Meet John Whitmire
Where do I even start with this clown from north Houston? Well, for one thing, he’s a registered lobbyist as well as a senator… but I’ll get into it slowly. He’s the longest-serving current member of the state Senate and served for a decade in the state House before he went to the Senate. Let’s go back a couple of decades to the sordid saga of the Texas Eleven. This goes back to when Tom DeLay and Rick Perry decided to gerrymander the state to make the congressional delegation much redder and to make it much more difficult for Texas Democrats to get elected to Congress.
Whitmer facilitated that. “With the crucial defection of a leading Texas lawmaker,” reported Ralph Blumenthal in September 2003, “the defiant band of Democratic state senators holed up in New Mexico since July 28 has lost its ability to deny Gov. Rick Perry the quorum he needs to push through a hotly disputed Republican redistricting plan. The surprising reappearance in Houston Tuesday night of a prize holdout, Senator John Whitmire, who, with 30 years in the State House and Senate is the dean of the Legislature, threw Texas politics into a new tizzy… The Whitmire switch gives the Republicans their best chance yet to use their majority muscle to redraw the lines and perhaps give Texas the largest Republican delegation in Washington, with sweeping national implications, tied to the career of the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Sugar Land. The odyssey of the Senate Democrats, following the flight in May of their House counterparts to Oklahoma, has provided endless fodder for late-night television commentators— less Alamo than Alamo Rent-A-Car, observed one, Bill Maher. ‘The Texas 11 have become the Texas 11 Minus One,' said Judith Zaffirini, one of the self-exiled senators, who has represented Laredo for 16 years.”
When he’s not making laws, he’s working in the government affairs section of a politically connected law firm— the section that employs registered lobbyists. Without ever leaving the Legislature, Whitmire has been a federal lobbyist.
“I know how to spell it now,” he said, deadpan.
He knows how to raise and spend campaign dollars, too.
As he begins his 21st regular legislative session, Whimire boasts the biggest war chest in the Legislature— more than $6 million at last count, more even than Gov. Rick Perry has reported.
Like many of his peers, he has used the money to fund an often-lavish lifestyle, helping him lease an $80,000 BMW 650i and buy $290,000 in tickets to sports events since the 1990s, including the Houston rodeo.
Car leases are allowable and the ticket purchases, for “constituent entertainment,” got the blessing of the Texas Ethics Commission, much to the consternation of some critics who complained about it.
At the Capitol, Whitmire is the dean of the Senate— where he took office in 1983— the title reserved for its longest-serving member. His bill-passing expertise and warm ties to the GOP leadership arguably make him the chamber’s most powerful Democrat. His old friends, like Craig Washington, call him something else: “Boogie,” a nickname that evokes his party boy reputation but actually stems from the zip-up “boogie boots” he used to wear in the '70s.
…[O]ver the years his personal business dealings have demonstrated just how blurry the lines can get between a lawmaker’s public duties and private interests. He endured a series of conflict-of-interest controversies and investigations in the 1990s, spending nearly $200,000 of his donors’ money on defense lawyers, campaign records show.
He has his own law practice and has been known to represent— on retainer or as a consultant— government contractors, taxpayer-supported agencies and close friends who do business with public entities. For the past 15 years, Whitmire has also been “of counsel” to Houston-based legal giant Locke Lord, which has a long list of clients with interests before the Legislature, including some that have benefited from legislation he has sponsored or helped pass.
Texans who follow politics know Whitmire for taking money from MAGA Billionaires who donated to Trump's Super PAC and then hiring him as the head of his finance committee, for voting in favor of a Luxury Yacht Tax Break and then partying on a MAGA Billionaire's Yacht; conspiring with George W Bush to increase Texas air pollution; for voting to stomp on Texas solar/wind industry by establishing a gas monopoly in Texas that would double residents' energy prices; for refusing to give recreational marijuana legislation a hearing; and for his A rating by the NRA for over 10 years, helping lay the ground for Texas's mass shootings. He also voted to make police officers who blinded children with non-lethal munitions immune from prosecution.
This cycle there’s an alternative: meet Karthik Soora. We’ll be getting to know him better in the lead up to the election. But for now, watch this announcement video: