Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D)

The congresswoman from the 6th District is Lynn Woolsey, a Democrat first elected in 1992. Woolsey grew up in the Pacific Northwest, moved to Marin, and was a stay-at-home mother with three children under age six when her marriage ended in 1968. She went on welfare, got a low-paying job, and left her children with 13 different babysitters in a year. Deliverance appeared in the form of a job with a high-tech start-up firm, where she rose to become a top executive. She remarried and moved to a house in Petaluma where her mother could live in and look after the kids. She put herself through business school at night, earned a degree in human resources, and started her own personnel service. In 1984, Woolsey won a seat on the Petaluma Council. In 1992, she won the U.S. House seat in a nine-candidate primary with 26%, well ahead of 19% for the runner-up. In the general, she faced liberal Republican Assemblyman Bill Filante. He was prevented from campaigning when he fell ill and had to have surgery for a brain tumor. She won 65%-34%.

An apt representative of her district, Woolsey has one of the most liberal voting records in the House. As the first former welfare recipient in Congress, she opposed the 1996 welfare overhaul and supports easing work requirements and providing more child care. She says she thinks a parent ought to be at home until children reach age 11. She lobbied against banning gays in the military, accompanied by her son, who is gay. Republicans sought to embarrass Democrats by calling for a vote on Woolsey’s bill to revoke the federal charter for the Boy Scouts because the group excludes gays, and her bill was defeated 362-12. On the Science and Technology Committee, Woolsey has worked to promote energy efficiency and increase support for alternative-energy sources. She is an unabashed liberal who told National Journal after the 2008 election that it would be a mistake for President Obama to take Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s advice that “the country must be governed from the middle.”

With Reps. Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters, fellow California Democrats, she created the Out of Iraq Caucus in 2005, and anti-war groups called it “the conscience” of the Democratic Caucus. For President Bush’s State of the Union message in 2006, she gave a gallery ticket to anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan, who was arrested during the speech. As co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in 2007, Woolsey called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in six months, even as Speaker Pelosi was pushing for a 2008 deadline. Woolsey lamented that many of her liberal colleagues eventually backed long-term funding for the war because “they can’t hold up under the pressure,” and she called for primary challenges to Democratic moderates. She wants “a complete re-evaluation of U.S. national security policy.” In September 2008, Woolsey was one of 13 Democrats who voted against House passage of a bill to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling. She wrote that the plan “continues the myth … that we can drill our way out of our nation’s energy crisis.” With her occasionally fractious relationship with Pelosi, she has failed in her quest to win a seat on the influential Appropriations Committee, holding spots on Education and Labor as well as Science and Technology.

But Woolsey did manage to get the House to authorize $15 million to renovate the immigration complex on Angel Island, where countless Chinese arrivals were detained in deplorable conditions. She has been easily re-elected. She was challenged in the 2002 primary by Santa Rosa Mayor Mike Martini, the founder of a winery in Sebastopol, who criticized her for lack of leadership, excessively liberal votes, and failure to bring sufficient funds to the district. Woolsey responded that she had delivered $430 million since 1997, and defended her record on civil-liberties grounds. She won 80%-20%. In the 2008 Democratic presidential primary contest, she endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, though Woolsey said that her own views were closer to those of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the liberal Ohio Democrat who was a long-shot candidate in the race.