Rep. Christopher Cox (R) Elected 1988, 8th term
Born:	Oct. 16, 1952, St. Paul, MN
Home:	Newport Beach
Education:	U. of S. CA, B.A. 1973, Harvard U., M.B.A., J.D., 1977
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Rebecca)
Professional Career:	Clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Herbert Choy, 1977-78; Practicing atty., 1978-86; Lecturer, Harvard Bus. Schl., 1982-83; Sr. Assoc. Cnsl., White House, 1986-88.
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If you drove south on the Santa Ana and San Diego Freeways in Orange County 30 years ago, once you got past Santa Ana and John Wayne Airport you would have found yourself in open land for the next 25 miles, a vacant landscape of flat plains and low mountains, all beneath the 4,600-foot Trabuco Peak in the distance. This was the land of the Irvine Ranch, purchased by Gold Rush merchant James Irvine from the Sepulveda and Yorba families and maintained as a ranch until the early 1970s, the last large plot of vacant land in metro Los Angeles. Irvine sold some of it to create the cities of Santa Ana and Tustin, but in the 1970s there was still this great swath of land, 10 miles along the Pacific Coast and 22 miles inland to the mountains, where the freeway traveler could see what the California the first American settlers saw looked like. But as Orange County grew up to the limits of the Irvine Ranch, the Irvine family realized that they owned immensely valuable land. In 1959 they donated a site for the University of California at Irvine and in the 1970s they sold the rest of the property to developers. The resulting city of Irvine was a planned community, with eight-lane parkways, huge office parks and shopping malls and attractive subdivisions and condominiums. Irvine has attracted high-tech and high-growth businesses, highly educated and affluent people, including Asian immigrants; in 2000, 10% of its 143,000 residents were Chinese, enough to support a Chinese supermarket and a Chinese-language library. Irvine is one planned city that respects free market economics; the new expressways on the Irvine Ranch land were built by private companies and paid for by tolls. Now Irvine is deciding what to do with its last piece of undeveloped territory, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station that closed in 1999. In March 2002 Orange County voted against using it as an airport and instead to develop it as a Great Park.

Irvine is set amid a raft of affluent communities, except for low-income and 76% Hispanic Santa Ana (the 48th has a small portion of the city). To the north is Tustin, an older town built on Irvine land. To the south is Newport Beach, one of California's richest cities; Newport Harbor is chock full of expensive boats. To the east is Lake Forest; the name used to be El Toro, although now some residents complain that it has few lakes or forests. To the southeast, on the Ocean is Laguna Beach with its art galleries and cute shops, and more conventionally affluent Dana Point. Inland are new affluent communities--Laguna Niguel, Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods.

The 48th Congressional District is centered geographically on the Irvine Ranch lands and includes all of these communities. Politically, this is a conservative area, and for a long time it was one of the most Republican districts in the United States. In the 1990s, like most of metro Los Angeles, it trended to the Democrats, but it is still very Republican. In 2000, 58% of its votes were cast for George W. Bush.

The congressman from the 48th District is Christopher Cox, a Republican first elected in 1988. Cox grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, graduated from the University of Southern California in three years, went to Harvard Law and Business Schools jointly, clerked for a Ninth Circuit judge in Hawaii, practiced law at a big firm in Orange County, then was part of the Reagan White House counsel's staff. In fall 1987 he had lunch in the White House Mess with Dana Rohrabacher, then a speechwriter. Cox told him that Orange County Congressman Robert Badham had announced he was retiring; Rohrabacher said Dan Lungren was vacating his Long Beach seat. That day they decided to run for the seats. Cox was one of 14 Republican candidates for the safe Republican seat. With the support of Oliver North, Robert Bork and members of the Irvine family, he won the primary with 31% of the vote. He has since won primary and general elections without difficulty. Cox's intellect and range of interests are impressive: from the former Soviet Union (he and his father published an English translation of Pravda from 1984-88) to lobbying for more local control of highway funds.

With the Republican victory in 1994, Cox came into his own, becoming chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and a leading legislator on many fronts. On the first day of the new Congress, he led the move to end baseline budgeting, which typically had given each agency and department either an inflation increase or the previous year's increase, whichever was higher, and an opportunity to argue for even more: this practically insured that government grew faster than the private economy. His radical idea was to state budget totals in dollar terms, so that an increase is an increase and a cut is a cut. Another specialty is tort reform. He wrote the securities litigation reform to prevent predatory suits against high-tech and other companies, which got two-thirds support in both houses and was the only bill passed over Bill Clinton's veto in his first term. His bill to limit appeals of death penalties became law in April 1995. With Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, he won enactment in 1998 of an important proposal for the emerging marketplace-- the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which placed a three-year moratorium on state and local governments from imposing special taxes on electronic commerce. It was renewed for two years in November 2001. In January 2003 Cox and Wyden sponsored a bill to make it permanent. Cox has sponsored another Internet-related bill, to create an Office of Global Internet Freedom in the Board of International Broadcasting, to monitor state censorship of the Internet, to deploy technology to defeat efforts to block access to sites and to keep track of companies which sell China and other dictatorships technology to block sites.

He also chaired the special committee investigating technology transfers from U.S. companies to China. Thanks to Cox and ranking Democrat Norman Dicks, this investigation was conducted on a bipartisan basis, without leaks, and produced a unanimous report documenting an extensive operation by China to acquire military technology, including nuclear weapons design, by groups with links to the Chinese military or state intelligence service. It faulted the policies of the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations; Cox won much bipartisan praise over his handling of the report.

Cox wrote a thesis at Harvard in 1977 on double taxation of corporate dividends, and beginning in 1992 he has sponsored bills to end double taxation. He welcomed George W. Bush's proposal to do just that in January 2003. He has called on Bush to index the capital gains tax, which he argues can be done administratively. In 2002 he and Barbara Boxer sponsored a bill to allow parents to deduct unpaid child support payments from their income and would force parents who don't pay child support to declare the unpaid child support as income.

After the September 11 attacks, some members and scholar Norman Ornstein speculated about what would have happened if United flight 93 had not been downed in Pennsylvania but had struck the Capitol: hundreds of congressmen and senators might have been killed or disabled. Vacancies in the Senate can be filled by gubernatorial appointments of successors, but under the Constitution vacancies in the House can be filled only by elections, which usually takes several months. Cox took the lead among Republicans on the issue. Cox co-chaired the bipartisan Continuity of Government Commission which started meeting in September. Speaker Dennis Hastert did not consider the issue a priority and wanted members to consider solutions which could be achieved by changing House rules and passing statutes before considering a constitutional amendment. In January 2003 Cox proposed three changes in House rules which were adopted with bipartisan support. The first would allow the speaker to designate successors in the event of a vacancy; that would allow the new speaker to convene the House. The second provided that the speaker could adjourn the House at any time of imminent danger; this overrode the rule that the speaker could not adjourn the House when a measure was being considered. The third allowed the House to adjust the number of its members after a catastrophic attack; the House cannot go into session without a majority of members, and so if many members were disabled, it could not act.

Cox has often been mentioned as a candidate for statewide office, but has never run. George Will suggested he would be a good choice for vice president. During the House Republican turmoil in late 1998, Cox twice showed interest in running for speaker but he backed off each time. In early 2001 Cox was on the verge of being nominated to be a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But Senator Barbara Boxer opposed him and in May 2001, after Jim Jeffords announced he was switching parties, he withdrew his name from consideration even as other Republicans were running active campaigns for what they assumed would soon be a vacant seat.

In January 2003 Cox sought the chairmanship of the Government Reform Committee. He was less senior than Christopher Shays, but Shays seemed unlikely to be picked because of his leadership on the campaign finance regulation bill passed over the leadership's opposition. The Republican Steering Committee passed over both of them and picked Tom Davis. Instead, Cox was named chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security. Cox emphasized that "This committee is intended to have all the authority of a standing committee and will exist indefinitely." Cox said he expected it to become a standing committee in 2005.

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DC Office
2402 RHOB 20515, 202-225-5611; Fax: 202-225-9177; Web site: www.house.gov/cox

State Offices
Newport Beach, 949-756-2244.

Committees

• Republican Policy Committee Chairman
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• Energy & Commerce (9th of 31 R): Energy & Air Quality; Telecommunications & the Internet.
• Select Committee on Homeland Security (Chmn. of 27 R).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	0	7	0	38	97	88	64	89	96	100	100
2001	5	--	0	0	--	--	74	91	96	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	0%	--	94%		34%	--	66%
Social	32%	--	67%		30%	--	68%
Foreign	27%	--	74%		34%	--	65%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Limit Patients' Bill of Rights Y 3. Campaign Finance Reform N 4. Ban ANWR Development N 5. Faith-Based Charities Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Arm Commercial Pilots Y  9. Trade Promotion Authority Y 10. Bar Funds for Intl. Court Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Deny Home. Sec. Dept. Union Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Christopher Cox (R)	122,884	68%	$736,225
	John Graham (D)	51,058	28%	$10,030
	Other	5,607	3%
2002 primary	Christopher Cox (R)	84,229	89%
	David Cobert (R)	6,367	7%
	Dave Forman (R)	3,654	4%
2000 general	Christopher Cox (R)	181,365	66%	$1,171,803
	John Graham (D)	83,186	30%	$17,922
	Other	11,850	4%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (68%); 1996 (66%); 1994 (72%); 1992 (65%); 1990 (68%); 1988 (67%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	156,340	58%
	Gore (D)	106,809	39%
	Other	7,421	3%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Forty-Eighth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R +10
• District Size: 301 square miles
• Population in 2000: 639,087; 99.9% urban; 0.1% rural
• Median Household Income: $69,663; 6.3% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 10.1% blue collar; 79.8% white collar; 10.1% gray collar; 10.3% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 68.0% White, 1.4% Black, 12.7% Asian, 0.2% Amer. Indian, 0.2% Hawaiian, 2.7% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 14.7% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 11.3% German, 9.3% English, 8.3% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.