The congressman from the 9th District is Bill Shuster, a Republican who won a May 2001 special election to succeed his father, Bud Shuster, the powerful chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the 1990s. The younger Shuster has become an important GOP figure on transportation issues in his own right. Read More

The congressman from the 9th District is Bill Shuster, a Republican who won a May 2001 special election to succeed his father, Bud Shuster, the powerful chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the 1990s. The younger Shuster has become an important GOP figure on transportation issues in his own right.

Bill Shuster grew up in the Pittsburgh area, where his father started a successful business. After graduating from Dickinson College and American University’s business school, he moved to Blair County, where he took over the family’s car dealership, Shuster Chrysler in East Freedom, near Altoona. He sold the business in 2002.

Bud Shuster announced his resignation in January 2001, unhappy that Republican leaders refused him an exemption from term limits on chairmanships. The contest for the House seat was for all practical purposes decided at a district-wide Republican convention. Facing nine other contenders, Shuster, with back-room help from his father, ran an insider campaign that took advantage of his father’s name and years of service. Although there was some local grumbling about a Shuster dynasty, opponents failed to coalesce behind a candidate. Shuster won 69 of the 133 votes, two more than the required majority. National Democrats ignored the race in the heavily Republican district, which seemed to them hopeless. But Democrat H. Scott Conklin campaigned vigorously as an opponent of abortion rights and gun control. Shuster won by a closer than expected 52%-44%. National Republicans attributed the narrow margin to residual intra-party ill will over Shuster’s nomination.

In the House, Bill Shuster has a solidly conservative voting record. Naturally, he ended up on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and in 2011 took the gavel of the Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee. Though he had earlier backed additional funding for the government-run Amtrak rail service, he joined committee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla., in arguing in March 2011 that private investment should supplant federal funding in building future rail service. He added an amendment to an aviation bill that month requiring the Federal Aviation Administration to give more weight to economic factors before adopting safety rules. Safety groups sharply criticized the proposal, but it narrowly passed.

His loyalty to the House GOP agenda has earned him a spot on its whip team and Republican leaders occasionally have called on him for behind-the-scenes jobs, such as reportedly leading an unsuccessful effort to persuade Pennsylvania Democrat Christopher Carney to switch parties in 2009. Shuster does occasionally reach across the aisle, joining with Vermont Democrat Peter Welch in 2011 in an effort to expedite limits on credit-card swipe fees. He said Sheetz Corp. executives told him that such fees were the company’s second-largest expense behind labor.

In his father’s tradition, Shuster has been an avid practitioner of earmarked spending for his district, a practice that in recent years has been attacked by budget conservatives as wasteful. In 2010, he claimed more than $23 million in earmarks—a figure only slightly below that of his home-state colleague Chaka Fattah, a Democratic member of the Appropriations Committee. But he subsequently went along with House Republicans’ push to ban the practice. Democrats lampooned him in March 2009 for taking credit for $9 million to his district from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, even though he had voted against the legislation. He was less amenable to funding for Berkeley, Calif. He tried unsuccessfully to cut $2 million for the city from an appropriations bill in 2008 after Berkeley told Marine recruiters they were unwelcome to set up shop in the city; Shuster called Berkeley “ground zero for radicals and leftist zealots.”

Shuster had an unusually strong challenge in the 2004 primary from Michael DelGrosso, a management consultant whose family owns a Blair County tomato sauce company. He said that the district needed a new economic approach. DelGrosso carried Blair County and three nearby counties in the northern part of the district, but Shuster ran strongly elsewhere and squeezed by with a 51%-49% win. He has not been seriously challenged in recent elections.