Rep. Frank Pallone (D)

The congressman from the 6th District is Frank Pallone, a Democrat elected in 1988. Pallone is the son of a disabled Long Branch policeman. He has been an environmentalist since 1969, when as a Middlebury College freshman in Vermont he worked for that state’s first-in-the-nation bottle deposit law. After getting a master’s degree in international relations from Tufts University and a law degree from Rutgers, he was elected to the Long Branch City Council in 1982, at age 31, and to the New Jersey Senate a year later. After the death of U.S. Rep. Jim Howard, a Democrat who chaired the Public Works and Transportation Committee, Pallone ran for the House. The district leaned Republican, but residents were angry about untreated sludge, plastic containers, and medical waste washing up on the beach. Pallone’s bumper sticker, which didn’t mention party affiliation, said, “Stop Ocean Dumping.” That, combined with his conservative stands on taxes and crime, helped him to win 52% in both the special and general elections.

Pallone, moderate to liberal, started as a political maverick but became more loyal to the party when Democrats were the minority. His environmental focus turned to the ever-lively border war with New York, and he opposed offshore dumping near Sandy Hook of highly contaminated material dredged from New York Harbor. In 2006, he won passage of a bill to reduce and prevent debris in the marine environment. In 2008, he was the lead sponsor of a bipartisan bill to rebuild American fisheries, in part by requiring a review of factors that lead to over-fishing.

As chairman of the influential Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, he has criticized shortfalls in children’s health funding. In 2009, he helped steer to passage the Democrats’ expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which he called “a down payment to ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care.” When the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill came up for debate, he backed an increase in the federal matching rate for Medicaid as a step to reduce the program’s financial burden on states. Pallone was also critical of President Bush’s plan to allow insured workers to switch to lower-cost health coverage and of the Republicans’ Medicare prescription drug program. With fellow Energy and Commerce members John Dingell and Bart Stupak, both Michigan Democrats, he promised action in 2009 on their bill to strengthen the authority of the Food and Drug Administration.

In a bow to the many people of Armenian descent in the district, Pallone helped push congressional approval of normalizing trade relations for Armenia. He sponsored the resolution that labeled the 1915 killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. But he agreed in October 2007 to defer a vote under pressure from the Turkish government and the Bush administration.

Since 1994, Pallone has been re-elected with at least 60% of the vote, with one exception. In 1998, he faced a tough challenge from 28-year-old Republican Mike Ferguson, an ally of former GOP Gov. Thomas Kean. An insurance group unhappy with Pallone’s support for President Bill Clinton’s plan to regulate health maintenance organizations spent nearly $2 million on Ferguson’s campaign. But Pallone won 57%-40%.

His ambitions for statewide office have been frustrated. When Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg announced his retirement in 1999, Pallone formed an exploratory committee but did not run. He again thought about running when Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli quit the 2002 Senate race. When Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine ran for governor in 2005, Pallone endorsed him and said that he would like to fill Corzine’s Senate seat. But after winning the gubernatorial race, Corzine appointed U.S. Rep. Robert Menendez to his Senate seat.