Laredo's loss could be Virginia's gain:
former Laredoan Bumper Hornberger wages senatorial bid

By María Eugenia Guerra

If I made a short list of schoolmates from the past that I would have an interest in seeing again, you would find Jacob G. (Bumper) Hornberger's name on that list. I liked him in high school for the energetic, generous-spirited boy he was, and I like him now -- admire him -- for his exercise of independent thought and action.
Hornberger is running as an independent for the Virginia Senate seat held by Republican incumbent John Warner, a 24-year veteran of that post.
Hornberger and I visited on a recent trip he made to Laredo to visit family and to gather up campaign contributions. Though he likened his entry into the race against Warner's machine politics to David facing Goliath, he said he had been easily able to complete the candidacy requirement of the valid signatures of 400 registered voters from each of Virginia's 11 Congressional districts. "We got 800 in each district," Hornberger noted, adding, "Six of us collected 10,000 signatures in two months."
"Mr. Warner's claim to fame over 24 years is all the political pork he has brought into Virginia. That is nothing to brag about," Hornberger said, adding that he faces the entire Republican machine in his race against Warner. Unfazed by odds that experts are calling a cake walk for Warner, he said, "I will put my ideas behind John Warner's money any time."
Necessity, he said, makes his low-cost campaign "a guerilla-type" endeavor, an old fashioned one-on-one campaign with a great deal of personal contact at county fairs, musical festivals, and community events. He said he is utilizing the Internet to reach the voters he has indentified as Beltway constitutents, who look to Washington for answers; cross-mountain country people who are largely laborers and farmers; and the state's 28,000 Hispanic voters of the Shenandoah Valley.
"Gun control is the most important issue in Virginia, for young and old alike. It is the legacy of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Taxation is the other central issue, particularly the income tax," he said.
Hornberger, a 1968 graduate of Nixon High School, holds a degree in economics from Virginia Military Institute. He graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1975 and practiced in Laredo with his father Jack Hornberger, Sr., from 1975 to 1983. He practiced in Dallas and in New York until he took a position with the Libertarian Foundation for Economic Education in 1987. The seeds of Libertarianism, he said, were planted when he read about the movement in the Laredo Public Library. "That changed the course of my life as I moved into the intellectual world of the non-profit educational arena," he said.
"I liked the law," Hornberger said. "It was hard to give it up, but less so as I moved into the world of ideas and began to meet some of the most brilliant minds. I gave up money, too," he continued. Devoted to the cause of Libertarianism, and, according to Hornberger, "its uncompromising moral position," Hornberger traveled extensively throughout Latin America and in 1989 became the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF) in Fairfax, VA, which he said presented him with an opportunity to become a well-published writer on the subjects of gun control, the futility of the War on Drugs as it is structured presently, open immigration, and free trade. Hornberger's work is published in a broad venue across Latin America and appears regularly in the United States in the newspapers of the Knight Ridder and Scripps Howard organizations.
"I believe our country has been headed in a wrong direction, a direction that has increasingly threatened the rights, liberties, and well-being of the American people," Hornberger said, using the examples of the federally waged war on drugs, the war on immigrants, the war on poverty, and now the war on terrorism.
The second generation American-born grandson of Mexican immigrants Matias and Dolores De Llano, Hornberger is passionate about the immigration issue, recalling working side-by-side with Mexican immigrants on the family farm near Laredo. It is a passion that has fueled internationally published articles on the efficacy of the United States Border Patrol.
"This question is ingrained in me: Why shouldn't people be free to freely cross borders in search of work or simply to visit family and friends? After all, for some 75 years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, our southern borders were open," Hornberger said.
Regarding the war on poverty, he said, "The model I saw growing up in Laredo was that you taxed the rich and distributed the gain to the poor. Experience has shown, however, that in the long run, socialistic measures such as these actually do tremendous damage to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The best way to help the poor is to eliminate the taxes and regulations that impede their ability to accumulate the capital to compete against the rich."
Quick-thinking, erudite, sincere, and well-versed in a no-nonsense commitment to simplify government so that it can better serve, Hornberger has launched a credible, substantive candidacy.
In working through my notes to write this story and in navigating through Bumper Hornberger's web site, I consider the question: how did we export from our ranks an individual with such a good mind, someone who could well have changed his hometown?
Laredo's loss could well be Virginia's gain.
(To contact Hornberger, go to www.hornberger2002.com.)