The congressman from the 6th District is Frank Pallone, a Democrat elected in 1988. Pallone is the son of a disabled Long Branch policeman. He has been an environmentalist since 1969, when as a Middlebury College freshman in Vermont he worked for that state’s first-in-the-nation bottle deposit law. After getting a master’s degree in international relations from Tufts University and a law degree from Rutgers, he was elected to the Long Branch City Council in 1982, at age 31, and to the New Jersey Senate a year later. After the death of Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Howard, Pallone ran for the House. The district leaned Republican, but residents were angry about untreated sludge, plastic containers, and medical waste washing up on the beach. Pallone’s bumper sticker, which didn’t mention party affiliation, said, “Stop Ocean Dumping.” That, combined with his conservative stands on taxes and crime, helped him to win 52% in both the special and general elections. Read More

The congressman from the 6th District is Frank Pallone, a Democrat elected in 1988. Pallone is the son of a disabled Long Branch policeman. He has been an environmentalist since 1969, when as a Middlebury College freshman in Vermont he worked for that state’s first-in-the-nation bottle deposit law. After getting a master’s degree in international relations from Tufts University and a law degree from Rutgers, he was elected to the Long Branch City Council in 1982, at age 31, and to the New Jersey Senate a year later. After the death of Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Howard, Pallone ran for the House. The district leaned Republican, but residents were angry about untreated sludge, plastic containers, and medical waste washing up on the beach. Pallone’s bumper sticker, which didn’t mention party affiliation, said, “Stop Ocean Dumping.” That, combined with his conservative stands on taxes and crime, helped him to win 52% in both the special and general elections.

Pallone started as a political maverick, but has become more loyal to the Democratic Party in recent years. His environmental focus has been on protecting the Jersey shoreline. In 2006, he won passage of a bill to reduce and prevent debris in the marine environment. And two years later, he was the lead sponsor of a bipartisan bill to rebuild American fisheries, in part by requiring a review of factors that lead to over-fishing. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Pallone was among several New Jersey Democrats who implored President Barack Obama to reverse his decision to open up waters for drilling off the East Coast.

As chairman of the influential Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in 2009, Pallone helped steer to passage the Democrats’ expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which he called “a down payment to ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care.” When the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill came up for debate, he backed an increase in the federal matching rate for Medicaid as a step to reduce the program’s financial burden on states. During the health care overhaul debate, he shuttled among the various factions of Blue Dogs and progressives to try to get them to be flexible about the plan’s contents. When the bill finally became law in 2010, he turned to other issues. He got a bill through the subcommittee that set guidelines for how long student athletes should wait before returning to a sport following a concussion.

In a bow to the many people of Armenian descent in the district, Pallone helped push congressional approval of normalizing trade relations for Armenia. He sponsored the resolution that labeled the 1915 killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. But he agreed in 2007 to defer a vote under pressure from the Turkish government and the Bush administration. Two years later, he joined a bipartisan group of House members who called on Obama to follow up on campaign statements and label the massacre a genocide.

Since 1994, Pallone has usually been re-elected with at least 60% of the vote. In 1998, he faced a tough challenge from 28-year-old Republican Mike Ferguson, an ally of former GOP Gov. Thomas Kean. An insurance group unhappy with Pallone’s support for President Bill Clinton’s plan to regulate health maintenance organizations spent nearly $2 million on Ferguson’s campaign. But Pallone won 57%-40%. In 2010, he drew another formidable opponent in Republican Anna Little, the mayor of Highlands and an immigration lawyer. With strong tea party backing, Little won a stunning GOP primary victory over weekly newspaper publisher Diane Gooch despite having been outraised $433,000-$22,000. Little took strong socially conservative positions and blasted Pallone’s efforts to pass the health care bill. Polls showed the race tightening in the campaign’s closing days, but Pallone was bolstered by a series of newspaper endorsements and kept his seat with a 55%-44% triumph.

Pallone has long wanted to make a run for the Senate, but the timing and circumstances have not worked out in his favor. When Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine ran for governor in 2005, Pallone endorsed him and said that he would like to have Corzine’s Senate seat. Corzine became governor, but he appointed U.S. Rep. Robert Menendez to his Senate seat. During Corzine’s re-election bid against Republican Chris Christie, Pallone became an attack dog for the governor, raising questions about Christie’s work as U.S. attorney for New Jersey and burnishing his own reputation among state party leaders.