The congressman from the 5th District is Mick Mulvaney, a Republican elected in 2010 by toppling 28-year Democratic incumbent John Spratt, the chairman of the House Budget Committee. Read More
The congressman from the 5th District is Mick Mulvaney, a Republican elected in 2010 by toppling 28-year Democratic incumbent John Spratt, the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Mulvaney grew up in Charlotte, where his father left teaching to run a homebuilding business. His views were also shaped by listening to his grandparents’ stories about economic hardships during the Great Depression and by his first political hero, Ronald Reagan. At age 13, he was inspired by Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president. “I remember seeing Reagan on TV and being able to understand what he was talking about,” said Mulvaney, who stuffed envelopes for Reagan’s campaign. Mulvaney graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he took one of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s courses and where he was voted student body president. After graduation from the University of North Carolina’s law school, he practiced at a large firm in Charlotte and then established his own practice in 1997. A year later, he married and he and his wife, Pamela, soon became parents of triplets. Mulvaney sold the firm in 2000 to join his father’s homebuilding business. He also dabbled in politics, working in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 2000. In 2002, Mulvaney settled with his family across the state line in Lancaster County.
In 2006, he won a seat in the South Carolina House covering parts of Lancaster and York counties. Two years later, he ran for the state Senate, also in a seat covering the two counties, and won. He was one of 10 state senators who supported Republican Gov. Mark Sanford’s decision to reject federal economic stimulus money, and he generally tended to support Sanford’s budget-cutting over the policies of Republican legislative leaders. He kept a Gadsden flag—“DONT TREAD ON ME”—on his Senate desk. In November 2009, he attended a town hall meeting where Spratt was jeered and booed when he explained his vote for the Democrats’ health care bill. “I decided to run while sitting at the back of that meeting,” Mulvaney told the Associated Press.
Despite his prominence in Washington, Spratt had been re-elected every two years with diminishing margins as the region grew out of its Southern Democratic roots and became more Republican. Spratt rose through the ranks in Washington, eventually becoming chairman of the Budget Committee, but that did not help him at home in the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, as the area became a hotbed of dissent from the administration’s agenda. Mulvaney slammed Spratt for his support of the Democrats’ health care overhaul, the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, and cap-and-trade legislation limiting carbon emissions from industrial plants. He vowed to join Republican efforts to repeal the health care legislation.
Mulvaney insisted that he liked and respected Spratt, but said, “Times have changed, and I think it’s time for us to change congressmen.” He spent $1.5 million, not much more than Republican Ralph Norman had spent against Spratt in 2006. But groups allied with Republicans also stepped in to help this time, including the anti-tax Club for Growth, American Future Fund and the National Republican Congressional Committee. Republicans put up posters around the district with a photo of Spratt and President Barack Obama arriving in Charlotte on Air Force One.
Spratt spent $2.5 million on his campaign, while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put in another $1 million. Democrats attacked Mulvaney for convincing Lancaster County to issue bonds to improve a property, which he promptly sold for a profit to someone who then abandoned the planned development. On the stump, Spratt told voters, “It makes sense to re-elect a seasoned old-timer like myself, who has been around the track a few times and knows how to get things done in Washington.” But seniority and past service were not strong currency in the anti-incumbent year of 2010.
Mulvaney won by a solid 55%-45%. In the area closest to Charlotte—York, Lancaster and Cherokee counties—he won 63% of the votes, a stunning outcome against a longtime and respected incumbent. Spratt carried the tobacco counties area, while Mulvaney carried the counties around Camden and Sumter.
When Obama announced his budget in February 2011, Mulvaney left no doubt that he takes a different view from his predecessor. “Let me see if I can say this as politically correctly as I can. I thought it was a joke,” Mulvaney told Politico. “It’s hard to explain how detached from reality this is, to think that the country can spend another $1.6 trillion when it doesn’t have the means.”
Mulvaney sponsored a bill in September 2011 that would cut the federal workforce by 10 percent by 2015. The bill aimed to do this through attrition, with one federal employee hired to replace every three workers who retire or leave agency positions. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee marked up the bill in early November 2011.
Mulvaney has parted ways with other conservatives through his attempts to restrain defense spending, despite his state’s historic ties to the military. In July 2011, he offered an amendment to freeze defense spending, but the vote failed, 290-135. “It’s easy to cut things we don’t like. It’s hard to cut things that are important to us,” Mulvaney told Politico. And Mulvaney has showed a more traditionally conservative skepticism towards foreign entanglements. When anti-war liberal Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. offered an amendment in May 2011 to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Mulvaney was one of just 26 House Republicans to vote in favor of it; the amendment was defeated, 215-204.
Mulvaney was one of the co-authors of the “cut, cap and balance” proposal that Republican deficit hawks and tea partiers supported during the debate over raising the debt ceiling. The bill included a spending cap and a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It passed the House in July 2011, but was subsequently tabled by the Senate. When the Republican leadership and President Obama finally brokered a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Mulvaney voted against it. Mulvaney was particularly outspoken during this debate. In August 2011, he told The Herald of Rock Hill, S.C. that the debt ceiling debate was a “fabricated crisis.” Throughout the year, Mulvaney often bucked his party leadership in the name of fiscal discipline and voted against several continuing resolutions offered by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. to fund the government. “My no votes are not motivated by a desire to poke my leadership in the eye,” he told National Journal in October 2011. “There’s a certain value to a small group of people representing true north on the compass.”
