for full funding of the No Child Left Behind initiatives.
He sponsored a 2007 bill to put qualified media speciliasts in public-school libraries, plus multiple bills from 2005 through 2009 to allocate grants to schools for improving the English-language skills of limited-English-proficiency students. In addition, he sought to boost the educational opportunities of juvenile offenders with a 2008 bill to enhance re-entry programs. He has also achieved increased funding for Head Start for the children of migrant and seasonal' wor.
The Environment
The League of Conservation Voters gives Grijalva a 95 percent lifetime score. While a member of theNatural Resources Committee, he worked to protect wilderness area and endangered species, restore ecosystems on federal lands and increase funds for wildfire suppression. He oversaw a federal study that linked oil and gas development on Western public lands to decline in hunting habitat. And he pressed the George W. Bush administration's Interior Department to be more discriminating in distributing grazing permits to Western ranchers.
He introduced bills in the 111th Congress to establish a Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area in Arizona, authorize construction of water-recylcinig facilities in the Black Wash Sonoran Desert and to ban mining in the vicinity of the Kanab Creek, and enlarge the Saguaro National Park by 583 acres.
He has also sponsored a 2009 bill to establish a National Landscape Conservation System to conserve, protect, and restore landscapes that have outstanding cultural, ecological and scientific values.
He supported reforms to the General Mining Law of 1872, passage of needed Western wilderness protection and increased oversight of U.S. national parks, forests and public lands.
The Network
Grijalva co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which numbers the largest in the House, which he runs with Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).
He has a fan in John Nichols, Washington correpsondent for liberal magazine, The Nation. In December 2008, when newly-elected Obama was reported to be seriously considering appointing Grijalva as Interior secretary, Nichols wrote a column arguing that Grijalva "is uniquely well qualified to renew the Department's role."
An assortment of Hispanic groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, and the Hispanic Federation, met with the incoming Obama administration and declared their "one hundred percent support" for Grijalva's confirmation. The post ultimately went to Ken Salazar.
Grijalva backed John Edwards in the 2008 presidential primary, though he switched to Obama in January of that year.
