Rep. Pete Sessions (R)

The congressman from the 32nd District is Pete Sessions, a Republican first elected in 1996. He is the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the No. 4 leadership position in the House minority.

Sessions grew up in Waco, graduated from Southwestern University, then worked at Southwestern Bell in Dallas for 16 years. His father is William Sessions, a federal judge who served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1987 to 1993. The vagaries of redistricting led Sessions to run for Congress in several different House districts. In 1991, he ran and finished sixth in the special election in the 3rd District, which then included much of North Dallas. In 1993, he resigned from the phone company to run against Democratic Rep. John Bryant in the 5th District, which included much of the east side of Dallas and several rural counties to the south. The district had been drawn to re-elect Bryant, a liberal Democrat. Sessions ran a vigorous campaign, making a two-day, 12-city tour of the district’s rural portions with a livestock trailer full of horse manure and a sign saying, “The Clinton health care plan stinks worse than this trailer.” Although he outspent Sessions 2-to-1 in 1994, Bryant won by just 50%-47%. Two years later, Bryant ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate. Sessions ran again for the House seat and won the primary. In the general election, he faced John Pouland, a former regional General Services Administration director. Sessions charged that Pouland was a big-government liberal and would abandon U.S. military bases overseas. Pouland criticized Republican cuts in Medicare. Sessions won 53%-47%.

Sessions’s voting record is among the most conservative in the House. In 1999, he got a seat on the leadership-run Rules Committee. He sponsored the constitutional amendment to require a two-thirds vote to raise taxes, was a leading advocate of the Republican proposal to stop the government from spending Social Security and Medicare surpluses, and called for scrapping the income-tax code. He is generally tightfisted but is apt to support government spending to help families with disabled children. Sessions and his wife have a son with Down syndrome.

In 2001, redistricting made the 5th District more Republican. But Sessions surprised state politicos by leaving the 5th to run in the newly created 32nd, which had no incumbent but included only 16% of his old district. He said he wanted to spend less time traveling around his district—the new 32nd was considerably more compact—and he thought the new district was more compatible with his pro-business philosophy; the 32nd certainly has a stronger fundraising base. Sessions had only token primary opposition and won the seat in 2002, 68%-30%.

In 2003, Republican Tom DeLay of Texas, the powerful majority leader in the U.S. House, persuaded the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature to draw the lines yet again. Although most Republicans were well served by the new lines, Sessions wound up in a somewhat less Republican district and with a re-election challenge from 13-term Democratic incumbent Martin Frost, whose 24th District had been shorn of its most Democratic precincts in the DeLay remap. Frost chose to run in the 32nd because of its large, Democrat-friendly Jewish population in the Park Cities. Frost also felt Sessions was too conservative for the new district. From the start, Sessions voiced confidence that he would win, though he braced for negative attacks. Frost focused on his own legislative accomplishments and his work on local issues to help the Dallas business community; he rarely mentioned 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

This was the most expensive House campaign of 2004. Sessions spent $4.5 million and Frost $4.8 million, and more still was spent by party committees and independent groups. The candidates hurled charges at each other, and tangential issues came into play. Frost criticized Sessions for a streaking incident in college. Sessions criticized Frost for scheduling a fundraiser with Peter Yarrow, the Peter, Paul and Mary singer who had been convicted of “taking indecent liberties” with a 14-year-old girl in 1969. Frost cited Sessions’s vote against the establishment of new air-passenger security rules after the September 11 attacks and ran an ad with images of the World Trade Center in flames and the message “Protect America. Say No to Pete Sessions.” Frost was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News, local police and firefighters groups, teachers’ organizations, and the Sierra Club. Sessions had support from the national anti-tax group Club for Growth and the National Federation of Independent Business. Sessions won 54%-44%, capturing more than 80% of the vote in some Park Cities precincts; Frost failed to get the higher turnout he needed in Oak Cliff. Sessions has not had great difficulty getting re-elected since.

After his victory over Frost, Sessions sought to get on the House leadership track by running in 2006 for chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which raises money for Republicans and recruits challengers in House races. But he lost to Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma. After the 2008 election, Sessions succeeded in a second bid to head the NRCC. He had the strong support of Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio—Sessions was among the few Texas Republicans who had backed Boehner for party leader against Roy Blunt of Missouri in 2006. Cole wanted a second term as NRCC chairman, but he carried the burden of the party’s 21-seat loss in the November 2008 election.

Sessions had a rocky start as chairman. In a March 2009 special election for New York’s 20th District, Jim Tedisco fell short of winning what had long been a Republican seat, despite several hundred thousand dollars from the NRCC. Sessions was lampooned by Democrats for his sometimes odd comments, including his statement that President Barack Obama was trying “to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.” Sessions set a challenging goal of gaining the 40 seats the party needs to recapture the majority in 2010, and he reorganized the committee to improve fundraising, communications and candidate recruitment.