Election Day will mark almost precisely two-thirds of the way through Colorado Republican Greg Lopez’s six-month tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Elected in June to fill the remainder of former U.S. Rep. Ken Buck’s term representing the 4th Congressional District after the five-term Republican resigned his seat, Lopez, a Republican who lives in Elizabeth, was sworn in on July 8 and stands to serve until his successor — either Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert or Democrat Trisha Calvarese — takes office on Jan. 3.

Lopez and his wife, Lisa, moved to Colorado in 1987 after the son and grandson of farm workers grew up near Dallas, served in the Air Force and got a degree in business administration from New Mexico State University in Alamogordo. He’s owned a restaurant and a medical supply company but spent much of his career helping cultivate opportunities for business owners, including serving as president of the Denver Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and six years as state director of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

While the 60-year-old Lopez has run for office several times over the decades — including bids for the U.S. Senate in 1998 and 2016, followed by falling short in the 2018 and 2022 Republican gubernatorial primaries — his lopsided victory in this summer’s vacancy election was the first time Lopez has won an election in three decades, since the voters of Parker made him the state’s youngest-serving mayor at age 27 in 1992.

Elected to the nonpartisan office as a Democrat, Lopez switched parties two years later, after what he’s described as a decision to examine the party he’d always belonged, if only because his parents were Democrats. Eventually, he says he drew up a chart with the Democratic Party’s priorities on one side and the Republican Party’s on the other and realized he belonged with the latter.

“I will always try to do the best thing that I can to help the quality of life of the individuals in the communities,” Lopez said in a recent interview. “As mayor, that was my role, and so I haven’t changed, but that’s the continuing thing that drives me in being in these positions, is trying to help people to the best of my ability and improve their quality of life.”

As the notoriously unproductive 118th Congress nears the finish line — with a sharply divided GOP holding a narrow majority in the House and Democrats wielding an even slimmer majority in the Senate, lawmakers have passed fewer bills than any Congress in decades — Lopez said he’s learned plenty about how difficult it can be to enact legislation but stressed that personal interactions are paramount.

“The No.1 key to get things done is you’ve got to build relationships,” Lopez said. “That doesn’t mean that you’re going to agree, but we must respect each other. We must be able to sit at a table and just ask questions: Why are you seeing it this way? What are the some of the things that can give you concern? Let’s be problem solvers, not problem observers. And I think when people do sit together and have a good, productive discussion, we get farther along the path of agreement than just going off of sound bites, just going off of social media posts and those types of things.”

He said that listening to both sides has given him “a better understanding as to how difficult it is to get everyone or the majority to agree to move it forward, just to take it to the Senate.”

House-passed bills, Lopez added, more often than not flounder in the Democratic-controlled Senate. “And so while we’re doing our work, we’re being detained by the Senate from allowing all this good legislation to pass, to make it in front of the president,” he said.

Lopez has thrown himself into the experience, from serving as speaker pro tem on multiple occasions to playing defensive cornerback in the congressional flag football game, when he called on his high school experience for a game against the Capitol Police team “under the big lights” at Audi Field, a soccer stadium.

“We didn’t win, but we at least scored one touchdown, and I did get an interception and I did get bragging rights, because I was voted the most valuable player of the congressional team,” Lopez said with a wide grin.

“The best analogy I can give you is, I tell people I’m that foreign exchange student who shows up at the end of the year, and everybody’s like, ‘Hey, there’s a new guy in town,'”Lopez said. “I don’t have a track record, as far as a voting record, so everybody on both sides of the aisle is very receptive.”

That’s meant working with members of the state’s congressional delegation from both parties, including signing on as co-sponsor of a bill led by Assistant House Minority Leader Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat, to increase pay for wildland firefighters. It’s part of the mission Lopez describes as “putting people over politics.”

But Lopez stuck to his conservative principles on the most consequential vote since he took office, opposing a continuing resolution in late September to fund the federal government until Dec. 20.

Passed in both chambers with opposition only coming from Republicans, the CR, as it’s known, sets up what could be a major spending fight right before Christmas — and Lopez said he’s prepared to shut down the government to force Congress to confront its spending problem.

Shaking his head over what he terms “zombie programs,” Lopez said, “It’s a hard thing for me to be able to to vote to continue to fund over 1,200 expired, non-authorized programs that Congress has yet to reauthorize, to the tune of over $800 billion.” He added that he had a discussion with House Speaker Mike Johnson on the topic, but language he submitted wasn’t included in the bill. “So I told him, ‘You know what, I can’t support something if we’re continuously just kicking it down the road.’ So I voted no.”

Lopez said his constituents have been supportive.

“‘We are more than happy with you shutting down the government,'” he said voters tell him. “‘We don’t believe the government’s really looking out for us anyway.'”

At some point, Lopez said, Congress “has to start doing their job and pass a budget,” which hasn’t been done in more than 20 years, instead of passing one continuing resolution after another. “I’m in agreement,” he said. “Why can’t we pass a budget? And I’m hopeful that we will, and I’m not afraid of a shutdown.”

A government shutdown, he added, “is kind of like the boogeyman. Nobody wants to talk about the boogeyman, but you know what? Sometimes we’ve got to make the problems bigger in order for us to solve them, you know? But I don’t know that we’re going to have the courage to do that.”

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