Tea Party Tests Its Might in Texas by Opposing Conservative Rep. Pete Sessions

Rep. Pete Sessions is one of the most conservative members of the House. Now he’s being challenged by Tea Party activist Katrina Pierson in a race that may show just how far right the Lone Star state will go.

In 1994, campaigning for Congress against a Democratic incumbent, Pete Sessions drove across rural Texas with a trailer full of horse manure. A sign was attached stating, “The Clinton health care plan stinks worse than this trailer.” Sessions narrowly lost that election by 4,000 votes. Two years later, with the seat open, the Texas Republican ran again and won.

Since then, Sessions has established himself as a fixture in the Republican leadership. He ran the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in 2010 when the GOP took back the House, and he has since become chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. But now, after 20 years, nine terms in Congress, and another Democratic proposal to overhaul healthcare after his “manure tour,” Sessions is under attack for being insufficiently conservative and facing a Tea Party primary.

With his white hair, navy blue suit, and soft Texas accent, the dapper Sessions looked and sounded like someone sent from central casting to play a generic Republican congressman when The Daily Beast talked to him outside the House Chamber last Wednesday. Bragging about his conservative bona fides, Sessions said that he was the most “consistently conservative” member of the House and that when it came to deficit reduction, he was “at the top of the heap.”

But to his Republican primary opponent, Katrina Pierson, 37, an African American Tea Party activist, Sessions is “a big part of the problem” in Washington, D.C., who is always “waving the white flag.”

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/21/tea-party-tests-its-might-in-texas-by-opposing-conservative-rep-pete-sessions.html