Kay Granger - Biography and Career

Biography and Career

Granger was born in Greenville, Texas, and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where she attended Eastern Hills High School, which recognized her as Distinguished Eastern Hills High School Graduate in 1993. She graduated from Texas Wesleyan University. She was elected to the Fort Worth city council in 1989 and was elected Mayor in 1991. Her tenure as mayor saw a drop in violent crime.

After the retirement of Congressman Pete Geren in 1996, both the Democratic and Republican parties worked to recruit Granger. Republicans were particularly bullish on their chances of winning the 12th. It had once been represented by Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright, but had been made significantly more affluent and Republican after the 1990 census. Granger made the decision to run as a Republican, much to the dismay of local GOP activists, who criticized Granger as being too liberal. She was elected by a wide margin, taking 56 percent of the vote over the Democrat Hugh Parmer, also a former Fort Worth mayor. She was handily reelected in 1998 and has only faced serious opposition once—in 2000. In 2008, Granger defeated Democratic challenger Tracey Smith with 67 percent of the vote.

In 2006, Granger was reelected to serve her sixth term in Congress. She was also elected Conference Vice Chair, the fourth-ranking position among House Republicans, in November 2006. She is currently Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommitee on State-Foreign Operations. She also sits on the United States House Committee on Appropriations's Subcommittee on Defense (the first woman to do so), and the Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Subcommittee. She has served as a House Deputy Whip also while in Congress.

Granger is the author of the book, What's Right About America, Celebrating Our Nation's Values.

In August 2007, Kay Granger Elementary School opened in far north Fort Worth in the Northwest Independent School District. A school named for Granger's mother - Mullendore Elementary - was opened several years earlier in North Richland Hills, Texas. The adjacent Kay Granger Park is maintained by the city.

On September 25, 2007, she publicly endorsed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the primary race for the Republican Party presidential nomination. She also took up the position of national co-chair of the campaign organization Women for Mitt, filling a vacancy left by the death of Jennifer Dunn. In a statement to the press following her endorsement, she said that she had heard Romney speak and that "I agreed with everything he said, in the order he said it."

She is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Republican Institute. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.