The congressman from the 1st District is Jack Kingston, an amiable and media-savvy Republican first elected in 1992. The son of a college professor, Kingston grew up in Texas and Georgia, but also spent time in Ethiopia. After college, he moved to Savannah to be a commercial insurance agent. In 1984, at age 29, he was elected to the Georgia House and served eight years. In 1992, when Democratic U.S. Rep. Lindsay Thomas retired, Kingston ran for Congress against Democrat Barbara Christmas, a school principal. He won decisively, 58%-42%, and has not been seriously challenged since. Read More

The congressman from the 1st District is Jack Kingston, an amiable and media-savvy Republican first elected in 1992. The son of a college professor, Kingston grew up in Texas and Georgia, but also spent time in Ethiopia. After college, he moved to Savannah to be a commercial insurance agent. In 1984, at age 29, he was elected to the Georgia House and served eight years. In 1992, when Democratic U.S. Rep. Lindsay Thomas retired, Kingston ran for Congress against Democrat Barbara Christmas, a school principal. He won decisively, 58%-42%, and has not been seriously challenged since.

In the House, Kingston has a mostly conservative voting record but he is not among the hard-liners in the Georgia delegation. He was the only one of the delegation’s Republicans in 2006 to support renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also rebuked former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2010 for wading into the GOP gubernatorial primary to endorse Karen Handel over former Rep. Nathan Deal, who eventually won the race. In 2005, he joined Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., in a bipartisan initiative to reduce oil consumption by increasing auto fuel efficiency. “The age of cheap oil and gas is over,” Kingston said, a view that proved to be prescient in the late 2000s as gas prices soared.

During the Clinton era, he parted company with Republicans on trade issues, notably the North American Free Trade Agreement and normal trade relations with China. But during a 2007 visit to Cuba, he softened his opposition on trade with that country, at least where the market for Georgia-grown Vidalia onions was concerned. During the Obama administration, he has made several attempts at pleasing the right, calling in September 2009 to cut back the use of White House policy “czars” whose jobs did not require Senate confirmation.

In the 112th Congress (2011-12), he is the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, where he is an advocate of the peanut-warehousing program. He helped play a role in 2009 in overturning a ban on Chinese poultry imports that had led China to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization. In 2008, he helped House Minority Leader John Boehner craft the party’s position on earmarking after the practice came under widespread criticism as wasteful government spending. But Kingston also has made it his business to grab his slices of pork. He has brought millions of dollars home to improve the water flow of the Savannah River and to complete the Sidney Lanier drawbridge in Brunswick. “I am convinced there are good earmarks and bad earmarks,” he said, while conceding that they got out of control when Republicans ran the House.

Kingston has been a party activist in the House. As head of the Republicans’ “theme team,” he became a spokesman for the House GOP on television talk shows. He encouraged colleagues to make appearances on Comedy Central and to make more use of blogs. (He himself was the first lawmaker to appear on comedian Stephen Colbert’s “Better Know a District” segment.) In 2002, he was elected vice chairman of the Republican Conference. But he was a victim of a desire for change in 2006, after Republicans lost their majority in the House. Kingston fell short in a bid for chairman of the conference, losing to Adam Putnam of Florida on the third ballot.

He considered but turned down opportunities to run for the Senate in 2002 and 2004, when less-senior Republicans prevailed. But long before Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, Kingston began floating his name to take over the top Republican slot on Appropriations. He argued that California Republican Jerry Lewis had served his three full terms under House GOP rules and was required to step aside. Two weeks after the election, he formally announced his bid, stressing his conservatism as well as his media-friendly credentials in communicating the panel’s work. But the Appropriations chairmanship went to Harold Rogers of Kentucky.