Ralph Hall

Early life, education, and law career

Hall is a lifelong resident of Rockwall County, northeast of Dallas. He was born in Fate, Texas. He graduated from Rockwall High School in 1941. He joined the U.S. Navy on December 10, 1942, serving as an aircraft carrier pilot from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, attaining the rank of lieutenant.

He attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth during 1943. After the war, he attended the University of Texas (1946–47), and received a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951. He was admitted to the Texas Bar in 1951 and maintained a private law practice in Rockwall for many years.

Early political career – 1950–1973

Hall was elected county judge of Rockwall County in November 1950. He held that position until 1962.

In 1962, he was elected to the Texas State Senate after incumbent Ray Roberts won a special election to replace Sam Rayburn in Congress. As a state senator, he would eventually chair a variety of committees:

In 1972, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Texas and lost the Democratic primary, getting only 15% of the vote. Bill Hobby won the primary with a plurality of 33%, and won the general election.

Business – 1973–1980

He was the president and CEO of Texas Aluminum Corp. and general counsel of Texas Extrusion Co., Inc. He was founding member and chairman of Lakeside National Bank of Rockwall, and was chairman of the directors of Lakeside News, Inc. He was a counsel for the aircraft parts maker Howmet Corporation from 1970 to 1974.

As of 2006, he was serving as the chairman, president or director of Crowley Holding Co., Bank of Crowley, Lakeside National Bank, Lakeside Bancshares Inc., North & East Trading Co., and Linrock Inc.

Elections

In 1980, incumbent Democratic U.S. congressman Ray Roberts of Texas' 4th congressional district decided to retire. Hall won the Democratic primary with 57% of the vote. In the general election, he defeated Republican business manager John Wright, with 52% of the vote, the closest race in the district's history and the lowest winning percentage in a general election in Hall's political career. He is only the fourth person to represent the 4th District since its creation in 1903. The district's second congressman, Rayburn, the longtime Speaker of the House, represented the district for 48 years. He has never won re-election in a general election with less than 58% of the vote. He also never won re-election in a Democratic or Republican primary with less than 66% of the vote, except in 2010.

In November 2004, he ran for his first full term as a Republican. He got heavy White House backing in the three-way GOP primary that year, defeating two opponents. Hall won the primary with 78% of the vote, and the general election with 67% of the vote defeating Democratic candidate Jim Nickerson and Libertarian Kevin D. Anderson.

He defeated Democratic candidate Glenn Melancon and Libertarian candidate Kurt Helm in the 2006 general election with 67% of the vote.

In the general election, he again faced Democratic nominee Glenn Melancon and was re-elected with 69% of the vote.

In the Republican primary, he won the nomination with just 57% of the vote, his worst performance in a primary election since his first election in 1980. It was a six candidate race, with his closest opponent, Steve Clark, winning 30% of the vote. In the general election, he won re-election with 73% of the vote against Democratic candidate VaLinda Hathcox and two other candidates.

He won the Republican primary with 58% of the vote. He won over Democratic candidate VaLinda Hathcox in the general election for the second year in a row, this time by 73% to 24%.

In May 2013, announced his bid for an 18th term in the U.S. House. On December 20, 2013, Hall said that the 2014 campaign would be his last, regardless of the result.

In the March 4, 2014 Republican primary, Hall led a six-candidate field with 29,815 votes (45.4%). Because he did not obtain a majority of the ballots cast, Hall was forced to enter the May 27, 2014 runoff election with the runner-up, former U. S. Attorney John Lee Ratcliffe of Heath who received 18,891 votes (28.8%).

Ratcliffe defeated Hall in the March 21 runoff. With the loss, Hall became the only sitting Republican U.S. representative from Texas to unsuccessfully seek renomination to his or her seat out of 257 attempts since statehood. No Democrat even filed, meaning that the runoff was the real contest for the seat. Accordingly, Ratcliffe was elected unopposed, and assumed office on January 3, 2015.

Tenure

Hall described himself as "an old-time conservative Democrat." For many years, he was one of the most conservative Democrats in the House. He was an early supporter of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget and also favored legislation requiring a super-majority on any tax increases. He frequently clashed with the Clinton Administration, and voted for three of the four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. He endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2000, becoming one of the few Democratic politicians to do so. The two had been friends for many years.

While Hall was very conservative even by Texas Democratic standards, his conservatism can be attributed to the demographics of the 4th District. It had once been reliably Democratic, but became increasingly friendly to Republicans as Dallas' suburban growth spilled into the western portion of the district. The 4th has not supported the Democratic nominee for president since 1964. Despite this district's increasingly Republican tilt, Hall won 10 more terms as a member of the Democratic Party with an average of 60% of the vote. In 1994, for instance, he was re-elected by a 19-point margin, even as other conservative Democratic congressmen lost their seats. By the 1990s, he was the only elected Democratic official above the county level in much of the district. It was taken for granted that he would be succeeded by a Republican once he retired.

Like many in the Democratic Party, he voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 1999, he was one of six Democratic congressmen who supported a Republican tax cut plan. He has been an original co-sponsor of bills to repeal the estate tax and the marriage tax penalty.

In late 2002, he voted for the resolution allowing the use of force in Iraq. In March 2003, he voted for a budget that included Bush's 10-year, $726 billion tax cut plan. The plan passed the House 215–212.

Hall was frequently rumored as a candidate to switch parties, especially after the Republicans took control of the House in 1995. Even as Democrats with far less conservative voting records than Hall's, such as Greg Laughlin, Jimmy Hayes, Billy Tauzin and Nathan Deal, all switched parties, he insisted that he would remain with the Democratic Party as long as it did not hurt his constituents. He said that he had an obligation to "pull my party back toward the middle." He was one of the co-founders of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate and conservative Democratic congressmen.

In 2003, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engineered a controversial mid-decade redistricting. He was the only white Democratic congressman not targeted by the remap. However, his district was shifted slightly to the north. Tyler, the heart of the 4th for a century, was shifted to the neighboring 1st District. It did, however, pick up most of Collin County, which had been part of the district until the 1980s round of redistricting.

In January 2004, on the final day for candidates to file to get their names on the ballot for the March 9, 2004 primary, Hall switched parties and became a Republican. He said that Republicans refused to put money for his district into a spending bill, and when he asked why, "the only reason I was given was that I was a Democrat." He also cited concerns with his Democratic criticism of President Bush; he hadn't attended Democratic caucus meetings for some time due to the criticism leveled at Bush, his longtime friend. He told the press, "The country is at war. When the country is at war you need to support the president. Some of my fellow congressmen have not been doing that."

After the switch, the Republican Party allowed him to keep his seniority. He became chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality. He also joined the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservative House Republicans.

The Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific with a large garment industry. Billing records of Preston Gates Ellis and Rouvelas Meeds, an international law firm employed by the CNMI, the government of the islands, show numerous contacts between the law firm and Hall's office. He said his dealings with the law firm were with Lloyd Meeds, a partner with the firm, which at the time listed 36 attorneys on staff, not with Jack Abramoff, the firm's representative for the CNMI contract. In 2006, he said of the Northern Marianas, "They were good allies, and I believed their government should handle their affairs and not have us impose labor laws on them."

In December 1996, Hall and E.K. Slaughter, a friend, and their wives visited the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The trip was arranged by the National Security Caucus Foundation (NSCF), which told him that the trip would be paid for by that group. Greg Hilton, the director of the now-defunct NCSF, had no funding for such trips; he only arranged them with CNMI officials. Hilton said he was led to believe by officials of Preston Gates that the CNMI would pay the expenses and be reimbursed by the private sector. In fact, Preston Gates paid the expenses for such trips and billed the CNMI for reimbursement. For the trip of Hall, Slaughter and their wives, Abramoff billed the CNMI $12,800.

In September 1997, Democratic Representative Neil Abercrombie placed remarks in the Congressional Record describing a teenager described as "Katrina", whose story had been widely publicized, stating that an "employer had lured her to the CNMI under false pretenses" and that "she was also forced into service as a prostitute."

Abramoff's staff contacted Hall's office fifteen times in the two months following Abercrombie's remarks. In November 1997, he entered into the Congressional Record a statement saying that upon reviewing those remarks, he had "felt that Congressman Abercrombie had relied on an erroneous and misleading article published by the Reader's Digest some months ago." The article, according to Hall, said that the teenager "was forced to perform lewd sex acts with customers before a video camera." He quoted a report by the acting attorney general of the CNMI in response: "in fact...she wanted to do nude dancing...to support her family." The remarks by Abercrombie did not cite that source, and the Reader’s Digest June 1997 story by Henry Hurt, "Shame on American Soil," does not refer to a child named Katrina.

In his remarks, he also said "I intend to seek further information on matters as reported by the Reader's Digest author—and I would hope that a fair minded person like Congressman Abercrombie would accompany me early next year if, and when, we can both work a visit into our schedule—a visit that would not involve the expenditure of any American tax dollars.

Asked in 2006 how the 1996 trip benefited the Texas Fourth Congressional District he represents, he said, "I think it benefits my constituents if you do anything that benefits the peace through strength people, when you’re going out to bring information to them to help win the Cold War. That’s a benefit to them, to their strategic interests." The last gasps of the Cold War ended in 1991.

He also said "the whole thing was about ... them setting their own minimum wage. They had told me they would waive their foreign aid in return for setting their own minimum wage." His comments in the Congressional Record in 1997 do not mention a minimum wage and the CNMI receives no foreign aid.

On December 1, 2011, Hall gave an interview to National Journal in which he expressed disbelief in anthropogenic climate change. He accused climate scientists of concocting the evidence for anthropogenic climate change in order to receive federal research grants, citing the Climategate controversy and calling investigations which had largely exonerated them "straw-man reviews". He stated that "I'm really more fearful of freezing. And I don't have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they're not basing it on real scientific facts." He responded to allegations that Republicans could be called anti-science in light of these views by saying "I'm not anti-science, I'm pro-science. But we ought to have some believable science.... We have to be more careful what outlays we make for something that hasn't been proved."

Hall introduced into the House the North Texas Invasive Species Barrier Act of 2014 (H.R. 4032; 113th Congress), a bill that would exempt the North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD) from prosecution under the Lacey Act for transferring water containing invasive species from Oklahoma to Texas. The Lacey Act protects plants and wildlife by creating civil and criminal penalties for various violations, including transferring invasive species across state borders.

Committee assignments

Caucus memberships

Personal life

Hall married the former Mary Ellen Murphy on November 14, 1944, while he was serving in the navy in Pensacola, Florida. They had three sons, Hampton, Brett, and Blakeley, and (as of 2013) have five grandchildren. She died on August 27, 2008.

In January 2004, regarding his switch of party, Hall said "I talked with some of my family. Some agreed, some did not. My wife didn't agree. She'd rather I quit than switch parties."

As a young man, Hall pumped gas for a man and woman whom he later identified as the infamous gangsters Bonnie and Clyde.

Electoral history

Texas's 4th congressional district:

Source: "Office of the House Clerk – Electoral Statistics". Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. 

Source: "Election Results". Federal Election Commission.