The congressman from the 15th District is Democrat John Dingell, the dean of the House. He is the longest-serving member of the House and hit a historic milestone in February 2009 by becoming the longest-serving U.S. representative in history. (In combined House and Senate years, the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia holds the record for total congressional service, which Dingell will break if he serves until July 2013.)
Dingell’s father, John Dingell, Sr., was first elected to the House in 1932, from a district created as a result of the Detroit area’s auto boom. The first Rep. Dingell was one of the most productive urban liberals of his day, a sponsor of the Social Security program and, starting in 1943, of national health insurance. His son has been around Capitol Hill almost as long. He was a House page from 1938-43, and then served in the Army in World War II. He graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and its law school, helping to pay his way by working as a Capitol elevator operator. He practiced law in Detroit and served as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County. After his father died, in September 1955, Dingell was elected to succeed him the following December. He was 29, and back then, he represented a district entirely within Detroit with large Polish, African-American and Jewish populations. He still uses his father’s office furniture and every session continues to introduce as H.R. 15—the national health insurance bill his father co-sponsored in 1943. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi borrowed Dingell’s gavel when the House passed the Democrats’ heath care bill in March 2010, the same gavel Dingell used when he presided over the passage of Medicare in 1965. “A good piece of wood doesn’t wear out with one great event,” Dingell said. He sat next to President Barack Obama when the president signed the bill.
It is a measure of his seniority that the second most senior member of the House, Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, once served on Dingell’s staff. His personal life is also wrapped in his political career. He married, had children, but then divorced and was remarried in 1981 to a granddaughter of one of General Motors’ Fisher brothers. Debbie Dingell was vice chairman of the General Motors Foundation until 2009 and is a Democratic national committeewoman. She headed the Michigan campaigns for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and helped each win 51% of the vote in this battleground state. In 2008 she played a key role in scheduling Michigan’s early presidential primary and defending it against the Democratic National Committee’s objections.
For 16 years, John Dingell was chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, from 1981 to 1995 and from 2007 to 2009. He was also chairman of its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. During that time, he established his reputation as was one of the most powerful and effective committee chairmen ever. He grew his jurisdiction to the point that his committee handled up to 40% of all House bills; he had the largest budget and staff of any House committee. And as institutions will, the committee took on the character of its leader: bright, determined and domineering. Dingell, dubbed “the Truck,” and his committee superintended the breakup of AT&T and the sale of Conrail by public offering. His 1992 cable reregulation bill was the only one on which Congress overrode President George H.W. Bush’s veto. He was a key player in the legislation creating the Medicare program for the elderly in 1965. He had a hand in writing the Endangered Species Act, and after a decade of sparring over clean air legislation, Dingell worked with Democrat Henry Waxman of California to produce the 1990 Clean Air Act.
On other issues, Dingell backed organized labor’s agenda against the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement and other agreements that followed. An avid outdoorsman and a hunter of deer, elk, caribou and moose, he long opposed gun control but voted for the 1994 crime bill and resigned from the National Rifle Association board. One of his proudest accomplishments is the creation in 2001 of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, on both sides of the river, from Zug Island in River Rouge south to Lake Erie. Dingell worked to get donations of land or easements from private landowners, land preservation groups and the Army Corps of Engineers, and the refuge grew from 394 acres to over 5,000. In many ways, he is an old-fashioned Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat, supporting big government and strenuous regulation, taking a conservative line on some cultural issues and backing an assertive foreign policy. He was the only Michigan Democrat to vote for the Gulf War resolution in January 1991. But he voted against the Iraq war resolution of 2002.
When the Republican majority took over in 1995, Dingell, as the senior House member, swore in Republican Newt Gingrich as speaker and then occasionally cooperated with Republicans to produce legislation. He developed a productive working relationship with Joe Barton, the Energy and Commerce chairman from 2004 to 2007. For years, Dingell opposed raising fuel economy standards for cars and trucks. He sprang into action whenever Michigan’s interests were threatened. In 2003, the city of Toronto started transporting its trash—180 truckloads a day—to a landfill in southwest Wayne County in his district. Dingell and Sen. Debbie Stabenow insisted that the Environmental Protection Agency enforce a 1992 treaty that they said required Canada to give notice of each shipment and allowed the United States to reject them. Trash shipments from Canada have since abated but not stopped altogether.
After Democrats won the House majority in 2006, Dingell took over as Energy and Commerce chairman again. Asked about his priorities after 12 years of Republican policies, Dingell said, “We will kill the closest snake first.” But while Dingell still had considerable power, it did not compare to his earlier reign as chairman. He no longer also chaired the investigative subcommittee that had been so effective in its heyday at putting top government officials on the hot seat. Moreover, the Energy and Commerce jurisdiction was diminished during the era of Republican control, with securities and insurance legislation reassigned to the Financial Services Committee. Despite a promise from Dingell that he would hold hearings on carbon emissions in spite of his close ties to the big automakers, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi went around him and created a select committee on global warming to consider legislation on carbon emissions—over Dingell’s strenuous objections. “These (select) committees,” he sniffed, “are as relevant and useful as feathers on a fish.” He called the new panel, headed by Edward Markey, D-Mass., “the Committee on World Travel and Junkets.”
In the 110th Congress (2007-08), energy legislation was Dingell’s chief priority. After the Senate passed new fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, Dingell moved to try to find a compromise that would be easier on Detroit automakers. Negotiating chiefly with Pelosi, he argued for differences between cars and light trucks, and for additional time for the industry to comply. The result, he said, was “a strong bill that (auto companies) will hate but with which they can live.” The final bill set a 35-miles-per-gallon fleetwide standard for cars and light trucks. On other issues, Dingell worked with Pelosi to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The bill was supported by some Republicans, but not enough to override a Bush veto. Dingell succeeded in enacting a bipartisan bill to strengthen product safety regulation, however.
The 2008 election ended on an unexpectedly jarring note for Dingell. The morning after the Democrats’ victory, Waxman called to tell him he planned to challenge him for the Energy and Commerce chairmanship. Dingell had suffered from health problems in recent years, undergoing two heart operations and the installation of an artificial hip, and he was recovering from knee surgery. Waxman said that with the election of Obama, Democrats had “a narrow window to act” on health and energy issues. But it was widely believed that his chief goal was to push Dingell aside so that he could fashion an energy bill imposing limits on carbon emissions. Dingell was caught off guard and scrambled to put together a two-week campaign to defend his turf as the party organized for the 111th Congress (2009-10).
He was backed by the centrist Blue Dogs, who defended his record and raised alarms about the liberal Waxman, whom Dingell called “an anti-manufacturing, left-wing Democrat.” Speaker Pelosi was officially neutral, but Waxman would not have made his move had she disapproved, and, her closest allies backed Waxman. The vote in the Democratic Caucus was close, but Dingell lost 137-122. Waxman gave Dingell the new post of chairman emeritus, with seats on every subcommittee, but no actual subcommittee chairmanship.
Despite his diminished status, Dingell was instrumental in crafting in December 2008 the federal bailout of $13.4 billion in short-term loans for the auto industry, which President George W. Bush approved. And he kept his hand in a variety of issues. In 2009, he added an amendment to the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill that restricted aid for electric cars to those developed and produced in the United States. Also in 2009, he was a lead sponsor of a major food safety bill that passed both houses of Congress and established more frequent inspections of food processors and gave the Food and Drug Administration more power in food recalls.
During the biggest debate of the 111th Congress (2009-10), on the health care insurance overhaul, Dingell stepped in to negotiate with conservative Blue Dog Democrats when they objected to the legislation. During a major telecommunications fight, Dingell successfully opposed a mandate for broadband providers to open their networks to competitors at regulated rates. During this period, Dingell also proved he hadn’t lost his old powers as an interrogator. He sharply questioned Toyota executives over charges that their cars’ accelerators were malfunctioning and causing accidents. With Waxman, he sponsored a bill to require additional safety features.
Until 2010, Dingell had only two serious challenges in elections, both in Democratic primaries after redistricting plans threw him into a district with another incumbent. In 1964, he ran in a district mostly new to him against John Lesinski of Dearborn, the only northern Democrat to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With strong support from the UAW, Dingell won 54%-46%.
In 2001, the Republican legislature put him in the same district with Lynn Rivers, an Ann Arbor liberal first elected in 1994. Dingell campaigned as a veteran congressman who had gotten things done. Dingell posed the question to audiences: “Are you going to replace one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives with one of the least effective members?” Rivers emphasized their differences on abortion rights and gun control. Dingell parried by pointing to the women’s issues he had worked on—breast and cervical cancer screening and minimum hospital stays after childbirth. This was Michigan’s most expensive House primary ever. Dingell spent $2.5 million to Rivers’ $1.5 million. Pelosi, then the House minority whip, took the unusual step of stepping in the middle of a family fight by endorsing Rivers. Dingell won the 2002 primary 59%-41%. In the general election, he won easily in this solidly Democratic district.
As the campaign season opened in 2010, Dingell was taken aback by the vehemence of the opposition to the health care legislation voiced by constituents during the August 2009 recess. In June 2010, he told the Detroit Free Press that the mood was similar to 1994, when Republicans made big gains and captured a House majority. “It’s not only eerie in its similarity…but it’s the avowed platform of the Republican Party today to see that nothing happens, so they can take over the House again.”
Four Republicans ran in the August 2010 primary, and Ann Arbor area cardiologist Rob Steele emerged the winner with 51% of the vote. In September, Dingell sent out an appeal to his supporters warning that a tea party-backed opponent was determined to defeat him. The incumbent might have also noticed that Republican Scott Brown had carried districts just about as Democratic as his in the January 2010 special Senate election.
Steele ran on his opposition to the Democrats’ health care bill. Dingell allies responded with ads depicting Steele as a rich man whose “five-car garage is not big enough to hold all of his nine luxury cars.” Dingell told The New York Times in October, “This is probably the nastiest climate I’ve ever seen.” A Republican poll showed Steele ahead 44%-39% in October, but media polls continued to show Dingell with a significant lead. Former President Bill Clinton came to Ann Arbor to campaign with Dingell in late October. And the next month, he won 57%-40%. Dingell won only 41% of the vote in Monroe County and 56% in Wayne County. He owed most of his margin to Ann Arbor’s Washtenaw County, which had voted more than 2-1 against him in the 2002 Democratic primary; in 2010 he carried it 67%-31%. He had large margins only in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and heavily black suburbs in western Wayne County.
Redistricting could be a problem for Dingell again in 2012. His determination to continue serving seems undiminished. He told one interviewer that his model is John Quincy Adams, who, after four years as president, served 17 years in the House and died on a couch in the Capitol at age 80. Republicans control the redistricting process, and the big population loss in Detroit means that the one House seat Michigan must lose will come out of the Detroit metro area. Redistricters will be aware that the state’s major economic interests favor Dingell staying in the House. So his prospects for a favorable district are reasonably good, though far from assured.
