The congressman from the 10th District is Bill Young, a courtly and genial Republican first elected in 1970. He is the most senior Republican in the House, and only Michigan Democrats John Dingell and John Conyers have more seniority than he does. He cast his 20,000th floor vote in May 2009. Read More

The congressman from the 10th District is Bill Young, a courtly and genial Republican first elected in 1970. He is the most senior Republican in the House, and only Michigan Democrats John Dingell and John Conyers have more seniority than he does. He cast his 20,000th floor vote in May 2009.

Young grew up poor in a Pennsylvania coal town. His first home was a shotgun shack that was swept down a river when he was 6 years old. At 16, he was shot in a hunting accident. The family moved to Florida, and Young dropped out of high school to support his ill mother by hauling concrete blocks and mixing mortar. At age 25, he applied for a job as an insurance salesman and ultimately ran a successful insurance agency. In the 1950s, he worked for St. Petersburg’s first Republican congressman, William Cramer, and got the politics bug. Young was elected to the state Senate in 1960, at age 29, and back then, was the lone Republican in the body. When Cramer ran for the U.S. Senate in 1970, Young ran for his House seat and won.

Young has a moderate to conservative voting record. He has joined Democrats on legislation to raise the minimum wage and extend unemployment benefits, and championed measures to improve federal responses to oil spills. Early on, he got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, where he, like many Republicans, worked closely with the Democratic chairmen through many years in the minority. When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, Young did not rise to full committee chairman though he had the seniority to do so. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich passed over him, as well as two more senior Republicans, for being too accommodating to Democrats. With some reason: After 34 years as a minority-party legislator, Young’s instincts were bipartisan. “I came into the majority party with this strong conviction that every member of Congress has been elected by their constituents and should be given respect,” he said at the time. But he certainly was not left powerless. He assumed the chairmanship of the defense appropriations subcommittee, giving him considerable sway over U.S. defense spending. In that role, he worked to produce bipartisan appropriations bills out of the spotlight.

In 1998, Young considered retiring, but at the end of the year, he finally got the full committee gavel. Three days after the November election, when Republicans suffered stinging losses, Gingrich decided to resign as speaker. In the subsequent leadership reshuffling, Young took over as Appropriations chairman from Bob Livingston of Louisiana. He stayed in the job six years, until 2004, the maximum allowed under GOP rules. During the Bush era, Young was often caught between White House demands to hold down spending and the rank and file’s enormous appetite for earmarks, the special projects for home districts. For the most part, he came down on the president’s side, but he demurred when the administration tried to get him to end earmarking altogether. An appropriator at heart, he also chafed at various attempts by the Budget Committee to impose caps on spending. Ever the bipartisan conciliator, he refused repeated demands from the Republican leadership to reduce the number of projects for Democratic appropriators.

Young by no means ignored his own district or his own self-interest when it came to earmarking. “I try to make sure things that are needed in the whole state of Florida are taken care of,” he once said. But he has also not been immune to the ongoing controversy surrounding earmarks, and in 2008, two of his earmarks dinged his reputation for high ethical standards. The St. Petersburg Times reported that he had directed $45 million to defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. after the company hired his 20-year-old son, Patrick, as a security administrator, though Patrick had only a GED and scant work experience. The newspaper also reported that Young had directed $28 million over nine years to another company that had employed another son, Billy Young, 23, for almost a year. The senior Young said that the companies got the earmarks on merit, not because they hired his children. In 2009, Young again came under scrutiny as one of seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions in largely no-bid contracts to clients of the lobbying firm PMA Insurance Group while accepting large campaign donations from those companies. The Ethics Committee cleared them of wrongdoing in 2010.

When the Republicans won majority control of the House again in 2010, Young got the chairmanship of the Defense Subcommittee for a second time. In that role, he takes an avid interest in Florida’s many military installations. MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, across the bay from St. Petersburg, is the headquarters of Central Command and Special Operations Command. In recent years, he pushed through a $25 million intelligence and operations center and $78 million for a conference center for SOCOM, as well as $31 million for more family housing. Another of Young’s special projects has been the bone-marrow donor program, originated by Dr. Robert Good of All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg. In 2010, Taxpayers for Common Sense reported that Young received $90.5 million in earmarks that he alone requested, more than any other House member that year.

He also pays close attention to veterans’ issues. In the 1970s, he persuaded Congress and President Ford to build the Bay Pines Veterans Medical Center in St. Petersburg, now the second largest veterans’ hospital. He worked in 2009 to add $20 million to a war supplemental spending bill to assist a private brain-injury center for U.S. troops. Since the Iraq War began in 2003, Young and his wife, Beverly, have visited wounded soldiers almost every week at military hospitals, including Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. Sometimes they found care lacking—a soldier sitting in a pool of urine, a sergeant’s brain surgery delayed because of malfunctioning equipment—and they regularly complained to Gen. Kevin Kiley at Walter Reed and others officers. In 2007, The Washington Post published a series of stories about wretched conditions at the facility, which led to reforms.

The trend toward Democrats in Pinellas County for years has not posed a threat to Young. Republican redistricters in 2002 made the district more Republican, so that the party could hold it when he retires. He seriously considered stepping down in 2010, but decided to remain. Young’s son, Billy, is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor when his father retires.