1. Joe Wilson served as the South Carolina state senator from the 23rd district from 1985 to 2001.
43 Facts About Joe Wilson
1. 2.
Joe Wilson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Wray and Hugh deVeaux Joe Wilson.
3.
From 1972 to 1975, Joe Wilson served in the United States Army Reserve.
4.
Joe Wilson was a municipal judge in Springdale, South Carolina.
5.
Joe Wilson was active in South Carolina Republican politics when the party barely existed in the state.
6.
Joe Wilson took part in his first Republican campaign in 1962, when he was 15 years old.
7.
Joe Wilson served as an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond and to his district's congressman, Floyd Spence.
8.
In 1981 and 1982, during the first term of the Reagan administration, Joe Wilson served as deputy general counsel for former governor Jim Edwards at the US Department of Energy.
9.
Joe Wilson is a graduate of Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
10.
Joe Wilson was elected to the South Carolina Senate in 1984 as a Republican from Lexington County and reelected four times, the last three times unopposed.
11.
Joe Wilson never missed a regular legislative session in 17 years.
12.
Joe Wilson was a member of Columbia College's board of visitors and Coker College's board of trustees.
13.
In 2000, Joe Wilson was one of seven senators to vote against removing the Confederate battle flag from being displayed over the state house.
14.
Joe Wilson serves on the Committee on Armed Services, for which he is a member of the Subcommittee on Readiness and Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.
15.
Joe Wilson serves on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, for which he is a member of the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions.
16.
Joe Wilson serves as the Chair of the US Helsinki Commission.
17.
Joe Wilson is a member of the Republican Study Committee, Chair of the RSC National Security and Foreign Affairs Task Force, and a member of the Tea Party Caucus.
18.
On June 27,2024, Joe Wilson announced he will run for the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
19.
In 2003, Joe Wilson voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, including its Section 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually of taxpayer money to reimburse hospitals for treatment of illegal immigrants.
20.
Joe Wilson has sponsored and co-sponsored a number of bills concerning teacher recruitment and retention, college campus fire safety, National Guard troop levels, arming airline pilots, tax credits for adoptions, tax credits for living organ donors, and state defense forces.
21.
Joe Wilson is a staunch advocate of a federal prohibition of online poker.
22.
Joe Wilson spearheaded the Drafting Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act of 2003, which offers higher education loan forgiveness to math, science and special education teachers in schools with predominantly low-income student populations.
23.
Joe Wilson cites as his most important vote the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.
24.
In 2015, Joe Wilson cosponsored a resolution to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
25.
Joe Wilson has criticized the Iraqi judiciary for being controlled by "Iranian puppets," specifically referring to Judge Faiq Zaidan.
26.
Joe Wilson questioned the legitimacy of Zaidan's rulings within the Iraqi Constitution and called for Iraq's liberation from Iranian influence.
27.
Joe Wilson said that his outburst reflected his view that Obama's bill would provide government-subsidized benefits to illegal immigrants.
28.
Several fact-checking organizations wrote that Joe Wilson's view was inaccurate because HR 3200 expressly excludes undocumented aliens from receiving government-subsidized "affordability credits".
29.
Joe Wilson was among those who publicly doubted her assertion that Thurmond had a child out of wedlock.
30.
Joe Wilson said even if her story were true, she should not have revealed it because "it's a smear" on Thurmond's image and was a way to "diminish" Thurmond's legacy.
31.
In December 2020, Wilson was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump.
32.
Joe Wilson stated that the proposed legislation, titled the "Georgian Nightmare Non-Recognition Act", would prohibit US recognition of the "illegal dictatorial regime" in Georgia and reaffirm Zourabichvili's legitimacy as the country's leader pending free and fair elections.
33.
Joe Wilson endorses "Kinderguardians", a nonexistent program to teach and arm schoolchildren as young as 3 to protect themselves in the classroom.
34.
In January 2023, Joe Wilson proposed a bill to direct "the Fine Arts Board to obtain a bust of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for display in the House of Representatives wing of the United States Capitol".
35.
Joe Wilson is the stepfather of Alan Joe Wilson, who has served as Attorney General of South Carolina since 2011.
36.
Joe Wilson stated that Weisiger "was not a plantation owner; he was a bank cashier", but Weisiger owned seven slaves in Virginia.
37.
On September 10,2024, Joe Wilson was hospitalized in Washington after collapsing at an event.
38.
Alan Joe Wilson said his father was being treated for "stroke-like symptoms".
39.
Joe Wilson was elected in 2001 in a special election caused by the death of Floyd Spence, his former boss.
40.
Joe Wilson once said that a dying Spence called him from his hospital bed and asked him to run.
41.
Joe Wilson was mentioned as a possible candidate for retiring Senator Fritz Hollings's seat in 2004, but decided to run for a second House term.
42.
Joe Wilson got 181,862 votes to Ellisor's 93,249 and Lefemine's 4,447, with 312 write-ins.
43.
Joe Wilson survived by winning his native Lexington County by 33,000 votes, more than the overall margin of 26,000 votes.