The congressman from the 6th District is Joe Barton, a Republican first elected in 1984. Once a poweful House Republican, Barton’s influence has waned, having lost his bid to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee following his unpopular defense of BP during its 2010 oil spill disaster. He remains an outspoken champion for the oil industry and, along with Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Inhofe, he is the leading global-warming skeptic on Capitol Hill. Read More
The congressman from the 6th District is Joe Barton, a Republican first elected in 1984. Once a poweful House Republican, Barton’s influence has waned, having lost his bid to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee following his unpopular defense of BP during its 2010 oil spill disaster. He remains an outspoken champion for the oil industry and, along with Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Inhofe, he is the leading global-warming skeptic on Capitol Hill.
Barton grew up in Ennis, in then-rural Ellis County. He graduated from Texas A&M and Purdue universities, worked as an oil company engineer and then was a White House fellow in the Energy Department. When Republican Rep. Phil Gramm ran successfully for the Senate in 1984, Barton ran for his 6th District House seat. Barton won the Republican runoff by only 10 votes, and he went on to win the general election with 57% of the vote.
Barton once sometimes strayed to the center on cultural issues, but since Democrat Barack Obama became president, he has been a rock-solid conservative. He chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee before his party lost its majority in 2006, and hoped to continue in the top spot in the 112th Congress (2011-12). After the election, Barton pushed the GOP leadership to ease term limits on chairmen, arguing that the rule wasn’t intended to apply to the positions of both ranking member and committee chairman. He set up an aggressive operation to boost his chances against Michigan’s Fred Upton, the Republican next in line on the panel. A 22-page critique of the moderate Upton’s record was circulated that accused him of being a “part-time Republican.” Though Barton said he wasn’t behind the effort, many Republicans were skeptical. The leadership-driven GOP Steering Committee picked Upton in December, and Barton chose not to challenge its decision.
The chairmanship defeat capped what was already a tough year for Barton. News reports surfaced in February that Barton had earned nearly $100,000 from an interest in natural gas wells that he bought from a campaign donor who had given him advice on energy policy. He said his investment was legal and presented no conflict with his legislative responsibilities, but it provided ammunition to environmentalists who loath his unyielding pro-production stance. Then came the June committee hearing at which BP executives were grilled on the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Barton apologized to the executives for the Obama administration’s decision to force it to establish a $20 billion fund to compensate people who lost their livelihoods in the aftermath. “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case, a $20 billion shakedown, with the attorney general of the United States,” Barton said. In light of the public’s anger over the spill, his remarks sparked a political uproar. GOP leaders threatened to strip him of his ranking spot on the committee, and Barton issued a retraction.
It was not the first time Barton’s contrariness had landed him in controversy. Discussing global warming with former Democratic Vice President Al Gore at hearings in 2007, Barton told Gore, who’d written a book on the topic, “You’re not just off a little. You’re totally wrong.” In a December 2009 C-SPAN interview, Barton said, “There’s ample evidence that warming generically, however it is caused, is a net benefit to mankind.” He was the party’s lead spokesman against the sweeping climate change bill passed by the House in June 2009. The bill established a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to reduce them by 80% from 2005 levels by 2050. Barton called it “a triumph of fear over good sense and science.” He offered his own bill that would have set emission standards for new coal and natural gas plants, but would not have penalized existing plants. Barton’s plan failed on a party-line vote. In March 2010, he introduced a bill to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases; it passed the House in April 2011 with unanimous GOP support, but was unlikely to prevail in the Democratically controlled Senate.
Barton also fought the Democrats’ health care proposals tooth-and-nail, but was often outgunned by California’s Henry Waxman, who took over the top Energy and Commerce Democratic slot in 2009. He was the opposing voice on the committee when the Democrats unveiled a restructuring of the nation’s health care delivery system. But on some issues, Barton sought common ground with Waxman, as he had with Waxman’s predecessor as chairman, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. He worked with committee Democrats on a proposal to approve generic versions of biologic drugs following a 12-year period of exclusivity for the inventor to recoup costs. And he worked with Dingell on a consensus approach to improved electronic medical records.
In earlier years, Barton had enjoyed a degree of success in the majority on the committee. In 1995, he became chairman of the panel’s Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee and used the platform to conduct extensive hearings of the nation’s food and drug laws. The result was enactment, with bipartisan support, of significant modernization of the Food and Drug Administration, encouraging the agency to more quickly review innovative drugs and medical devices. In 1999, he became chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee with jurisdiction over energy legislation. He managed to reach agreement in 2001 with Dingell on higher fuel economy standards. Barton pressed for action on electricity regulation, but he retreated from requiring utilities to join regional transmission organizations and sought to encourage them to do so. His bill passed the House but died in the Senate.
In 2004, after full commerce chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., stepped down, Barton was selected to succeed him—the only Texan other than former Democratic speaker Sam Rayburn to hold the post. He aroused some partisan ire when in September of that year he blocked committee Democrats’ demand for information about Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force. But he also worked successfully to win Democratic votes on some issues and to defend and expand the committee’s jurisdiction. Telecommunications issues are a major responsibility of Energy and Commerce. In 2006, the House passed Barton’s bill to make it easier for telephone companies to enter the broadband market, but influential Democrats opposed the measure, and it died in the Senate. In 2010, Barton became one of the leading opponents of a Federal Communications Commission plan to increase regulation of broadband service companies. The FCC argued that the regulations were necessary to prevent companies from favoring some kinds of content over others, but Barton and other Republicans worried that the plan would harm competition and growth in the high speed internet industry.
On the 2005 energy bill, Barton insisted on retaining provisions protecting manufacturers of MTBE, a fuel additive that was discovered to be polluting groundwater. The bill became hung up over that provision as some lawmakers fought to hold the manufacturers responsible for expensive cleanup projects. Barton ultimately agreed to drop it in order to get a bill that could pass both chambers. With his help, the GOP majority was able to enact major energy legislation with $12 billion in incentives, an inventory of oil and natural gas reserves, and a one-month extension of daylight savings time. Also in 2005, the House narrowly passed Barton’s bill to encourage the construction of new refineries, but it died in the Senate.
At home, Barton was criticized by Democrats for seeking in 2003 and 2004 to keep Ellis County outside the Environmental Protection Agency’s Dallas region in applications of the stringent rules of the Clean Air Act. Ellis County is home to three cement producers and other companies whose political action committees and executives were big contributors to Barton’s campaigns, and the county produces 40% of the industrial emissions in North Texas. Barton said there was no connection between the contributions and his action and argued that there was no scientific basis for Ellis County’s inclusion. But in 2004 the EPA decided otherwise and that Ellis County must take steps to reduce air pollution.
Barton has had some political disappointments. He ran for the Senate in 1993 after Democrat Lloyd Bentsen resigned to become President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary. He finished third with just 14% of the vote in the all-party primary. In September 2001, when Gramm announced his retirement from the Senate, Barton considered running for his seat. But the Bush White House favored Texas Attorney General John Cornyn and Barton stepped aside. After the 2006 election, he made a bid for minority leader, but discovered that John Boehner, R-Ohio, had wrapped up sufficient votes to win. Barton withdrew after six days.
He has been re-elected easily in the 6th District. He suffered a heart attack in December 2005 but made a full recovery. He reportedly got into a spat with fellow Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the Judiciary Committee chairman, in early 2011 over the racial makeup of the state’s redistricted congressional boundaries in 2012. Smith sought to evenly split four new districts between Republicans and Democrats, giving Texas’ booming Hispanic population minority-majority seats in the Dallas and Houston areas. But Barton wanted to keep Republican voters dominant in three or all four of the new districts.
