The congressman from the 6th District is Gregory Meeks, a Democrat first elected in 1998. Meeks grew up in public housing projects in Harlem. He was inspired by his mother, who went back to school when her four children were older and who encouraged community service volunteerism. Meeks’s childhood hero was Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After graduating from college and law school, Meeks moved to Far Rockaway. He became an assistant district attorney in 1978 and a workers’ compensation judge in 1985. After losing a City Council race in 1991, he was elected to the New York state Assembly in 1992. He became an ally of Democratic Rep. Floyd Flake, a minister whose Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation grew from 1,400 members in 1976 to 12,000 in 2000. When Flake retired, Meeks won a majority of Democratic committee members at a January 1998 endorsement meeting and thus became the party’s nominee. Democratic state Sen. Alton Waldon and Assemblywoman Barbara Clark ran as independents. With the support of Flake, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, and civil-rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Meeks won with 57% of the vote, to Waldon’s 21%, and Clark’s 13%. Since then he has had only token opposition. Read More

The congressman from the 6th District is Gregory Meeks, a Democrat first elected in 1998. Meeks grew up in public housing projects in Harlem. He was inspired by his mother, who went back to school when her four children were older and who encouraged community service volunteerism. Meeks’s childhood hero was Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After graduating from college and law school, Meeks moved to Far Rockaway. He became an assistant district attorney in 1978 and a workers’ compensation judge in 1985. After losing a City Council race in 1991, he was elected to the New York state Assembly in 1992. He became an ally of Democratic Rep. Floyd Flake, a minister whose Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation grew from 1,400 members in 1976 to 12,000 in 2000. When Flake retired, Meeks won a majority of Democratic committee members at a January 1998 endorsement meeting and thus became the party’s nominee. Democratic state Sen. Alton Waldon and Assemblywoman Barbara Clark ran as independents. With the support of Flake, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, and civil-rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Meeks won with 57% of the vote, to Waldon’s 21%, and Clark’s 13%. Since then he has had only token opposition.

Meeks has a liberal voting record on social issues, but his stance on economic issues is more pro-business than most other New York City Democrats. He is a member of the commerce-oriented New Democrat Coalition. He backed the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement, citing increased traffic for JFK Airport. In 2009, he became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s International Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee and remained as its top Democrat in the 112th Congress (2011-12). He has joined the committee’s other African-American members in seeking to ensure that minorities’ issues are addressed in Financial Services legislation. He also expressed concerns about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s adoption of rules in 2008 to expand its oversight of some fixed indexed annuities that states had been monitoring. Meeks sided with financial companies that want them to remain subject to state oversight, and joined with conservative Rep. Tom Price of Georgia in sponsoring a bill to that effect in 2009.

Meeks has shown a desire to advance within the party. When several House Democratic leadership positions opened up in late 2002, he campaigned for vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus but was bested by Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina. In 2008, Meeks became chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus’s political action committee.

He has sought to bring business deals to Queens by meeting with leaders of other nations, and his many overseas trips have attracted attention. His personal life has caused him some political problems. The Federal Election Commission in 2006 reprimanded him for using more than $6,000 in 2004 campaign funds for a personal trainer and other expenses. He agreed to pay fines totaling $63,000. When his wife, Simone, expressed interest in running for the New York City Council in 2007, Meeks refused to endorse her and she deferred to the candidacy of her husband’s aide.

In 2010, his financial ethics became fodder for all of New York’s major dailies. The New York Times wrote in March that despite acknowledging that he has no more than a few thousand dollars in his savings account, he “lives a life worthy of a jet-setter,” staying in luxury hotels, driving a taxpayer-leased $1,000-a-month Lexus and buying a $1 million house built by a developer who was a campaign contributor. He told the newspaper that he observed all campaign finance laws, but “I am not going to raise the money in my district that I need to be a player here in Washington.” The New York Daily News reported in June that he described his failure to list $55,000 in personal loans as an “oversight.” And The New York Post found inconsistencies in his political action committee records, including paying $325 in monthly rent on a nonexistent Queens office. He blamed the negative attention on conservative groups out to undermine Democrats.