FreedomWorks’ Congressman of the Month – Jeb Hensarling

Rep. Jeb Hensarling was first elected to Congress in 2002 to represent Texas’ 5th Congressional District. He holds a lifetime score of 91 percent on the FreedomWorks Congressional Scorecard, has won the annual FreedomFighter Award multiple times, and achieved a perfect score for three consecutive years.

Hensarling is a student of economics who serves as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, where he has a reputation as a fiscal hawk. He coauthored a constitutional amendment to require government spending to grow no faster than the economy, has fought to reform the politically popular, but actuarially unsound, flood insurance program, and vigorously opposed the $700 billion stimulus package that Barack Obama pushed as a response to the housing crisis in 2009. He was also one of the loudest voices in opposition to reauthorizing the cronyist Export-Import Bank.

Most recently, Hensarling has become the chief House sponsor of a project to restore constitutional authority to the legislative branch, joining Sen. Mike Lee, the chief Senate sponsor. The Article I Project, referring to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which lays out the powers and duties of the legislature, is designed to rein in the executive overreach that has increasingly characterized the White House and its recent occupants.

While the power to make law and appropriate money is explicitly housed in Congress, it has become routine for presidents to issue executive orders to circumvent the legislative process. Obama’s infamous boast that he has “a pen and a phone” he can use to go around the legislature is emblematic of a executive branch that has exceeded its proper authority.

Moreover, regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Department of Education are run by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, and yet have the power to make rules that affect millions of lives and impact the economy to the tune of $2 trillion a year.

The Article I Project is built on four planks: reform the budget process, stop governing by crisis, rein in regulatory agencies, and fix the laws that allow the president to exceed his constitutional authority.

For spearheading this incredibly important initiative and for showing leadership on restoring fiscal sanity to the House of Representatives, we are proud to name Rep. Jeb Hensarling FreedomWorks’ Congressman of the Month for March, 2016!