Those who read the 1A Wall Street Journal story this morning about Jeb Hensarling and those who can’t climb the paywall might enjoy our profile of him from 2009, written by Joe Guinto. From the Journal:
During Jeb Hensarling’s first congressional bid, a man at a campaign stop in Athens, Texas, asked the Republican if he was “pro-business.”
“No,” the candidate replied, drawing curious stares from local business leaders who had gathered to hear him speak, a former Hensarling aide recalled. “I’m not pro-business. I’m pro-free enterprise.”
Now, more than a decade later, that distinction has Wall Street on edge. The new chairman of the House financial services committee wants to limit taxpayers’ exposure to banking, insurance and mortgage lending by unwinding government control of institutions and programsthe private sector depends on, from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to flood insurance.
From our story, titled “The GOP’s Most Powerful Nobody,” which related how growing up on the family chicken farm got him interested in politics:
He did not particularly like it, chicken farming. But pretty much from the time the family moved to College Station when he was 6, Jeb was cleaning up after chickens. And also collecting eggs and vaccinating the chicks and sending the birds to their doom and everything else a poultry professional does. Then, one day, while a student at Texas A&M Consolidated High School, he got out of the business. “As soon as I got my driver’s license,” Hensarling says, speaking from a couch in his Capitol Hill office, “I put the poultry farm in my rearview mirror. Really, there’s not much you could do with chickens that’s legal that I hadn’t already done. And even today I look at eating fried chicken as a form of revenge.”
