Rep. Frank Wolf (R)

The congressman from the 10th District is Frank Wolf, a Republican first elected in 1980. Wolf grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a police officer. As a child, he developed a strong interest in American history and precociously consumed biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. He majored in political science at Pennsylvania State University and went on to get a law degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He worked as an aide on Capitol Hill and was an Interior Department appointee in the Nixon and Ford administrations. In 1976, he ran for Congress and lost the Republican primary. In 1978, he won the nomination to run against Joseph Fisher, a liberal who had won the district (then not extending beyond Fairfax County) in 1974, and again lost, 53%-47%. In 1980, Wolf ran again and won 51%-49%.

Wolf started off his House career, in the suburban Washington manner, concentrating on issues affecting federal employees. With Democrat Steny Hoyer, who represents a suburban D.C. district in Maryland, he sponsored a bill in 2007 to increase the government contribution to federal employees’ health insurance premiums. He has long promoted telecommuting for federal employees. With Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., he sought to repeal a 2005 law that allows high-voltage electric wire systems to be built even if states object. In June 2007, they lost on a 257-174 vote. Wolf helped set up a Northern Virginia gang task force in 2003 and has sought funding for it since. In 2008, Congress enacted his 175-mile Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Trail, which will run from Gettysburg to Charlottesville, passing six presidential houses, 13 national historic landmarks and many Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields.

For many years he used his seat on the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee to work on projects in his traffic-choked district. From 1995 to 2001, he was the committee’s chairman. He opposed earmarking proposals for specific congressmen before that position became popular with budget reformers in recent years. And it put him at odds with the powerful chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee at the time, Republican Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania. In February 2007, the moratorium on earmarks that he and Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., sponsored failed in a floor vote, 204-196. Wolf also used the subcommittee chairmanship to push to passage a national .08% blood alcohol limit for drunk driving. He has sought funding for a Metro rail link to Dulles Airport which, astonishingly, was not foreseen by the system’s planners. In August 2008, the Federal Transportation Administration approved plans for the link, a major hurdle cleared for Wolf.

Wolf has been one of the House’s leading crusaders for human rights and is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. He traces his interest in the issue to a 1984 trip he took to Ethiopia with his best friend in Congress, liberal Ohio Rep. Tony Hall (1978-2002). The country was in the middle of a famine, and Wolf called his close-up view of the impact on the Ethiopian people “a life-changing experience.” Since then, Wolf has been to El Salvador, Chechnya, the Sudan, Sierra Leone and other global trouble spots. In 1998, Wolf sponsored the law setting up a religious freedom office in the State Department and requiring annual reports on religious freedom throughout the world. With Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California, he led the annual efforts in the 1990s to withdraw normalized trade relations with China because of human right violations, citing China’s acts of jailing dissidents, persecuting Tibetan Buddhists and aiming missiles at the United States. In March 2008, he sponsored a bill to prevent officials other than the president from attending the Olympics in Beijing and urged President George W. Bush not to attend. In June 2008, he and New Jersey Republican Chris Smith said that the Chinese had hacked into their office computers searching for casework information involving Chinese dissidents. When he and Smith tried to meet with dissidents’ lawyers in China, the lawyers were arrested. In December 2008, he worked successfully to get $15 million set aside to thwart governments that erect Internet firewalls. Pelosi once called Wolf “an unmatched leader in his commitment to human rights.”

Wolf has also been influential on policy toward Iraq. After his third visit to the country in September 2005, he called for “fresh eyes” to look at American policy there and suggested a bipartisan study group. He pressed this idea with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The result was the influential Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton. When Bush ordered a troop surge to try to restore order in Iraq, rather than move toward withdrawal as the ISG recommended, Wolf sponsored a bill to implement its recommendations, but the Democratic leadership declined to bring it up. He did get the House to vote 355-69 in June 2007 to keep the ISG operating. In early 2007, Wolf pleaded with Rice to send an envoy to Syria after Syria threatened Israel. With Bob Aderholt, R-Ala., and Joe Pitts, R-Pa., Wolf then met with Syrian leaders in April 2007. Their meeting was not assailed by the administration like a similar session that House Speaker Pelosi conducted with Syrian leader Bashir Assad a short time later. In 2009, Wolf became a vocal opponent of transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp to prisons within the continental United States.

Wolf also has long been one of Congress’s leading opponents of gambling and has unsuccessfully tried to stop the proliferation of Indian casinos.

He has generally been re-elected by wide margins, but the Democratic trend in Northern Virginia has produced well-financed challenges to him in the last three elections. In 2004, he faced Democrat James Socas, who made a fortune in high-tech boom, and spent $500,000 of his own money. Wolf spent $1.6 million and won 64%-36%. In 2006 and 2008, his opponent was Judy Feder, former dean of Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute, who worked in the Clinton administration. She spent $1.5 million the first time and $2.2 million the second, attacking him for supporting the Bush administration and for GOP inaction on the health care crisis. Wolf kept pace with her spending and criticized her for backing the 1993 Clinton health care plan. He won 57%-41% in 2006. Two years later, despite Obama’s success in boosting Democratic turnout in Northern Virginia, Wolf won, 59%-39%, carrying every county.