Q What’s your interest in joining this very contentious body?

A The last thing I dreamed of doing was serving in the public sector. I just never thought I would do that. But about a year ago, I began waking every morning and feeling less and less comfortable with the direction our country was going. This is where I grew up. (Holds up a picture of a ramshackle house in a field.) This is the first house I lived in after we moved out of a trailer after my father got out of the Air Force. This is in Stratford, Texas, in the Panhandle. So I’ve lived the American Dream. I got to go from that to what I’ve been able to do today. I want my kids and the grandkids we hope to have someday to have those same opportunities. America has always been about growing the economic opportunity pie for everybody, not trying to reallocate a shrinking pie. And every day it seemed like we were doing more and more things to take away the ability of people to move away from this type of a start (referring again to the picture). I looked at it two ways: One, I needed to go serve because I never served in the military when I got out of school, and I need to serve because I want to protect the future for my kids. If we keep going the direction we’re going, whatever I’ve worked to put together is going to be taken away from me anyway. That’s the reason I decided to run for Congress.

Q How do you achieve that — saving the country? You’d be one guy out of 435.

A You’ve seen the Tea Party movement. Whether you agree with it or not, you’re seeing a group of people who have not been politically active in a long time. And what the Tea Party says is we believe in limited government, fiscal responsibility and adherence to the Constitution. They don’t get off into social issues. Those people are starting to make changes to the people they have in Congress, and I believe if we do things right this fall, we’ll have a group of 40 to 50 conservative Republicans elected to Congress. If we can find the right leadership in that group, to hold them together as a bloc, I really believe we can push true reform in Congress. Congress today, both the Republicans and Democrats, view themselves as a ruling class. They’re out of touch with us down here in the real world of America.

Q What reforms are you talking about?

A We’ve all talked about term limits in the past but never had any luck getting term limits pushed in the Congress. Why term limits? We’re trying to get people in Congress to change their mind-set in how they write legislation. They need to know they’re going to come back and will be mowing their yards next to their neighbors and will see them at the movies or at a Little League game and that they need to be accountable to those neighbors. We need to have term limits for Congress, term limits for their staffs and then ensure that the laws they pass apply to everybody in the federal government — Congress, the executive branch, everybody but the military. Next, we need to do what I’ve done in business in tough times. I came out of the energy business, which goes through all these changes and sees great volatility of conditions. Well, the management teams of every company I was with, we would always take pay cuts, voluntarily, and we would take fairly deep pay cuts, and then we would impose pay cuts on everybody in the organization so the organization would survive. When times got better, pay cuts were restored. If you apply that on the federal level, if Congress can’t balance the budget, they should take a pay cut. They need to have an incentive to do right. Now, there would be times when you got around this requirement, such as in times of war. But they need to understand that what they’re doing in terms of deficit spending is wrong. Lastly, if Social Security recipients don’t get a cost-of-living increase, Congress shouldn’t get a pay increase.

Q What kind of leadership experience have you had? I don’t mean business experience. That has nothing to do with the legislative process. But where have you had to work with colleagues and others?

A The most noteworthy is I was on the board of the Association of Former Students at Texas A&M University, which is our alumni association. It has between 300,000 and 350,000 passionate Aggies who all want to go in different directions. I ultimately became chairman of the board of that organization. That was in 2007, and we had our very best year ever. We approved the rebuilding of our building, we had our largest fundraising year ever, both in terms of major gifts and in terms of annual funds. That was a volunteer position. I don’t know how many hours I put in that year, but it was probably in the neighborhood of 500 or 600 hours. I also served on the Private Enterprise Research Council, an economic think tank that is part of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at A&M. That’s one of the reasons I’m here today. What I read in some of the economic analyses they put together will scare the pants off you. I’m also on the board of trustees for Houston Baptist University, which is led by Dr. Robert Sloan. We have taken that little private Christian school and begun to make moves in a particularly difficult economic environment that I think are going to be positive for the school as a whole.

Q What have you learned about yourself working with others in those duties?

A What I’ve learned is that if you can get people, develop a common vision with people, let them provide their input into that vision, and make sure you clearly articulate it to everybody and tell them what’s in it for them, usually you can move organizations beyond what you could ever believe. It’s one thing to do that in the business world — you’re exactly right about that — but it’s another to do it when you’re trying to get volunteers to also do it.

Q You’ve talked about citizen legislators taking their expertise to Washington. I saw in a debate how you’d like to get rid of the U.S. Department of Energy because they haven’t done anything. How would you go about developing a vibrant energy policy for this country?

A Our energy policy should be to maximize our ability to get access to all domestic resources we have. If you could go to the North Slope of Alaska and see how oil and gas companies have developed that resource base, you would come away saying, “I have no problem with those companies drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” If you would look offshore to the Gulf of Mexico and see what we used to do when I was in the oil and gas there, you would have no problem drilling off the East Coast or the coast of Florida. The second thing is we need to come up with a long-term solution for base-load electric power. We need to get to the point where at least 80 percent of our base-load power is fired by nuclear plants. France does it. There’s no reason France should be ahead of us on this. That’s also the best solution for a low-carbon footprint. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like all the coal plants that we have, but I don’t want to put them out of business tomorrow. We need to have a long-term solution where we go toward nuclear, and as these coal plants wear out, then they’re not replaced. We’ll have cleaner air and the best long-term, low-cost solution for power.

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