Bill Archer, Texas congressman who led Ways and Means, dies at 98

Bill Archer, who spent three decades representing a Houston-area district in Congress and used his final years there to press one of Washington's most sweeping tax-overhaul ideas, has died at 98. His death was reported by The New York Times.

Three decades in the House

William Reynolds Archer Jr. represented Texas's Seventh Congressional District, in the Houston area, in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 2001, according to the House's official history. A Republican, he built a reputation as a determined fiscal conservative over 15 terms, focused above all on taxes and federal spending.

His influence peaked in his last six years in office. When Republicans took control of the House in the 1994 elections, Mr. Archer became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in 1995, the panel that writes the nation's tax laws, congressional records show. He succeeded Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the powerful Illinois Democrat who had led the committee for years.

The case against the income tax

As chairman, Mr. Archer became a leading voice for a radical rethinking of how the government raises money. He argued for abolishing the federal income tax, and with it much of the Internal Revenue Service, and replacing it with a national tax on consumption. The idea, a version of what came to be known as the "FairTax," never became law, but Mr. Archer kept it near the center of the tax debate for years and made it a signature of his chairmanship.

He also helped shape trade policy. In 1999 he worked with President Bill Clinton to move toward permanent normal trade relations with China, a shift that reshaped commerce between the two countries.

After Congress

Mr. Archer left the House in 2001. In private life he remained connected to tax and fiscal policy, including work with the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Born in Houston in 1928, he had come to Congress as part of a generation of Texas conservatives who moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century, a realignment that reshaped the politics of the state and the region. Over 30 years in Washington, he pushed consistently in one direction, toward lower taxes and a smaller federal footprint, and he left the tax debate marked by his insistence that the whole system be reconsidered.