Texas Democratic Congressman and former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has died of cancer.
U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-TX-18), the former mayor of Houston, has died at age 70 following a nearly three-year battle with cancer.
Cancer sucks, and bone cancer sounds like a particularly nasty way to go.
Current Mayor John Whitmire confirmed Turner’s death during a city council meeting Wednesday morning. Whitmire said Turner had been taken to the hospital in Washington, D.C. last night.
“This comes as a shock to everyone,” said Whitmire. “I would ask Houstonians to come together, pray for his family, join us in celebrating this remarkable public servant.”
Turner grew up in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood and was valedictorian at Klein High School. He attended the University of Houston and earned his law degree from Harvard.
First elected to the Texas House in 1989, Turner represented House District 139 in Houston for 27 years before running for mayor in 2015. He was re-elected in 2019 following a runoff election.
Turner’s mayoral tenure was not without controversy; he drew criticism over financial management and a long-running conflict with city firefighters that ended with a settlement negotiated by Whitmire last year.
Following the death of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee last year, Turner was chosen by the Harris County Democratic Party to replace her on the 2024 ballot, an election he handily won with nearly 70 percent.
Turner represented the 18th Congressional District, which is something like D+50. The best showing by a Republican congressional candidate there was Carmen Maria Montiel, who won 26.2% of the vote in 2022.
Turner was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer in 2022, but had rallied and appeared in the Houston Rodeo Parade last Saturday before returning to Washington D.C. He attended President Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday evening.
Turner was an improvement on Sheila Jackson Lee, who was a very dim bulb indeed, and wasn’t the worst mayor Houston has had, as he was better than both Annise “How dare your church oppose tranny bathrooms” Parker and Lee “Out of Town” Brown, and he did roundly oppose the “defund police” madness that infected his party in 2020. But a whole lot of scandals plagued Turner’s tenure as mayor, and Houston’s infrastructure notably declined under his watch, with thousands of cracked water pipes and buckled streets still in evidence years after the 2011 drought.
Whichever Democrat gets the nod to replace him in TX-18 will likely be worse…