The congressman from the 2nd District is Jim Langevin, a Democrat first elected in 2000. Langevin (LAN-jeh-vin) grew up in Warwick and as a boy hoped to become an FBI agent. But in 1980, at age 16, when he was a police cadet in the Boy Scout Explorer program, he was shot by a police officer when a gun accidentally discharged. The bullet went through his upper back and throat and damaged the upper part of his spinal column, making him a quadriplegic. Today, he is the first quadriplegic to serve in Congress. After the accident, Langevin received $2.2 million in a settlement with the city of Warwick, and although he disliked the attention it brought him, he says he became determined to do something meaningful with his life. He worked as an intern in the state House and for Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell. In 1988, while still a student at Rhode Island College, he was elected to the state House of Representatives, where he styled himself as a reformer. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he went on to get a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In 1994, Langevin was elected Rhode Island’s secretary of state. Read More

The congressman from the 2nd District is Jim Langevin, a Democrat first elected in 2000. Langevin (LAN-jeh-vin) grew up in Warwick and as a boy hoped to become an FBI agent. But in 1980, at age 16, when he was a police cadet in the Boy Scout Explorer program, he was shot by a police officer when a gun accidentally discharged. The bullet went through his upper back and throat and damaged the upper part of his spinal column, making him a quadriplegic. Today, he is the first quadriplegic to serve in Congress. After the accident, Langevin received $2.2 million in a settlement with the city of Warwick, and although he disliked the attention it brought him, he says he became determined to do something meaningful with his life. He worked as an intern in the state House and for Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell. In 1988, while still a student at Rhode Island College, he was elected to the state House of Representatives, where he styled himself as a reformer. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he went on to get a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In 1994, Langevin was elected Rhode Island’s secretary of state.

When Democratic Rep. Bob Weygand ran for the Senate in 2000, Langevin ran for his seat in the U.S. House. In a four-way contest for the Democratic nomination, Langevin’s most strenuous opposition came from Kate Coyne-McCoy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Association of Social Workers who made an issue of Langevin’s opposition to abortion rights. Although Langevin had support from many Democratic Party leaders and some unions, and won the party’s endorsement at the April convention, Coyne-McCoy waged an aggressive campaign financed by unions, health care workers, and EMILY’s List. “There’s no such thing as being too liberal,” Coyne-McCoy said. Langevin called her positions “unrealistic and extreme.” He favored less stringent forms of gun control and said, “No one has to tell me how dangerous weapons can be.” He spoke often about the accident that paralyzed him. “Certainly, being disabled is part of who I am, but it doesn’t define me,” he said. Langevin won the primary. His chief opposition in the general election came from Rodney Driver, nominee of the Conscience for Congress Party and a retired mathematics professor who spent $300,000 of his retirement savings on his campaign. Langevin won, 62%-21%.

The House chamber in the U.S. Capitol was made wheelchair accessible for Langevin, with two of the fixed seats in the front removed to give him space to maneuver and to talk to colleagues. At his urging, then-Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to more far-reaching structural changes in 2009 to make all parts of the chamber, including the speaker’s rostrum, accessible. In July 2010, on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Langevin became the first person in a wheelchair to preside over the House of Representatives.

Langevin has been liberal on economic issues and more centrist on cultural and foreign policy issues, an apt reflection of his district’s ethnic communities. In 2005, he was one of only three House Democrats from New England to join conservatives in the controversial case of Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of a court battle over removing her life-sustaining feeding tube. But he was back in the liberal fold on the issue of embryonic stem cell research, opposed by anti-abortion groups. Langevin took the view that the research might alleviate suffering from certain diseases and injuries, and he drew heat from the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence for his position.

Langevin has sponsored several gun control bills, and he has called universal health care coverage his top priority. In 2008, he co-sponsored a plan for national health care coverage for all Americans that would resemble the one provided to federal employees, with an increase in the payroll tax financing the new program. Langevin was a staunch supporter of the Democrats’ health care initiative in 2009 and 2010, which sought to bring millions of uninsured households into the system. In 2006, Langevin won passage of a bipartisan bill that established a respite program for caregivers of individuals with special needs.

In the 111th Congress (2009-10), Langevin was the chief House sponsor of a bill that established cybersecurity offices in the White House and Homeland Security Department and gave the president emergency powers to act during a cybersecurity crisis. The bill passed in the House, but not in the Senate, and Langevin reintroduced it in March 2011. On the Armed Services Committee, where he chaired the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Langevin sponsored a measure in 2010 allowing the Pentagon to convert more jobs held by private contractors to full-time civilian positions. He also led efforts to boost spending for missile defense systems above the level requested by the Obama administration.

Both state and national Democrats urged Langevin to consider challenging Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee in 2006, but abortion rights groups objected to his candidacy. Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, the former state attorney general, challenged Chafee and won. Langevin ran for re-election to the House that year, and again faced opposition from within the party for his abortion position.

Brown University political scientist Jennifer Lawless challenged Langevin in the primary. With support from national abortion rights and women’s groups, she ran an aggressive and negative campaign that hit Langevin hard on his abortion stance and the war in Iraq. Lawless ran an ad that featured a doctor talking about rape, and cited 27 votes that Langevin cast “against a woman’s right to choose.” Langevin countered that he supported abortion rights in sexual assault cases. Lawless also accused Langevin of failing to be sufficiently anti-war. Langevin raised more than double what Lawless did, and wound up defeating her 62%-38% in the September primary. In the general election, Republicans did not bother to field a candidate.

However, in the gale-force Republican year of 2010, the GOP put up corporate executive Mark Zaccaria, who was able to chip away at Langevin’s always-comfortable vote margins. Although Langevin won, Zaccaria held him to 60% of the vote, his lowest ever in a House race. Zaccaria spent just $180,500 compared to over $1 million by Langevin. The Republican got 32%, while an independent candidate won 8%. Two years earlier, when Zaccaria challenged Langevin, the incumbent won with 70%.