The congressman from the 4th District is David Price, a Democrat first elected in 1986. He lost the seat in 1994 and regained it in 1996. Since his return, he has distinguished himself as a thoughtful, deliberative voice on anti-terrorism and border security spending in addition to education and science. Read More

The congressman from the 4th District is David Price, a Democrat first elected in 1986. He lost the seat in 1994 and regained it in 1996. Since his return, he has distinguished himself as a thoughtful, deliberative voice on anti-terrorism and border security spending in addition to education and science.

Price grew up in east Tennessee, the son of a school principal and an English teacher. He is an interesting blend of political scientist, practical politician, and lay Baptist preacher. He came to Chapel Hill to go to college, worked as a young aide on Capitol Hill, earned a degree in divinity and a doctorate in political science at Yale University and taught there for four years. In 1973, he took a job as a political science professor at Duke. He was executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party in the 1980 election season and chairman in 1983-84. With Gov. Jim Hunt, Price helped develop North Carolina’s robust straight-ticket politics.

In 1986, he ran for the House and beat Republican freshman Rep. Bill Cobey. In 1994, Price lost the seat, 50.4%-49.6%, to Fred Heineman, a former New York City police officer and Raleigh police chief in the 1970s. Two years later, Price came back for a rematch and outspent Heineman, winning 54%-44%. Price has written four books, including The Congressional Experience, about his observations on Congress. The polarization of the two chambers has made him pessimistic about finding widespread agreement on solving the nation’s fiscal problems. “Our capacity to take them on in the bipartisan fashion that history teaches us is almost always necessary is far weaker” than it was in the 1990s, he told National Journal in May 2010.

In the House, Price’s voting record typically placed him near the center of House Democrats, but he moved sharply leftward during years his party held the majority, 2007-11. A National Journal analysis found him to be the House’s 31st most liberal lawmaker in 2010, far ahead of the rest of North Carolina’s delegation. During his first years, Price helped pass laws increasing the percentage of a home’s value the government can insure, aiding technical education at community colleges, and setting up an Advanced Technological Education program at the National Science Foundation. His Education Affordability Act, which he worked on for a dozen years and considers his proudest achievement, was folded into the 1997 Balanced Budget Act and became law. It made interest on student loans tax deductible and allowed penalty-free withdrawals from individual retirement accounts for education expenses.

In January 2007, Price became chairman of the Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, on which he had served quietly under Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., during the years of GOP control of the House. Price pledged to take a bipartisan approach, as he said Rogers had. But he consistently sought higher levels of spending for homeland security measures, like support for first responders, than requested by the Bush administration. In 2007, the House passed Price’s bill establishing a code of conduct for private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. A target of the bill was North Carolina-based Blackwater, whose activities in Iraq, including the shooting of 17 people in a Baghdad square, had been extremely controversial.

Price generally has been more in sync with the Obama administration—the fiscal 2010 homeland security bill was about 1% below the administration’s request. However, he has been critical of the administration’s approach to border security, particularly the problem-plagued SBInet “virtual fence” technology system that ultimately was scrapped in 2011. Price called increased drug trafficking and violence on the border “an emergency” in 2010 and said it merited as much attention as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Price has also been active in campaign finance law. He sponsored the “stand by your ad” requirement for candidates to appear in the full frame of television ads reading their disclaimers on the air, so they would more likely be held responsible for negative ads. His proposal became part of the campaign reform law in 2002. He wants a similar requirement for Internet ads, and said the Supreme Court’s March 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited spending by corporations made it important to counter the likely flow of misleading ads. “The least we can do is inform viewers (about) who has bought the ads they are seeing,” he said. That same year, he sponsored a bill to make small political donors more important by matching contributions of under $200 to presidential campaigns on a 4-to-1 basis.

In the appropriations process, Price has nurtured local projects, including $272 million for a new Environmental Protection Agency complex in Research Triangle Park as well as a variety of defense- and technology-related programs for colleges in his district.

Since his return to the House in 1996, Price has been re-elected by wide margins. In 2008, he won 63%-37% over a well-funded technology-company executive, B.J. Lawson. In Wake County, the fastest-growing part of the district, responsible for 47% of the total vote, he won just 52%. He ran much better in the areas dominated by universities: 77% in Durham County, 72% in Orange County, and 62% in Chatham County. Lawson returned for a rematch two years later, but managed only to narrow the margin to 57%-43%.