Posted on 02/13/2020 5:03:54 AM PST by The Houston Courant
Much as national Democrats vaunt their goal to flip a half-dozen Texas congressional districts this year, they’ll need a sound defense to hold some of their ground, particularly freshman Rep. Lizzie Fletcher’s 7th District. Her liberal voting record in spite of her moderate constituency has fomented a stampede of Republican contenders. The one Fletcher’s party fears the most is former Army Captain Wesley Hunt.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has lobbed numerous media attacks on the African-American conservative’s candidacy since he announced it last April. Unshaken, the Space City native and veteran has been the embodiment of composure, discipline, and duty. “I’m running for Congress to essentially be a warrior to defend our values and our way of life,” Hunt told HC.
Just yesterday, Hunt secured the ultimate ally in that mission: President Donald Trump. “@WesleyHuntTX is running for Congress in the Great State of Texas,” the president posted on Twitter. “He will help us accomplish our America First policies. Wesley is strong on Crime, the Border, our 2nd Amendment, Trade, Military and Vets. Wesley has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”
A St. John’s School alumnus, Hunt graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served eight years in the Army, including assignments as an aviation branch officer and Apache Longbow helicopter pilot. He was deployed once to Iraq and twice to Saudi Arabia, the latter as a Diplomatic Liaison Officer. Service and dedication to country are values his parents instilled in him as well as his sister and brother, also West Point graduates. His father served 23 years in the Army and his immediate family’s combined military tenures total about six decades.
Having attained the rank of captain, Hunt received honorable discharge and went on to Cornell University, earning master’s degrees in business, public administration, and industrial/labor relations. While in graduate school, a West Point classmate would introduce him to his future wife Emily. They moved back to Hunt’s hometown of Houston where he works in human resources at Perry Homes, she works as a pediatric nurse practitioner at Texas Children’s Hospital, and they raise their daughter Victoria.
“The same Houston, TX that created the Hunt family—all the service, the time at West Point, the time in the military—that same Houston, TX needs to be here for my one-year-old daughter,” Hunt reflected. “And I feel like we’re going in the wrong direction, and someone like me has got to step up to take this fight to Washington to make sure that we keep Houston as great as it once was, [that we] keep it that way for the future.”
Exemplifying that “wrong direction” in Hunt’s view has been Fletcher’s failure to lead on behalf of the Houston area’s job-creators, particularly in the oil and gas industries. While the congresswoman has cast a few votes against bans on oil drilling, she has remained largely unobtrusive toward her party’s anti-fossil-fuel agenda and has ardently supported regulation to address global warming, including the drastic 2015 Paris Climate Accords.
“The Democrat Party is not in favor of the oil and gas industry; they are trying to destroy it, even destroy ‘fracking,’” Hunt said, referring to hydraulic fracturing, a modern extraction technique responsible for unlocking vast new reserves of energy, especially natural gas. “And you see all these candidates talking about a fracking ban… She is not a leader of her party. She doesn’t have the influence needed, like, let’s say, an [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fletcher’s socialist colleague from New York City] to actually influence and change the direction and the path of that party. And that’s why we need to have Republican leadership back in this district.”
Hunt credits his graduate studies in industrial and labor relations with much of his perspective on what drives the economy and how it functions best for those working in it. He emphasizes that human flourishing depends not primarily on government or the revenue that fuels it but on individual initiative.
“Everything takes human capital; it is always about people—always,” he said. “In order to have a labor market, you need to have labor. What’s most important is to keep the economy churning and humming at a very high rate in order to be able to provide jobs for people in this country who actually want to work… There’re actually more jobs available than labor available. And the reason why we’re doing that is because of President Trump’s policies towards growth, and we’ve got to maintain that… I’m a big fan of less regulation… The federal government needs to get out of the way and allow more of the private market to take care of this.”
Trump’s actions on deregulation have indeed made a positive impact. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard has reported that the shift in federal policy in favor of regulatory repeal and against new regulation has saved taxpayers $33 billion. That, along with the president’s tax reform and the continued economic expansion, is something FreedomWorks for America Political Director Colby Bledsoe says candidates like Hunt are right to talk about and wishes more Republican dignitaries would do the same.
“It’s popular when you talk to people about it,” he told HC. “Unfortunately the party apparatus and even some of these candidates aren’t talking about it enough. I think President Trump’s tweeting about the economy quite a bit, but I don’t really hear a lot out of other outside groups really playing up the successes that the president’s had with the tax cut but really just with jobs and the economy in general. I think there’re a lot of great success stories there. You talk to voters and they see it in their paychecks. So when we talk to candidates, we’re encouraging them to talk more about it… I think the economy really is still a winning issue.”
Hunt’s energetic defense of free enterprise and his service record have earned him a number of valuable endorsements in addition to Trump’s, including that of FreedomWorks. This race is one of about 15 House contests the free-market advocacy group expects to focus on this year, likely spending about $2 million altogether. They have prioritized holding several districts now represented by small-government legislators, as well as beating statist Democrats with conservative challengers. Bledsoe cites the 7th District as a key opportunity for the latter.
“Lizzie Fletcher has a pretty abominable score with us… I don’t think her votes resonate well with the district,” Bledsoe told HC, referring to the two-percent grade she received on FreedomWorks’s 2019 scorecard (worse even than Ocasio-Cortez’s 18 percent that year). Regarding Hunt, he said, “I think he presents himself really well; I think he presents his positions in a way that voters will resonate with, and we’re excited to support him.”
Many conservative officeholders, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz as well as Harris County Commissioners R. Jack Cagle and Steve Radack, have also thrown their support behind Hunt.
The Republican’s criticism of Fletcher goes beyond flashy issues that grab national headlines. He has been especially vocal on disaster readiness. An important step he favors taking to prevent devastation on the scale that Hurricane Harvey caused in 2017 is excavating dirt from Barker and Addicks reservoirs, allowing them to hold more stormwater, and creating a new reservoir benefiting Harris and Waller counties. He has bemoaned the slow pace with which that process has been pursued and is running on his ability to work with the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees such projects, to expedite it.
“We have got to get these projects started,” he said. “It’ll take about eight years to do it, but right now they’re telling us it’s going to take 20 because we have to do more surveys. So we have to be able to cut through the bureaucratic tape and know how the Army Corps of Engineers works—which is something I’m intimately familiar with—to get this done.”
And Hunt’s military service also informs, as one would expect, a vigilance on matters of national security. He has taken a hawkish position on border security, largely in agreement with President Trump, and has also spoken in favor of the January 3rd airstrike that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, a man Hunt says is responsible for the deaths of some of his West Point classmates.
“My guess is, for the next four years, I don’t think we’re going to hear much from Iran in terms of aggression toward the United States,” Hunt said.
As of the new year, Hunt’s campaign has raised over $1.3 million and has $808,000 on hand. The closest GOP runner-up for cash on hand is Maria Espinoza, with just over one-fourth that amount, followed by former Bellaire Mayor Cindy Siegel, who reported having under one-tenth as much as Hunt. Jim Noteware, Kyle Preston, Laique Rehman will also appear on the GOP primary ballot on March 3rd. In this crowded, field, Hunt is unfazed.
“I’m the only one on that stage who’s actually put my life on the line to defend this country against all enemies both foreign and domestic,” he said. “And I believe that with my heart and soul. And I think I’m uniquely positioned to take that kind of mentality to Washington.”
https://www.houstoncourant.com/houston-voices/2020/a-warrior-to-defend-our-values-wesley-hunt-runs-in-the-7th-district
Sounds like the real deal...any Texans out there have any independent collaboration on his conservatism?
Just reading his bio convinces me that he's a more natural conservative than one Donald Trump of New York - and that's saying something!
Yep, I think Hunt is one of the good ones.
Hunt graduated from West Point in 2004, the same year as Michigan’s republican senate candidate John James did. Both were helicopter pilots....
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