The congressman from the 29th District is Gene Green, a Democrat first elected in 1992 and a gregarious centrist with a bipartisan streak. Read More

The congressman from the 29th District is Gene Green, a Democrat first elected in 1992 and a gregarious centrist with a bipartisan streak.

Green grew up in the largely Hispanic Lindale section of north Houston, the son of a home-improvement business owner who enlisted his sons to provide him with free labor. “The joke in our family was that nobody had enough money to be a Republican,” he said. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, and got business and law degrees from the University of Houston. He was elected to the state House in 1972, at age 25, and to the state Senate in a special election in 1985. He has been a friend to unions and trial lawyers in Austin and Washington, and an opponent of gun control, a politician whose natural political base is Texas’s small, unionized blue-collar class.

In the 1992 primary for the House seat, he faced Ben Reyes, a tempestuous Houston councilman who once protested official inaction on crime by demolishing a crack house. Green, a compulsive campaigner, went door-to-door and carried lawn signs and a hammer in his trunk while appearing as a frequent guest on Spanish-language radio shows. In the primary, Reyes led 34%-28%. But in the runoff, Green came out ahead by 180 votes out of 31,508 cast. Reyes went to court and charged that Republican voters had illegally crossed over to vote in the runoff. That got him a July re-runoff, but to no avail. This time, Green won with 52%. He went on to win the general election with 65% of the vote.

In the House, Green has a moderate voting record, especially for a member of a heavily minority urban district. He has become more inclined to join Democrats since President Barack Obama took office, but he still goes his own way on occasion. In December 2010, he opposed repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay service members. He also voted against the tax cut deal that Obama reached with Republicans that month, having earlier opposed the original 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that were extended as part of the deal.

After a spirited fight with other Texas Democrats in 1996, Green won a seat on the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, where he naturally has focused on issues important to the oil industry. In 2008, he became chairman of the Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee. But Democrat Henry Waxman of California eliminated the panel—and Green’s chairmanship—soon after taking over as Energy and Commerce chairman in 2009. Green had been an ally of Michigan Democrat John Dingell in the pitched battle for control of the committee gavel in November 2008. He said he patched things up with Waxman after letting him know that he wouldn’t stand for being retaliated against for backing Dingell. After the Republican takeover of the House in 2011, Green became ranking Democrat on the newly created Environment and Economy subcommittee.

Green has been active legislatively on the panel. In May 2009, he got significant concessions from Waxman for oil refineries in the climate change bill the committee produced, which capped emissions and created a system for companies to “trade” emissions limits. Green has had to strike a balance between the industry’s desires and quality-of-life issues in the district. For example, he fought Republican proposals to encourage new oil refineries because the environmental exemptions could have jeopardized the clean air program in Houston. But he sided with other Texas delegation members after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and opposed lifting the liability cap on spills for companies. He also joined Louisiana Republican Charles Boustany in March 2011 in sponsoring a resolution in support of continued deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of Green’s other main interests is health care. He backed the government-run “public option” to compete with private insurers that passed the House but was stripped from the Senate’s health care overhaul. He has worked on array of related issues, getting bipartisan bills into law to upgrade states’ trauma care systems and eliminate tuberculosis. In 2010, he worked with Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy on a House-passed bill to provide more doctors in underserved areas. On another issue, Green in 2009 took up the cause of local radio stations trying to preserve their long-standing exemption from paying royalties on the music they air. He said his goal was to prod stations to negotiate with performers. “I often tell industries, ‘The last thing you want is to have Congress do something,’’’ he said.

Green has been re-elected easily and has had no significant primary challenges, despite the fact that the 29th remains an inviting opportunity for an ambitious Hispanic politician. He has paid close attention to constituent service—his office hosts an annual “Immunization Day” to provide free vaccines. His district has grown more slowly than the state average, making it more difficult to divide it into two for the purposes of adding another Hispanic-majority district in Texas as a result of 2012 redistricting.