The Chairman's Turf

It's a Long Way From Border Country to the Shadow World of Spies

Rep. Silvestre Reyes at the Mexican border: "People talk about illegal immigration and they cite statistics. You're handling not statistics, but people." (Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

EL PASO Silvestre Reyes is straight out of Border Country, that place of lawmen and bandits, pluck and luck.

Grows up on a cotton farm along the Rio Grande, oldest of 10, struggling with English as a kid. Helicopter gunner in Vietnam, some college, marries his high school sweetheart (honeymoon at the Mesa Motel), lands a solid government job -- Border Patrol. He works like hell for 26 years, gets shot at by Mexican train robbers, rises from agent to bridge inspector to chief for West Texas and Arizona.

"Outdoor work," he calls it, for someone with "a flair for a little danger" -- but unexpected work for the boy who used to warn undocumented farm workers when la migra came around.

Next, a grateful citizenry sends its tough but soft-spoken lawman to Congress, reelects him five times, the first Latino to represent his 80 percent Hispanic district.

Reyes is, in short, that most cherished of political properties, the real guy, a man of the people, not just someone who pretends to be.

"He is a Real Life 101 politician. He's been there," says Cindy Ramos-Davidson, chief executive of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "He can talk with the best of the best and the lowest of the lowest. There are a lot of people in elected office who have never had Real Life 101. It's wondering where the next paycheck is coming from, it's balancing family life and work life. It's helped him stay human, for lack of a better word. "

Now, though, he stands at a perilous political intersection. Today he becomes the new chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, assigned to ride herd on 16 spy agencies with an estimated collective budget of $42 billion.

In Washington's power corridors you can hear the whispers. Isn't this one of those jobs that demand intellectual firepower? (Never mind those other whispers, as old as the republic, that not a few in Congress, even some of the stars, are, actually, well, dopes.)

All that Real Life stuff is swell. But the new outlaws are more lethal and formidable than ever. Is an instinct for the Common Man what the nation requires to ensure the global war on terror is successful -- and constitutional?

Can credential-crazy Washington countenance an intelligence chief with a two-year community college degree? Not to mention that ambush from Congressional Quarterly, where Reyes blew the question of whether al-Qaeda is Sunni or Shiite.

It's a big challenge for a lawman from a dusty border town.

"The border is a tough area to work," Reyes says one morning, standing down here in that dust at the edge of two countries. "Sometimes there are no rules. The big rule is 'Survive.' "