John Whitmire

John Whitmire

John Harris Whitmire (born August 13, 1949) is the longest-serving of current members of the Texas State Senate representing District 15, which includes much of northern Houston, since 1983. Previously he was a member of the Texas House of Representatives from 1973 through 1982. He also served as the Acting Governor of Texas in 1993 as part of the Governor for A Day tradition.

Whitmire was born in Hillsboro, Texas to James M. Whitmire and Marie Harris Whitmire and graduated from Waltrip High School and the University of Houston.

In 2003, Whitmire was one of the "Texas Eleven", a group of Democrats who fled the state for New Mexico in 2003 in a quorum-busting effort aimed at preventing the passage of controversial redistricting legislation that would have benefited Texas Republicans.

National House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a powerful figure in Texas politics, advocated arresting Whitmire, along with the other members of the Texas 11, telling reporters that he supported using Federal Bureau of Investigation agents or U.S. marshals to arrest the runaway Democrats and bring them back to Austin, asserting that redistricting is a federal matter of federal concern.

It was Whitmire who first broke ranks and headed back home to Austin. His stated reason for doing so was that he wished to preserve consensus in the state Senate instead of allowing no-holds-barred partisan civil war to continue. Others have speculated about a possible "deal" between Republicans and Whitmire.

Besides the New Mexico controversy, he voiced his opposition to the City of Houston's Safe Clear program which unanimously passed by Houston Mayor Bill White. Whitmire introduced legislation to disband Safe Clear where it was deemed a revenue generator to which two Houston City Councilmembers decried its policy. The proposed legislation was later withdrawn after a private meeting in Austin where Mayor Bill White and Whitmire negotiated.

In July 2005 Texas Monthly, in its article “The Best and Worst Legislators of 2005” the magazine named Whitmire one of the ten best legislators in the Seventy-ninth Texas Legislature.

In 2008 Whitmire received threatening calls from death row inmate Richard Tabler who had a smuggled cell phone in his death row cell.

Whitmire is the former brother-in-law to Kathy Whitmire, the mayor of Houston from 1982 to 1991.