Background
Marchant was born February 23, 1951 in Bonham, Texas, but grew up in Carrollton, a Dallas suburb.
Marchant was born February 23, 1951 in Bonham, Texas, but grew up in Carrollton, a Dallas suburb.
He graduated from R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton and attended college at Southern Nazarene University (SNU) in Bethany, Oklahoma, graduating with a business degree.
The district includes several areas around Dallas and Fort Worth. He worked as a real estate developer and he owned a homebuilding company prior to entering politics. Marchant served on the Carrollton City Council from 1980 to 1984, and was mayor of Carrollton from 1984 to 1986.
During three of his nine terms in the Texas House, Marchant served as chairman of the Committee on Financial Institutions.
He pushed for legislation that reorganized the Texas Banking Code. In 2002, he was chosen as Chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus.
In 2004, he was named a Top Ten Legislator by Texas Monthly and Legislator of the Year by the Texas Municipal League. Committee assignments
Committee on Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Oversight
Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures
Committee on Education and the Workforce
Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education
Subcommittee on Health, Labor, and Pensions
Republican Study Committee
Tea Party Caucus
Congressional Cement Caucus
In the 110th Congress, Marchant served on the United States House Committee on Financial Services, Committee on Education and Labor, and Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Marchant worked closely with Bush when he was governor of Texas, and bills himself as a staunch conservative.
However, he has occasionally broken ranks with the Grand Old Party, as he did to increase the minimum wage. He has said that his top priority on Capitol Hill will be cutting the federal deficit with fiscal conservative policies. Marchant had planned to run for Congress two years earlier in a bid to represent the newly created 32nd district in suburban Dallas, but fellow Republican Pete Sessions, an incumbent, chose to run there instead.
During the 2003 Texas redistricting, Marchant, in his position on the Texas House"s Redistricting Committee, was ideally positioned to help draw Texas districts.
As part of this effort, the 24th District, represented by 13-term Democrat Martin Frost, was reconfigured from a heavily Democratic district with a sizable Latino population into a heavily Republican district that was over 73 percent white. Marchant was elected to Congress in 2004, and was reelected in 2006 (with 60% of the ballots cast) and 2008 (with 56% of the ballots cast).
He is a member of the Republican Party. He was a member of the from 1987 to 2004. The Sunlight Foundation wrote that among the 435 members of the in 2008, Marchant has the fifth-highest amount of investment in oil stocks.