WASHINGTON — Rep. Alan Nunnelee, a Mississippi Republican and partial of a ancestral 2010 GOP call choosing that gave a celebration control of a House, died Friday. He was 56.
“Congressman Alan Nunnelee has left home to be with Jesus. He was good desired and will be severely missed,” pronounced a matter from his family.
Nunnelee, who was portion his third term, underwent mind medicine final Jun and had been in and out of hospitals and reconstruction centers a past year.
He was hospitalized again Dec. 28 in Mississippi and was incompetent to take a promise of bureau for a 114th Congress on Jan. 6 with other lawmakers. Nunnelee was sworn in a week after by U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills during a North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo.
President Obama expelled a matter Friday afternoon job Nunnelee a “proud son of Tupelo.”
“Alan never wavered in his integrity to offer a organisation and women who placed their trust in him, even as he bravely battled a illness that eventually took his life. As a Sunday School clergyman and a deacon during his church, Alan believed deeply in a energy of faith and a strength of American families,” a boss said.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant called Nunnelee “the best male we have ever known.”
“Alan Nunnelee has been like a hermit to me and was one of my beloved friends and companions,” Bryant said. “I will skip him greatly. Deborah and we are praying for Tori and their children.”
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Friday asked that flags over a Capitol be flown during half-staff in Nunnelee’s honor. Boehner pronounced in a matter that Nunnelee “was a singular relaxing participation in a cauldron of politics. He never let cancer get a best of him.”
Bryant has 60 days to sequence a special choosing to fill Nunnelee’s seat. By state law, a administrator contingency report that choosing to take place during slightest 60 days from a date he issues his order.
A former Mississippi state senator, Nunnelee served on a absolute House Appropriations Committee. He was clamp authority of a panel’s Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies.
In 2011, Nunnelee, a mercantile conservative, was one of 3 GOP freshmen given a desired chair on a Appropriations Committee.
Nunnelee, who unseated Democratic Rep. Travis Childers in 2010 to win his seat, was “highly reputable in a House,” former Mississippi senator Trent Lott pronounced recently.
A member of a regressive Republican Study Committee, Nunnelee represented a mostly farming 1st District in northern Mississippi. Before that, he served in a state Senate from 1995 to 2011 and was authority of a state Senate Appropriations Committee from 2008 to 2011.
After initial nearing in Congress, Nunnelee drew a decidedly detrimental series in a lottery for House bureau suites: No. 84 out of 85.
“That’s because we stay divided from a casinos,” he joked during a time. But he pronounced he didn’t caring where his bureau was, “as prolonged as a front doorway says ‘Member of Congress.’ “
Thoughts and prayers with Alan Nunnelee’s family. My 2010 House classmate was a good man, represented his district well.
Nunnelee was famous as an pleasant congressman who mostly talked publicly about his faith. He against termination and pronounced he was unapproachable of his work as a state lawmaker to umpire abortions in Mississippi.
As authority of a state Senate Public Health Committee, he led efforts in 2007 to revamp a state health department. He also was a personality in tort remodel efforts in a Mississippi Legislature.
Democratic state Sen. Hob Bryan removed Nunnelee’s clarity of integrity and appropriateness that he pronounced transcended politics and partisanship.
“He cared really many about a process, about creation certain everybody was treated with honour and dignity,” pronounced Bryan, a good crony of Nunnelee’s.
Bryan removed that when Nunnelee was authority of a state Appropriations Committee, he approached him about due changes to Senate manners and asked his input.
“He was endangered with propriety, that a procedures were satisfactory so that any lawmaker, even if they weren’t in a caring and no matter their celebration got a satisfactory shot during convincing others,” Bryan said.
Bryan pronounced he was unhappy to see Nunnelee leave for Congress. “I told him, you’re ruining dual ideally good legislative bodies,” Bryan said. “He knew what we meant.”
Have only been told that we mislaid my crony Alan Nunnelee as he has left home to be with Jesus. Prayers for his clever + faith led family
In Congress, Nunnelee assimilated other GOP freshmen in pulling Republican leaders for some-more spending cuts.
“There might have been an opinion in this city during one time that freshmen are to be seen and not heard, though we don’t consider that’s a box with this caring organisation and with this Republican Congress,” Nunnelee pronounced in 2010 talk with Gannett. “We are a organisation of people that put a Republicans into a infancy and we are a thoughtfulness of a concerns of a American people.”
A year into his initial term, Nunnelee pronounced he felt undone with a partisanship in Washington.
A connoisseur of Clinton High School and Mississippi State University, Nunnelee was in a word business in Tupelo for many years. He after won a state Senate chair (representing Lee and Pontotoc counties) that Republican Roger Wicker had hold before Wicker won choosing to a U.S. House in 1994.
Nunnelee assimilated Wicker, now a senator, on a debate route final Jun for Republican Sen. Thad Cochran.
Nunnelee simply won his final dual House elections. In 2012, he degraded Democrat Brad Morris, Childers’ former arch of staff.
John Bruce, chair of a domestic scholarship dialect during a University of Mississippi, described Nunnelee as a “solid member of Congress,” whose legislative character was many some-more understated than other lawmakers.
“He’s never been flashy. He’s never been during a front of large high-profile issues,” pronounced Bruce. “He’s some-more of a still guy.”
During his congressional career, Nunnelee voted with Republicans on many issues, including a pull to dissolution a 2010 Affordable Care Act, that he called “a sight wreck.”
He also upheld legislation to check increases in sovereign inundate word premiums for many homeowners. He voted for a five-year plantation check that finished approach payments to farmers and stretched renouned stand word programs while slicing sovereign food assistance. Both bills eventually became law.
Nunnelee pronounced a plantation check was “far from perfect,” though would yield some certainty to a state’s rural industry.
Last May, Nunnelee sought caring during a Washington sanatorium for revulsion and fatigue. His bureau pronounced afterwards that doctors had found a “small intracranial mass” on a right side of his brain.
Nunnelee underwent mind medicine in Jun during a University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, afterwards went to a reconstruction core there. That same month, he eliminated to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he perceived chemotherapy and radiation.
Nunnelee had been receiving debate and mobility therapy in Mississippi and Washington. He returned to his congressional bureau on Nov. 12, operative for several weeks before a cover left for a holiday mangle Dec. 12.
During that time, Congress authorized measures due by Nunnelee, including one to explain denunciation that will concede trucks with special permits to continue carrying additional weight from Highway 78 to Interstate 22 in Mississippi. That magnitude became law.
Another of Nunnelee’s measures, to send 172 acres of a Yellow Creek Port area to a state, also became law final year.
Nunnelee’s health declined again over a holidays.
In early January, his bureau pronounced a congressman was being treated in Tupelo for a hematoma — a flourishing of clotted blood caused by a mangle in a blood vessel —in his left leg that had grown over a holidays.
Earlier in life, Nunnelee began losing his eyesight to a degenerative disease, keratoconus, and he became legally blind while a tyro during Mississippi State University. His eyesight was easy by corneal transplants in 1980 and 1982.
Nunnelee is survived by his wife, Tori, and 3 children, Reed, Emily and Nathan.
Geoff Pender reports for a (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion Ledger.
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~/84843227/0/usatodaycomwashington-topstories~Rep-Alan-Nunnelee-dies-at/