The congressman from the 5th District is Jeb Hensarling, a Republican first elected in 2002. Hensarling grew up in Morris County in East Texas. He worked on his father’s poultry farm near College Station as a teenager and decided that he did not want to be a farmer. In high school, he started a Republican club and began organizing political events. He graduated from Texas A&M University and went on to get a law degree from the University of Texas law school. After a short stint practicing law, he got a job on the staff of U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, a Republican. Hensarling rose quickly through the ranks of Gramm’s staff and was named the senator’s 1990 campaign manager. When Gramm was chosen by fellow senators as chairman the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Gramm named Hensarling as his executive director. Hensarling later returned to Texas to become vice president of communications for Green Mountain Energy, a local utility, and was co-founder of Family Support Assurance, a firm that sought to modernize child support collections.

After the congressional redistricting in 2001, Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, who had represented the 5th District for the previous six years, decided to run in the new and more compact 32nd District on the north side of Dallas. Hensarling became the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 5th District. Like his mentor, Gramm, he listed cutting taxes as his top priority. Against four opponents, he won the nomination with 54% of the vote. For the general election, Democrats nominated Ron Chapman, a former Dallas County appellate judge who described himself as a loyal Democrat who could work with Republicans. Hensarling referred to his opponent as “Judge Softie” for his record on capital murder cases. The folksy Chapman emphasized his fiscal conservatism and deep local roots. He tried to paint Hensarling as too conservative and extreme for the district, but his message failed to take hold, especially as high-profile Republicans came through the district with endorsements, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Gramm. Hensarling won 58%-40%, and has been re-elected easily since.

In the House, Hensarling has a solidly conservative voting record. He styled himself as a fiscal conservative in the mold of Gramm and has not been afraid to push Republican leaders to take more conservative positions, though he usually voted with them in the end when they didn’t. He joined the Republican Study Committee, a group of the most conservative House members and took the lead in budget legislation. His efforts did not endear him to Republicans on the Appropriations Committee and others in the party establishment. He tried to influence Republican strategy without abandoning his own beliefs or stirring the pot with party leaders too much.

His dilemma was apparent in 2003 when he struggled over whether to vote for the Republicans’ Medicare prescription drug bill, which many conservatives criticized for creating a costly new government entitlement but was strongly supported by Bush. Hensarling claimed credit for a modest cost-containment provision and waited until the final hours before deciding to vote for the bill. Later, he led an effort to identify cuts in spending to offset the huge costs resulting from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. On the Financial Services Committee in 2008, Hensarling was an outspoken opponent of the bill to rescue the financial services industry, which went against his free market principles. After the legislation passed, Hensarling was named to the House Republican slot on an oversight board to review how the money was spent. In 2009, he became the ranking Republican on the Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee.

An avid foe of campaign regulations on the grounds that many of them violate the right to free speech, he sought unsuccessfully to exempt bloggers from campaign finance rules in response to a court ruling making them subject to the rules. In 2006, he spearheaded a successful effort to repeal the Wright Amendment, which limited long-distance flights from Love Field in Dallas as a way of protecting the Dallas-Forth Worth Airport from competition from Love Field. The action was a major boost for Southwest Airlines, which uses Love Field for its flights into Dallas and Fort Worth.

In December 2006, Hensarling secured what for him was the dream job in the House—chairman of the ultra conservative Republican Study Committee, where he could be the “keeper of the conservative flame” as he put it. Also at that time, Hensarling managed the losing campaign of Republican Mike Pence of Indiana in his bid against John Boehner of Ohio for the post of Republican leader. Boehner won, putting Hensarling on the wrong side of a major intraparty leadership contest.

In 2007, after Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 election, Hensarling said that Republicans needed to regain their commitment to limited government. “There is nothing quite like a two-by-four smacked across your head to get your attention,” he said in January 2007. The next year, Hensarling, as RSC chairman, crafted a seven-point strategy for House Republicans that included a constitutional amendment to limit spending and a flat tax to replace the progressive income-tax system with graduate rates as income rises. The party embraced his platform, except for his call for a moratorium on spending earmarks in appropriations bills. After the 2008 election, Hensarling was named to head fundraising for the National Republican Congressional Committee, chaired by his Dallas-area conservative colleague Pete Sessions.