A Thank You Letter to constituents from Sen. Jeff Wentworth

August 6, 2012

Dear Friend,

“Thank you” seems so inadequate – but it’s a start.  So thank you very much for your support of my public service over the years.

While I am naturally disappointed in the outcome of the runoff election last week, it’s simply impossible for me to be despondent while at the same time being inundated with positive, uplifting, even congratulatory messages from scores of friends, colleagues, constituents (my bosses) and others.

The truth of the matter is that I’m not taking this defeat personally.  It wasn’t personal.  The voters are angry (and so am I) about the direction in which our country is headed right now..

The challenge for me – and for Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, too, for that matter – was that the voters didn’t make a distinction between Austin, Texas, and Washington, DC.  Most Republican voters want the Congress to pass a balanced budget, not raise taxes, and cut spending.  And that is EXACTLY what we did at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, last year.  We passed a balanced budget, did not raise taxes, and cut $14-15 Billion from the previous budget.

It has been a productive 25 years, five in the House of Representatives and 20 in the Texas Senate, and a quarter century during which I’ve been truly blessed to have been an active participant in the political life of Texas.

And to have been, more often than not, regularly elected to the Texas Legislature with more actual votes cast for me than for any other Texas state legislator was a humbling honor.

I have run for the Texas Legislature 11 times from 1988 through this year, and, from my standpoint, the voters got it right 10 out of those 11 times.  Not a bad record, actually.

The TEXAS grant program, which has helped 350,000 Texas college students with $2.3 billion in assistance with their tuition and required fees, was the end result of an effort I began after hearing a speech by Pat Taylor of New Orleans at a Texas Lyceum meeting in Austin in the early ‘90s.  And I share much of the credit for that successful legislation with Sen. Rodney Ellis and then-State Rep. Henry Cuellar.

The bill that I wrote several years ago that requires every public school student in Texas to say the pledge to both the United States and Texas flags daily and to have sixty seconds of silence for reflection, meditation OR PRAYER in school every day in every public school in the state.

In addition, I voted against deregulating tuition and allowing Boards of Regents to set college tuition rates instead of the Legislature.

And authoring and successfully steering through the Texas Senate three times – in 2005, 2007 and 2011 – a bill that would bring some semblance of fairness to the process of Congressional redistricting that occurs after each 10-year census.

In short, I voted every time the way that I truly believed the majority of my bosses, the one million people who live in Senate District 25, would have voted had they been sitting in my chair either in committee or on the floor of the Texas Senate and armed with the same information I had at the time.

Again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much for the honor and privilege of serving you for all these years.

 Sincerely,
Jeff Wentworth