The congressman from the 3rd District is Peter King, a Republican first elected in 1992 who has gone from being known mainly as a loquacious maverick to becoming a serious counterweight to the Obama administration on domestic security matters. Read More
The congressman from the 3rd District is Peter King, a Republican first elected in 1992 who has gone from being known mainly as a loquacious maverick to becoming a serious counterweight to the Obama administration on domestic security matters.
King grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. His parents were Irish immigrants and Democrats, his father a New York City police detective. He went to St. Francis College and law school at the University of Notre Dame, and he clerked one summer at former Republican President Richard Nixon’s law firm with a Long Islander named Rudolph Giuliani. After law school, he followed the trek to the suburbs and became part of the Nassau County Republican machine. He worked as a lawyer and staffer in county government beginning in 1972, and in 1981, he became county comptroller. When 22-year Republican Rep. Norman Lent retired in 1992, King ran for the seat and won the Republican primary. In the general election, King ran as a fiscal conservative, and abortion rights opponent. He won by just 50%-46%, but hasn’t had a close re-election since.
King’s voting record ranks him near the ideological center of the House. He is more conservative on foreign policy than on economic or social issues, but with distinctive interests. He opposes racial quotas and preferences, bilingual education, and gun regulation. He supports English-only laws and opposes aid to illegal immigrants. He has been an ardent supporter of the Irish Republican Army. Within days of his election in 1992, he flew to Belfast to meet with leaders of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, and he had a role in 1998 peace negotiations, carrying messages between the IRA and the Irish government. His activism on the issue led to an unusually close bipartisan relationship with President Bill Clinton, who helped broker the agreement. But in 2005, after Sinn Fein’s suspected involvement in a bank robbery and a highly publicized murder, King called for the IRA to disband.
Over the years, King has been a provocative presence on radio and television chat shows. He also gained attention with three novels about politics and diplomacy in Northern Ireland. In one of them, Deliver Us From Evil, a thinly disguised Long Island congressman is the protagonist. “Maybe after I retire from Congress, or get thrown out of Congress, or whatever, I’ll be a writer because as I’ve seen from some newspaper columnists, almost anyone can be a writer,” he told the Long Island Sentinel.
After the September 11 attacks, in which 160 of his constituents died, King became more of a Republican Party regular and focused on legislation to prevent a repeat of the attacks. In 2005, GOP leaders tapped King to be chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. The following year, he was the first House Republican to attack the Bush administration’s plan to give control of six major U.S. ports to a company in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and he subsequently helped to enact tighter controls on port security.
In 2009, he bucked his friends in organized labor by opposing their “card-check” bill to facilitate union organizing. King originally supported the controversial bill but cited “the most severe economic crisis in 75 years” to explain his switch. At the same time, he showed his willingness to anger conservatives with his promise to introduce gun safety legislation following the shooting of Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011 at a constituent event in her district.
After President Barack Obama’s election, King further sharpened his rhetoric on terrorist threats. He told Newsday in December 2009 that the president was not tough enough on Muslim extremists: “Part of his liberal DNA is that he does not want to use the word ‘terrorism’ unless he absolutely has to,” he said. He said excessive concerns about discrimination against Muslims had hamstrung authorities in the case of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who went on a killing rampage at Fort Hood in Texas. When the Homeland Security Department published a report in April 2009 about domestic right-wing extremism, King complained that the agency “has never put out a report talking about ‘Look out for mosques.’” The Council on American-Islamic Relations called his remarks “bigoted.”
After Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, King decided to pursue hearings on what he described as “the radicalization of the American Muslim community and homegrown terrorism.” Islamic leaders said they feared a witch hunt, and King acknowledged that his stance carried risks. “It is controversial,” he told The New York Times. “But to me, it is something that has to be discussed.” The hearings opened in March 2011 amid massive publicity and heightened round-the-clock security for the congressman after reports of threats against him. Some Muslim groups accused him of a double standard in his fervent support of the IRA. King responded, “The fact is, the IRA never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.”
As one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in Congress, King has occasionally been held up in GOP circles as an example of how the party can make inroads in Democratic territory the Northeast. Freshman Nassau County legislator David Mejias, a Democrat, ran against King in 2006 with an endorsement from the AFL-CIO. In an otherwise dismal year for New York Republicans, King won 56%-44%. He also had easy wins in 2008 and 2010, but national and New York Democrats have publicly vowed to redraw his district following the 2010 census. He considered challenging Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, but said that he would have had a hard time raising enough money to compete with her.
