Rep.-elect Pete Sessions (R-Texas-17)

Date of birth: March 22, 1955
Residence: Waco, Texas
Occupation: former congressman
Education: B.S., Southwestern University
Family: wife, Karen; two children, three stepchildren

Pete Sessions is returning to the House, but he’ll be representing a different district.

Sessions previously represented Texas’s 32nd Congressional District in the Dallas suburbs before being unseated by Rep. Colin Allred (D) in 2018.

The Texas Republican — who was first elected to the House in 1996 — moved to Waco, Texas, to run for the 17th District seat after Rep. Bill Flores (R) announced his retirement.

Sessions won a runoff in July against businesswoman Renee Swann, despite Swann receiving Flores’s backing, and defeated Democrat Rick Kennedy in the general election.

While his opponents for the seat attempted to paint Sessions as a carpetbagger, Sessions asserted he was born in the district and has strong ties, touting his experience in Congress throughout the course of both the primary and the general election contest.

During Sessions’s previous tenure in the lower chamber, he served as the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee and at one point led the National Republican Congressional Committee.

-Juliegrace Brufke