The congressman from the 24th District is Kenny Marchant, a Republican elected in 2004 whose Read More

The congressman from the 24th District is Kenny Marchant, a Republican elected in 2004 whose

loyalty to the GOP agenda landed him a prized seat on the Ways and Means Committee in March 2011.

Marchant graduated from Southern Nazarene University, and became a local homebuilder and successful developer. He was the House’s 12th-richest member in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Marchant served a quarter-century in elected offices before running for Congress, including stints on the Carrollton City Council, as Carrollton mayor, and then in the state House. He also has been active in private humanitarian projects around the world. The Ken Marchant Foundation funds church loans, mission projects and scholarships.

In contrast to other upwardly mobile Republicans in the state House, he enjoyed a reputation on both sides of the aisle as a levelheaded peacemaker. Despite serving in some of the legislature’s most partisan leadership posts, the mild-mannered and deeply religious Marchant refrained from engaging in the acrimonious battles all around him. Marchant had been chairman and floor leader of the Texas House Republican caucus and served on the House Redistricting Committee during the bitter 2003 redistricting battle.

Unsurprisingly, the redistricting plan couldn’t have been more favorable to him. The new 24th was heavily Republican and inhospitable to incumbent Rep. Martin Frost, an effective partisan who was targeted by then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, the mastermind behind the redistricting effort. Frost opted to run in the new 32nd District in Dallas County and lost. Meanwhile, Marchant thrived in the new 24th, which incorporated nearly his entire state legislative district. In the primary, he defeated three other candidates with 73% of the vote, and in the general election, he won 64%-34%,

In the House, Marchant has a solidly conservative voting record. He was among the original members of the Tea Party Caucus and a co-sponsor of the so-called “birther” bill in 2009 requiring future presidential candidates to prove U.S. citizenship. But he does not have the sharp rhetorical edge of other hard-right conservatives. “He was a silver-tongued devil when he was a state legislator; he still is as a United States congressman,” President George W. Bush once jokingly said of him.

In February 2011, Marchant introduced a bill to prevent the federal government from subsidizing illegal immigrants’ housing purchases by requiring borrowers to submit to the E-Verify background check program. During debate on the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill in 2009, he unsuccessfully sought to have a new consumer protection agency’s regulations be subject to review by the courts. He developed a fruitful relationship with Republican Speaker John Boehner; he joined the Education and the Workforce Committee that Boehner chaired in 2005 and was one of the few Texans to back Boehner in his bid to become majority leader when Republicans controlled the House in 2006.

Marchant has had no trouble winning re-election; Democrats didn’t bother to field a candidate against him in 2010 and he defeated a Libertarian challenger, 82%-18%. Three weeks after the election, he underwent successful double-bypass heart surgery.