The congresswoman from the 20th District is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a hard-charging Democrat elected in 2004. With a nod to her considerable skills as a media messenger and fundraiser, she was tapped as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in April 2011. She planned to keep her House seat while heading the DNC, which will have a major role in the 2012 presidential contest. Read More
The congresswoman from the 20th District is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a hard-charging Democrat elected in 2004. With a nod to her considerable skills as a media messenger and fundraiser, she was tapped as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in April 2011. She planned to keep her House seat while heading the DNC, which will have a major role in the 2012 presidential contest.
Like many of her constituents, she was born in Queens. She grew up on Long Island, where she ran for student council every year and always lost. She got bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Florida. In her last year at school, she sent out 180 resumes to legislators in Florida and New York and got five interviews. Florida State Rep. Peter Deutsch, a Democrat and former New Yorker from Broward County, gave her a summer job, and then appointed her as his legislative aide. In 1992, he ran for the 20th District House seat and urged Wasserman Schultz to run for his seat in the legislature. She did, knocking on doors for six months and finishing far ahead of four opponents in the Democratic primary. At age 26, she became the state’s youngest woman ever elected to the state House. She served eight years in the state House, including two years as minority leader, followed by four years in the state Senate. She called herself “a pragmatic liberal,” and she sponsored a controversial law to require an equal number of men and women on state boards and a bill that failed to pass requiring that dry cleaners and some other businesses charge the same prices for women as for men.
In 2004, when Deutsch ran for the Democratic nomination for Bob Graham’s open Senate seat, Wasserman Schultz moved to again replace Deutsch, this time in Congress. She began laying the groundwork early. More than a year before the primary, she had raised $115,000. By February 2004, she had lined up endorsements from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and six of Florida’s seven House Democrats. Wasserman Schultz ultimately collected more than $1 million for what turned out to be an uncompetitive race, since no one else filed to run in the decisive Democratic primary. Wasserman Schultz called for repeal of the Bush tax cuts, a reduction in the budget deficit, greater use of diplomacy overseas, improved prescription drug coverage, gay civil rights, and abortion rights. Against a Republican who attacked the “homosexual agenda” in the public schools, she won 70%-30%. She has not faced a serious challenge since, allowing her to channel campaign contributions from a wide spectrum of Democratic interests to her colleagues. In 2009 alone, she raised nearly $5 million for House Democrats, matching the dollars brought in by more senior leaders.
In the House, she has a mostly liberal voting record, though it’s more centrist on foreign policy. Within days of arriving in Congress, she was making an impact. In the debate then raging over whether to intervene to retain the feeding tube for severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo of Florida, Wasserman Schultz argued that Congress would set a dangerous precedent if it attempted to circumvent the courts. She also sponsored a bill, passed by the House in 2007, toughening the Internet Crimes Against Children program by adding hundreds of federal agents at a cost of $1 billion over eight years. She has been one of the Florida delegation’s most ardent opponents of offshore oil drilling, declaring after the 2010 BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that “our country needs to run on something other than oil.”
In 2006, Wasserman Schultz was appointed co-chairman of the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” effort. Working closely with then-Chairman Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago mayor, she became a party spokesperson and a mentor to Democratic recruits. When Democrats won House control that year, she was a prime beneficiary. Majority Whip James Clyburn tapped her as a chief deputy whip. She got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, and immediately became a “cardinal” as chairman of the Legislative Branch Subcommittee. Working with ranking Republican Zach Wamp of Tennessee, she took charge of the Capitol Visitors Center project, which was plagued by cost overruns, and extracted commitments on costs and completion dates. She pushed successfully for a unionization vote at the Government Accountability Office. Wasserman Schultz founded the Cuban Democracy Caucus and was a founding member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equality Caucus.
In the 2008 election season, Wasserman Schultz was criticized by liberal bloggers when she refused to campaign against the three Cuban-American Republican members from South Florida as part of her DCCC duties. They were facing unusually strong Democratic challenges, and ultimately all three—Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart—were re-elected. She was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s co-chair in Florida and nationally.
In late 2008, Wasserman Schultz was interested in becoming vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus if the incumbent, California’s Xavier Becerra, a favorite of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was appointed special trade representative, and she was mentioned as a candidate to succeed Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen as DCCC chairman. But Becerra did not accept the job, and Van Hollen was reappointed. Wasserman Schultz was named vice chair of the DCCC’s incumbent retention program. A National Journal poll of anonymous congressional insiders in 2009 predicted she had the brightest political future of anyone on Capitol Hill.
Her precocious success seemed all the more impressive when she announced in March 2009 that for much of the previous year she had been battling breast cancer. Although her tumor was in early stages, which would typically require only surgery and radiation, she said that she elected to have a double mastectomy after learning that as an Ashkenazi Jew, she had a greater predisposition to recurrence. The mother of three school-aged children, Wasserman Schultz was diagnosed just after turning 40. She talked about her experience on ABC’s Good Morning America as a way of educating young women about the importance of early diagnosis.
