The congressman from the 1st District is William Lacy Clay, a Democrat first elected in 2000 to the seat that his father, Bill Clay, held for 32 years. Born in St. Louis, he moved to the Washington, D.C., area at age 12 after his father’s election to the House in 1968. He attended public schools in suburban Silver Spring, Md., and then the University of Maryland, studying by night for seven years while he worked as a House staffer by day. He had started law classes at Howard University in 1983, when a special election for the state House drew him back to St. Louis. Party leaders appointed him the Democratic nominee. Eight years later, he was again chosen by party leaders to run in a special election for a safely Democratic state Senate seat. Read More

The congressman from the 1st District is William Lacy Clay, a Democrat first elected in 2000 to the seat that his father, Bill Clay, held for 32 years. Born in St. Louis, he moved to the Washington, D.C., area at age 12 after his father’s election to the House in 1968. He attended public schools in suburban Silver Spring, Md., and then the University of Maryland, studying by night for seven years while he worked as a House staffer by day. He had started law classes at Howard University in 1983, when a special election for the state House drew him back to St. Louis. Party leaders appointed him the Democratic nominee. Eight years later, he was again chosen by party leaders to run in a special election for a safely Democratic state Senate seat.

Then in 1999, his father decided to retire from Congress, after helping to enact many labor and education laws he had fought for. Clay wanted to take his father’s place, but he had a serious primary contest. St. Louis Councilman Charlie Dooley raised nearly $400,000 and was an African-American with a base of support in the mostly white suburbs of St. Louis County. Dooley campaigned that the office should not be “inherited,” and he attacked what he called Clay’s old-style tactics of political threats and bossism. The St. Louis Labor Council and Missouri AFL-CIO, long allied with Bill Clay, declined to endorse his son, but more than 30 locals endorsed him. William Lacy Clay played up his father’s name and revved up the still reliable machine. He won the primary 61%-28% over Dooley, winning St. Louis City 76%-12% and St. Louis County, where twice as many votes were cast, 49%-39%. In the general election, Clay won 75%-22%, and since then has won re-election by comparable margins.

In the House, Clay has had a mostly liberal voting record. He is a member of the House Democrats’ whip organization and is active in the Congressional Black Caucus. He has worked to protect voting rights for blacks and the reliability of electronic voting equipment. A member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Clay formerly chaired the Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee, with jurisdiction ranging from the Freedom of Information Act to the Census Bureau. He succeeded in pushing the bureau in 2010 to not automatically count prison inmates—who tend to be urban African-Americans or Latinos—as residents of the rural, mainly white communities that host prisons.

In 2007, he helped enact a rewrite of the Freedom of Information Act to expedite requests and the handling of disputes; he also foiled an attempt by the Bush Administration to eliminate a Census Bureau program that provides information on the effect that federal programs have on the poor. He has promoted efforts to make low-income public housing more energy efficient and to establish a National Civil Rights Trail that would include several stops in the St. Louis area. On foreign policy, he called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2006 and famously described President Bush as an “incompetent chicken hawk.” The following year, he cosponsored a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. Clay also led opposition to the request of Rep. Stephen Cohen, a white Democrat from Tennessee, to join the Congressional Black Caucus. “It’s an unwritten rule” that only African-Americans can belong, he said.

Upheaval in his personal life caused a minor controversy in May 2009, when Clay’s wife, Ivie, accused him of not telling her or their children about his divorce filing before it hit the news media. He responded that he and his wife had been discussing the breakup for months and that the divorce “should not have come as a surprise to anyone.” A future concern for him is the declining population in his district and its effect on redistricting.