The congressman from the 8th District is Jerrold Nadler, a West Side Democrat first elected in 1992. Nadler was the House’s most liberal member in 2010, according to National Journal rankings, with a strong civil libertarian bent. Read More
The congressman from the 8th District is Jerrold Nadler, a West Side Democrat first elected in 1992. Nadler was the House’s most liberal member in 2010, according to National Journal rankings, with a strong civil libertarian bent.
Nadler was born in Brooklyn and moved around with his family as a child. His parents bought a chicken farm in New Jersey, but the business failed, and they moved back to the city. His father ran a gas station on Long Island and owned an auto parts store. Interested in politics from a young age, Nadler campaigned for Democrat Eugene McCarthy for president while at Columbia University, where he roomed with Dick Morris, who would later become a top adviser to President Bill Clinton. The two were at Columbia during the 1968 campus riots. After getting his law degree from Fordham University, Nadler ran for the New York Assembly in 1976, at age 29. In the primary, he beat Ruth Messinger, the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997, by 73 votes. In 1992, he was suddenly presented with the opportunity to run for Congress. Ted Weiss, long an Upper West Side icon, died the day before the September primary, which he won posthumously. The nomination was decided by a convention of almost 1,000 county Democratic committee members. Nadler won 62% of the votes to secure the nomination and thus the election. He has not been seriously challenged since.
As the top Democrat on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, Nadler has been a counterweight to lawmakers of both parties seeking expanded police powers to crack down on terrorism. It is not because Nadler, as the representative of the site of the September 11 attacks, is unsympathetic to their cause. But he has worked to narrow the definition of “enemy combatants” and to protect the habeas corpus rights of detainees. In 2008, he sponsored a bill requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to surmount higher legal hurdles before being allowed to use “national security letters,” which are government demands for information not subject to judicial review. He vigorously opposed the USA PATRIOT Act, the Bush administration’s centerpiece anti-terrorism law. Nadler in 2009 moved a bill through the full committee aimed at strengthening the hand of Americans who sue the government to challenge alleged spying or illegal detention
Nadler has little regard for most of the Republican-backed social legislation that makes its way to the Judiciary Committee or for the tea-party conservatives who support reading the Constitution on the House floor. “You are not supposed to worship your constitution; you’re supposed to govern your government by it,” he told The Washington Post in January 2011. He led the fight in the House against conservative proposals to ban same-sex marriage. In early 2009, Nadler held hearings to document what he viewed as the “criminal” abuses of the Bush administration and demanded that former Bush aide Karl Rove testify about the “politicization of the Justice Department” after the firing of several U.S. attorneys around the country allegedly for political reasons.
On foreign policy, Nadler has been a staunch supporter of Israel, but he opposed the Iraq war resolution in 2002. Regarding Afghanistan, he said in July 2010: “An intelligent policy is not to try to remake a country that nobody since Genghis Khan has managed to conquer.” He offered an amendment to a spending bill in February 2011 to de-fund military operations there that lost overwhelmingly, 98-331.
For a decade now, Nadler has been involved in post-September 11 issues and concerns in his district. In late 2010, he helped steer into law a long-delayed measure providing more than $4 billion in compensation to first responders suffering health problems—a development he called “without a doubt the proudest moment of my 34-year career in government.” Right after the attacks, he helped provide $20 billion for rebuilding, and he spearheaded numerous actions on behalf of affected families and small businesses.
As the Northeast’s most senior Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Nadler has fought to get more rail competition east of the Hudson and to save Amtrak. His biggest project has been a rail-freight tunnel under the Hudson. Lack of a rail-freight line means that New York gets only a tiny share of its freight by rail; a new line could mean cheaper freight and therefore lower consumer prices. Mayor Bloomberg initially sided with neighborhood groups in Queens that object to the plan because it would increase noise, but in 2009, reversed himself and called it “a good long-term solution.” Nadler also has been a strong proponent of the Obama administration’s commitment to high-speed passenger rail, which many Republicans have rejected as too expensive. “It simply makes no sense to travel by air between New York and D.C. or Boston, or frankly between any cities within a 500-mile radius,” he said in February 2011. Nadler also successfully fought developer Donald Trump’s attempts to alter the West Side Highway to accommodate his luxury housing project on old rail yards between 59th and 72nd Streets. Trump in turn called Nadler a “hack.”
Nadler has been open about his decision to undergo stomach-reduction surgery in 2002 to combat obesity. The 5-foot-4 Nadler weighed as much as 338 pounds before the procedure but lost more than 60 pounds within three months. “I want to live to see my grandchildren grow up,” he told The New York Times.
