Each year, online magazine Roll Call publishes a list of the 50 richest members of Congress. This year the magazine published its list on September 7, 2014. CQ Roll Call states that it is committed to covering Congress from “inside and out”. In its September 7, 2014 listing of the 50 richest members in Congress, four were from Texas and one was from New Mexico. Beto O’Rourke (D) was not the list however; I thought it would be interesting to apply the same metrics Roll Call did for the top fifty and compare O’Rourke to the list.

Since Roll Call did not include information beyond its list of fifty, it would be rather time consuming for me to do the number crunching necessary to rank O’Rourke with all members of Congress. However, what I can do is create a profile for Beto O’Rourke using the same metrics used by Roll Call and compare him to the four Texans and Steve Pearce from New Mexico. The four congressmen from Texas are Loyd Doggett (D), Kenny Marchant (R), Michael McCaul (R) and Roger Williams (R).

Michael McCaul, a Republican is listed as number two on Roll Call’s list of 50 wealthiest congressmen. According to Roll Call, McCaul has a net worth of $117.5 million. Next on the list is Roger Williams, another Republican ranked as sixteenth on the list. Roll Call lists William’s net worth at $28 million. William is followed by Roger Doggett, a Democrat ranked at number 35 on the list. Doggett’s net worth, according to Roll Call, is $11.5 million. Rounding out the Texas delegation on the list is Kenny Marchant, a Republican whose net worth is listed by the publication at $8.1 million. Marchant is ranked 47 by Roll Call.

The single New Mexican on the list is ranked second to last of the 50 wealthiest congressmen. He is Steve Pierce, a Republican with a net worth of $7.7 million, according to the publication.

Roll Call listed Darrell Issa, a Republican as the wealthiest congressmen with a net worth of $357.2 million. McCaul, number one on the list saw a slight increase in his net worth from the previous year. Roger Williams, on the other hand, had a dramatic increase from $5.3 million to $28 million in one year. Doggett and Marchant lost about one million each from the previous year. Steve Pierce meanwhile kept his net worth about the same, slightly dropping from $7.9 million the previous year to $7.7 million.

Before giving you O’Rourke’s net worth I need to explain to you how I arrived at the number. I used the same process Roll Call used to get its ranking to derive the net worth for O’Rourke. Roll Call takes the minimum asset value in the value range for each member of congress. For example, a report might show a value range of $1,001 to $2,500. What Roll Call did is take the $1,001 value as the minimum net worth for that line item. The same process was applied to the liabilities section of the report. From those numbers a net worth is derived by subtracting the liabilities from the assets. This results in a minimum net worth for that individual.

Using the same criteria, I took Beto O’Rourke’s latest report, and the previous year and calculated his minimum net worth. As you can see from the table below Beto O’Rourke’s net worth dropped by about $223,000 from the last report.

ororuke_netw_graph

Beto O’Roruke’s net worth, including his spouse is at a minimum of $2.8 million, a slight drop from the $3 million he had reported previously. Where these figures rank O’Rourke in relation to the rest of the congressional membership is impossible to decipher without tedious data entry and number crunching. However, comparing him to the top 50 gives you a general idea of where he might rank.

There are three line items listed in the table. The first is labelled “Beto O’Roruke”. These are the figures that O’Roruke reported for himself as an individual. The “Joint Accounts” are the figures he reported for his immediate family. Finally, the “Spouse Accounts” are the figures reported by his spouse.

The figures were derived from the 2012 and 2013 Financial Disclosure Reports filed by O’Rourke with the Office of the Clerk for the House of Representatives.

Martin Paredes

Martín Paredes is a Mexican immigrant who built his business on the U.S.-Mexican border. As an immigrant, Martín brings the perspective of someone who sees México as a native through the experience...

4 replies on “Comparing Beto O’Rourke to 50 Richest Member of Congress”

  2. Roll Call is not an online magazine. It’s online and it’s printed daily with its main readership being inside the beltway. It’s a newspaper for political people.

  4. How much of that money did Beto earn on his own ? Was it given to him by his dad in law Sanders ? His mother ? His Dad’s insurance policy ? His mom’s cash paying customer from Mexico whose cash deposits she allegedly restructured ?

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