Former Republican congresswoman Kay Granger, who spent nearly three decades in the U.S House of Representatives but stopped coming to Congress in the final months of her term because of dementia, has died at 83. Granger, who represented Texas’s 12th District for 28 years until last year, was the first Republican woman elected to Congress from Texas and later became the first Republican woman to chair the influential House Appropriations Committee. But her career came to a controversial end after it emerged that she had been in an assisted living facility in Texas for months without anyone in D.C. noticing that she had stopped coming to work. Her death was announced by her son, J.D. Granger. House Speaker Mike Johnson paid tribute on X, writing that Granger “broke barriers for women in public service” and “was a dear friend who will be greatly missed.” Granger first entered Congress in 1996 after serving as Fort Worth’s first female mayor. During her time on Capitol Hill, she became a leading voice on federal spending and defense funding, including backing production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Granger was an early Republican critic of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid but later endorsed him in 2020 and voted with his legislative positions about 97 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.
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