Rep. Joe Barton (R) Elected 1984, 10th term
Born:	Sept. 15, 1949, Waco
Home:	Ennis
Education:	Texas A&M U., B.S. 1972, Purdue U., M.S. 1973
Religion:	United Methodist
Marital Status:	divorced
Professional Career:	Asst. to V.P., Ennis Business Forms, 1973-81; White House Fellow, U.S. Dept. of Energy, 1981-82; Consultant, Atlantic Richfield Co., 1982-84.
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The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex--yes, the name is part of everyday speech there--has spread outward from its historic nodes in downtown Dallas and Fort Worth. Although Dallas is the larger population center, much of the development has moved west, across the dusty plains where one crosses the barely perceptible Balcones Escarpment, the geologist's boundary between green and grassy East Texas and the brown and barren West. This was empty territory a few decades ago; now it has mostly been filled in, with subdivisions and shopping centers that leave some feeling of the shape of this land under the enormous Texas sky. The biggest city here is Arlington, once seemingly all suburban, with all-American attractions like Six Flags over Texas, Wet 'n' Wild and the Ballpark in Arlington, commissioned by the former part owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush. But this is not just white bread suburbia any more. Arlington's population in 2000 was 18% Hispanic, 14% black and 6% Asian; just a couple miles south of Six Flags is a mixed Latino-Vietnamese area with Mexican restaurants and Asian delis, and the Arlington police gives extra pay to officers who can speak Spanish or Vietnamese.

The 6th Congressional District includes most of Arlington (although not Six Flags and the others) and the southern edge of Fort Worth to the west. More than one-third of its people live in Johnson and Ellis Counties, once rural and dusty, now fast-growing suburbia just south of Fort Worth and Dallas. The district also includes still unsuburbanized Hill and Navarro Counties to the south. Redistricting changed the boundaries of the 6th District considerably. In the 1980s it consisted mostly of rural counties and stretched almost all the way from Fort Worth to Houston. After the 1991 and 1996 redistrictings, it stretched odd tentacles all around Fort Worth and Tarrant County. The 2001 redistricting smoothed out the boundaries and extended the district to the south. Politically, this is a heavily Republican part of the Metroplex; George W. Bush won 67% here in 2000.

The congressman from the 6th District is Joe Barton, a Republican first elected in 1984. Barton grew up in rural Ennis, in then rural Ellis County just south of Dallas. He graduated from Texas A&M and Purdue, worked as an engineer and was a White House Fellow. When Phil Gramm ran for the Senate in 1984, Barton ran for his 6th District House seat, and won the Republican runoff by only 10 votes and the general with 57%. At first, Barton had two great causes, one defunct, the other successful--in a way. The first was the superconductor Supercollider, an enormous scientific laboratory that was to have been built in Waxahachie, in Ellis County. In retrospect this was a Texas project, alive only so long as George H.W. Bush was president; despite Barton's efforts, the House voted 282-143 to zero it out in 1993. His other cause has been sponsorship of a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. When the House took up the issue in early 1995, leadership whispered there was no way the tax limitation measure could win the needed 290 votes. In fact it got 253. Newt Gingrich promised to schedule the two-thirds amendment for a vote on subsequent April 15ths until it passed, but the number of votes has never exceeded the 1995 count. Barton claimed progress across the country, where many states have approved tax-limitation plans. But the budget surpluses starting in 1998 changed the conversation, and the amendment has been mostly forgotten.

In 1995 Barton became chairman of the Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee and conducted extensive hearings on food and drug laws. These resulted in enactment, with bipartisan support, of major FDA modernization, encouraging the agency to more quickly review innovative drugs and medical devices. In 1999 Barton became chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee. One of his bills was to restructure federal electricity regulation to adjust to the states' moves toward deregulation. But he clashed with full committee Chairman Thomas Bliley, and Bliley declined to take the issue up. Bliley retired from the House in 2000 and amid the fight for the chairmanship between Billy Tauzin and Mike Oxley, Barton maneuvered to expand his subcommittee's jurisdiction to include energy and air quality.

In 2001 he concentrated first on a bill to relieve California's electricity crisis; it did not include the price caps sought by Democrats and passed in subcommittee on a 17-13 party line vote in May. But in June Tauzin, now chairman of the full committee, said he would not bring it up. In July Barton got into a tiff with Democrats who objected to the Navy's paying for the electricity in the Vice President's house, which is on the grounds of the Naval Observatory; Barton replied that Congress, with its old electric power plant, wasted more energy than the vice president. Barton's subcommittee had jurisdiction over part of the Bush energy plan, which Barton generally supported. He surprised some by supporting higher fuel economy standards. "A lot of people have been surprised that I would support any increase. But I think when you have a responsibility, you also have accountability." His bill, passed in subcommittee in July 2001, required a cut of 5 billion gallons in light truck gas consumption by 2010. He held hearings on the Clean Air Act in 2002 and in July 2002 sponsored a bill embodying Bush's Clear Skies proposal, which was intended to reduce power plant emissions with market incentives.

All the while he pressed for action on electricity regulation. In December 2001, despite the implosion of Enron, heretofore the nation's largest electricity trader, he was pressing for subcommittee action and seeking agreement with Democrat Rick Boucher, though their positions continued to differ. In February 2002 the subcommittee held markup hearings but Barton suspended them, at Tauzin's request, to assess the Enron collapse more fully. In July, he circulated another draft, which differed considerably from the version that passed the Senate. Barton retreated from requiring utilities to join regional transmission organizations and sought to encourage them to do so, to produce an easy basis for exchanges of traded electricity. His version repealed the 1930s Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) and repealed also the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act except to the extent it was maintained in the Senate bill. Interestingly, this was an issue on which a Republican like Barton was trying to increase federal regulatory power while Democrats like John Dingell and Henry Waxman were trying to maintain state primacy. In September Tauzin took the issue before the full committee and, amid an onslaught of Democratic amendments, pushed it through. Later in September a House-Senate conference committee took it up but it went no farther. Tauzin reintroduced the bill in the 108th Congress; it passed the House again in April 2003. Electricity regulation is one of those Energy and Commerce issues that has tremendous ramifications for the national economy and affects so many interests that major legislation is seldom passed more often than every generation or two; it is the sort of issue which is carried over from Congress to Congress. So Barton has plenty of work ahead of him.

The House Republicans' three-term limit on chairmanships, if enforced and if Republicans maintain their majority, means that Barton will not chair this subcommittee in the next Congress; Tauzin has one more term to go as full committee chairman. Presumably Barton will find another subcommittee to chair. But he also has his eye on the full committee chairmanship. So does Mike Oxley, who got the chairmanship of an expanded Financial Services Committee in 2001 after his fight with Tauzin for the Energy and Commerce chairmanship. Oxley has greater seniority, but Barton has argued that his seniority lapsed when he left for Financial Services. This looks like a future headache for the Republican leadership.

Barton has been a headache to the leadership before. He got along well with Majority Leader Dick Armey but not his successor Tom DeLay. He has voted against compromise budgets backed by Republican leaders, opposed PNTR with China and sought unsuccessfully to require a three-fifths vote to break budget spending caps. Barton has also had some political disappointments. He ran for the Senate in 1993 after Lloyd Bentsen resigned to be Treasury secretary but finished third with just 14% of the vote in the May all-party primary. In 1994 he was outgoing Republican state Chairman Fred Meyer's choice to succeed him but Barton lost at the state convention. In September 2001, when Phil Gramm announced his retirement from the Senate, Barton considered running for his seat. But in early October, busy with electricity and energy legislation and amid talk that the Bush White House favored Attorney General John Cornyn, he announced he would not run.

Barton has been reelected easily in the 6th District.

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DC Office
2109 RHOB 20515, 202-225-2002; Fax: 202-225-3052; Web site: www.house.gov/barton

State Offices
Arlington, 817-543-1000.

Committees

• Energy & Commerce (Chmn. of 31 R).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	0	7	0	0	15	75	60	100	96	97	100
2001	5	--	0	7	--	--	69	91	96	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	7%	--	89%		0%	--	91%
Social	0%	--	81%		0%	--	75%
Foreign	0%	--	97%		33%	--	66%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Limit Patients' Bill of Rights Y 3. Campaign Finance Reform N 4. Ban ANWR Development N 5. Faith-Based Charities Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Arm Commercial Pilots Y  9. Trade Promotion Authority Y 10. Bar Funds for Intl. Court N 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Deny Home. Sec. Dept. Union Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Joe Barton (R)	115,396	70%	$1,324,767
	Felix Alvarado (D)	45,404	28%	$13,367
	Other	3,237	2%
2002 primary	Joe Barton (R)	unopposed
2000 general	Joe Barton (R)	222,685	88%	$936,534
	Frank Brady (Lib)	30,056	12%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (73%); 1996 (77%); 1994 (76%); 1992 (72%); 1990 (66%); 1988 (68%); 1986 (56%); 1984 (57%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	146,931	67%
	Gore (D)	72,754	33%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Sixth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R +17
• District Size: 3,961 square miles
• Population in 2000: 651,620; 75.6% urban; 24.4% rural
• Median Household Income: $49,763; 8.2% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 25.4% blue collar; 62.2% white collar; 12.3% gray collar; 13.1% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 71.8% White, 10.2% Black, 2.6% Asian, 0.4% Amer. Indian, 0.1% Hawaiian, 1.3% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 13.5% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 9.4% USA, 9.3% German, 7.8% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.