Rep. Dennis Hastert (R) Elected 1986, 9th term
Born:	Jan. 2, 1942, Aurora
Home:	Yorkville
Education:	Wheaton Col., B.A. 1964, N. IL U., M.A. 1967
Religion:	Protestant
Marital Status:	married (Jean)
Elected  Office:	IL House of Reps., 1980-86.
Professional Career:	H.S. teacher & coach, 1965-80.
Additional Info
Recent Articles · Offices · Committees · Election Results District Demographics
More On Illinois
At A Glance · State Profile District Map Redistricting · Almanac Home

A few dozen miles beyond the Loop there is an invisible line marking two different Chicagos. One is the Chicago dominated by blacks and descendants of the vast immigrations of 1840-1924 and 1970-2000, a Chicago where certain loyalties are taken for granted: loyalty to ethnic group, to church (usually the Catholic Church, often with an ethnic prefix), and to party (almost always the Democrats). This Chicago is a gritty city, where personal cheerfulness and courtesy lighten up days otherwise as cold and impersonal as the gray winter sky. The other Chicago is the beginning of the Great Plains, originally a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Chicago, a place whose residents are products of the first great wave of immigration to America. The tone of this Chicago is lighter, its streets and highways cleaner and neater, its daily life generally free from evidence of unpleasantness and deprivation. Ronald Reagan grew up in Downstate Illinois within the orbit of this Chicago (though he did live in the city briefly), and its spirit helped to characterize his presidency. His migration to southern California, incidentally, is not atypical: You can see in the geometric grids and Republican voting patterns of Orange County or Phoenix almost exact replicas of the grids and patterns in Chicago's suburban Collar Counties, transported to the once-empty Southwest on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe or out the old U.S. 66 from their beginnings in Chicago's Loop.

The 14th Congressional District straddles this line between metropolitan Chicago and Downstate Illinois. It gets as close as 30 miles to Chicago's Loop, in western DuPage County, with two great Chicagoland landmarks--Cantigny, the estate of Colonel Robert McCormick, longtime publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and FermiLab, the world's fastest energy particle accelerator and employer of some 2,500 people--icons of political conservatism and high technology within two miles of each other. The 14th also contains the Fox River Valley and its industrial cities of Elgin and resurgent Aurora--which grew to the third-largest city in Illinois in 2000--plus antique St. Charles in the heart of the Collar Counties. Farther west, amid what may be the world's richest cornfields, the 14th passes through DeKalb, long the world's leading manufacturer of barbed wire, and goes on to Kendall and Lee Counties, including Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon. Since the 2001 redistricting, the 14th moves farther west, almost to the Mississippi River, to include farmlands in parts of Whiteside, Bureau and Henry Counties. This was traditionally some of the most heavily Republican territory in the country. Northern Illinois was settled when Chicago was just a frontier village by Yankees from Ohio, Indiana, Upstate New York and New England, and by Germans emigrating after the failed revolutions of 1848: people who formed the heart of the Republican Party from its founding in 1854 and who would form the core of the Grand Army of the Republic a few years later. Their descendants, in this extension of Chicagoland, remain mostly Republican today.

The congressman from the 14th District is Dennis Hastert, a Republican first elected in 1986, and today the 51st Speaker of the House of Representatives. He comes from the Fox River Valley, outside the Chicago metro orbit when he was growing up, but now part of its booming outer edge. His great-grandfather emigrated from Luxembourg to Aurora, on the Fox River, in the 19th century, to work on the railroads. His father, originally an embalmer, opened a feed supply business in Oswego, and Denny and his two younger brothers hoisted 100-pound bags and delivered milk in the early morning; his parents also had a restaurant where he worked as a fry cook. At high school in Oswego--then a rural town, now exploding with subdivisions--he wrestled and played football. He graduated from Wheaton College, a religious school in nearby DuPage County, and then he became a high school teacher at Yorkville High School, a few miles south of Oswego. There he taught history and coached wrestling for 16 years and met his wife, a physical education teacher. But his experience was not entirely local. In summers he traveled as a teacher for the YMCA or other groups to Japan, Colombia, Venezuela, Europe and the Soviet Union. And as a wrestling coach he excelled. His team won the state championship and he was named the national coach of the year in 1976, and he can still remember the names and records of all of his wrestlers. He tries to attend the NCAA wrestling tournament every year. He owns nine antique vehicles, including two fire engines and a pickup truck; he likes to carve duck decoys and fish for walleye in the Fox River.

After a trip to Washington in 1978, when Democrats had a 2-1 majority in the House, Hastert got involved in politics, interning with state Senator John Grotberg. In 1980 he finished third in an Illinois House primary; then the incumbent became fatally ill and Hastert was chosen to take his place on the November ballot. After the March 1986 primary, Grotberg, at that point a member of Congress, was fatally stricken with cancer and Hastert again was chosen by the party as a replacement. The election was unusually close, but Hastert won 52%-48%.

In his early years in the House, Hastert had a conservative voting record and made few waves. But he gained valuable experience. He got a seat on the Commerce Committee and on the subcommittees handling health, energy and telecommunications issues. He built a relationship with Minority Leader Robert Michel, from the 18th District of Illinois. He worked together with Tom DeLay of Texas for Illinois's Ed Madigan in the race for minority whip in March 1989; Madigan lost by just two votes to an upstart from Georgia named Newt Gingrich. In 1994 he was chief organizer for DeLay's campaign for whip, the one leadership post won by a non-Gingrichite after the big Republican gains that fall. Afterwards Hastert was named Chief Deputy Whip and shared an office and staff with DeLay. If he had not stopped in the hall to answer a reporter's question, he would have been in the line of fire when a crazed killer stormed into DeLay's office in July 1998.

To his work Hastert brought the habits of a coach, listening long to colleagues' goals and complaints, sizing up their character and capacity, then insisting firmly on a course of action when he reached a judgment. He operated with minimal ego and a bear-like friendliness, putting his arm around a colleague when asking advice or seeking intelligence; increasingly he was looked to by other leaders to help Republicans reach consensus and to negotiate difficult issues with Democrats, particularly health care. In 1997 he helped put together the Republicans' Medicare bill. Gingrich made him head of a task force that hammered out a patients' rights bill, which was passed by the House in August 1998. Hastert was active in negotiations on the 1996 telecommunications bill and on repealing the Social Security "earnings tax"--the deduction of benefits among senior citizens who earn over a certain figure--in the 1995 Contract With America. Over the years, Hastert has continued his trips abroad, including to Japan, and has been supportive of free trade; central Illinois, where the largest company is Caterpillar, produces more exports than just about anywhere else in the country.

Then suddenly one day in December 1998 he was chosen Speaker of the House. Speaker Newt Gingrich announced his retirement three days after the November election. Members scrambled for leadership positions, and Hastert was urged to run against Majority Leader Dick Armey. But Hastert had pledged to support him and, when he asked to be released from the pledge, Armey said no; so he kept his word and didn't run for a position he probably could have won. Then on December 19, just before the House voted on impeachment, Speaker-designate Bob Livingston announced his retirement too. Gingrich told Hastert, "You are the only one in this conference who could pull this body together. You are going to have to be the next speaker of the House." At 1 p.m. he announced; by the end of the day he had more than 100 votes, and the speakership.

Some called him "the accidental Speaker," but when he finishes this term Hastert will have served as Speaker longer than anyone since Tip O'Neill and his fitness for the job has long since ceased to be in question. In many ways he resembles O'Neill, who likely would never have been Speaker but for the death of Hale Boggs in a plane crash in 1972. Like O'Neill, Hastert is tall and heavy, is from a modest background, speaks in a rough and tumble manner but has a sophisticated understanding of politics and a more than sufficient command of policy; and like O'Neill he is a tough partisan and a man of his word. He is a backslapper who continually listens to other members--in the words of the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, "the rumpled, enormous Speaker who doesn't approach members so much as engulf them." As Mark Leibovich wrote in the Washington Post, "He does much of his communicating without words. He fidgets with his glasses, clears his throat and stretches his eyebrows into weird positions to evince surprise, frustration, boredom or wryness. When others are talking, he often purses and unpurses his lips slowly. If necessary, Hastert will wrap this thick arm around a shoulder and land a THWAPP to emphasize his point."

As Speaker, Hastert has been good at tactics. In his first four years, working with Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Hastert's leadership team brought to the floor 387 rules--the resolutions that set the terms and conditions of debate--and with never more than 223 Republicans, just five more than a 218-vote majority, lost on only two. But Hastert, though he has none of the grandiose vision of Newt Gingrich, has also been good at strategy. "It's my job that we keep the majority," he said in September 2002, and during the last two years of the Clinton administration and the first two years of the Bush administration, Hastert has steered House Republicans to compile a record that has enabled them to keep their majorities in the elections of 2000 and 2002. In 1999, when Republicans were in opposition, he got the House to pass an "EdFlex" bill, block grants for the states supported by all 50 governors, and a "lockbox" on Social Security, so that they could say they had not tapped the trust fund. When Republicans rebelled at the 1999 appropriations bills, he brought them together; he got them to pass a $792 billion tax cut that was vetoed by Bill Clinton; facing a large number of defections, he allowed the Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill to come to the floor and pass, confident that it would be killed by filibuster in the Senate. The House passed financial services deregulation and, after negotiations with White House Chief of Staff John Podesta (whom Hastert had known in college), an appropriations bill. He backed Clinton's Plan Colombia in June 2000 and agreed in August 2000 to allow a minimum wage increase in return for tax relief for small business; in October 2000 he canceled a vote on a resolution condemning Turkey's 1915-23 massacres of Armenians in response to pleas from the White House. His bitterest moment came in November 1999, when he and Armey passed over a Catholic priest recommended by a plurality of a special committee for the post of House chaplain; Democrats quickly accused the Republican leaders of anti-Catholic prejudice. The controversy ended when Hastert in March 2000 abruptly announced the appointment of another Catholic priest recommended by Chicago's Cardinal George. Hastert took special umbrage at Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, and relations between them were chilly to nonexistent until September 11, 2001.

All the while, Hastert kept his eye on the 2000 elections. He effectively lobbied some Republicans in marginal seats, like Upstate New York's Amo Houghton, to stay on rather than retire; he allowed members with Democratic-leaning districts to cast votes against the leadership that would be useful at home; he used the tool of the Republicans' six-year term-limit on chairmanships to get those competing for spots opening up to raise money for Republican candidates; he helped the Battleground 2000 program raise some $21 million; he went fly-fishing with contributors during the Republican convention at $5,000 a head. His quiet pursuit of a modest legislative strategy let Republican candidates emphasize their own local issues--a far cry from Gingrich's nationalized Contract With America campaign in 1994. As the election approached, Republican chances improved, and by late October Hastert sent an appropriation to the White House knowing that Clinton would veto it because it overrode the administration's proposed ergonomics regulations; he evidently thought that he could negotiate on better terms after the election if House Republicans and George W. Bush won. His Republicans did hold their majority, narrowly, on November 7 and when the House came back after settlement of the Florida controversy in December the negotiations mostly went Hastert's way.

With a Republican president, Hastert's role changed. Legislative priorities would be set mainly by the White House; the House's job was to pass administration-backed legislation so that the President could put pressure on the always shaky Senate. Hastert's relations with Bush were good (his nickname is "Speak") but not subservient: he was careful to protect his members and wary lest the White House water down legislation too much in negotiations with the Senate. In spring 2001 the House quickly passed the Bush tax cut and education bill. On campaign finance, passed by the Senate in March 2001, Bush refused to threaten a veto; in July 2001 Hastert lost a rule vote and then yanked the measure from the floor. When the measure's supporters got 218 signatures on a discharge petition, the bill passed the House in February 2002. But on other issues in July and August 2001--when Bush's job rating was hovering around 50% and there were only 222 House Republicans, four more than a majority--Hastert had a spectacular record otherwise. The House passed the Bush energy program, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and not including an increase in auto mileage standards. In 2000, Republican Charlie Norwood had gotten 68 Republicans to join him and almost all Democrats on his HMO regulation bill. In July 2001 Hastert developed and gathered votes for a Republican alternative and in the meantime the White House negotiated with Norwood, who agreed to George W. Bush's terms, much to the dismay of many of his allies. A Bush veto threat--and the existence of a plausible alternative that might pass--persuaded Norwood to compromise; the House passed an HMO regulation bill acceptable to Republicans and for which they could claim credit.

On September 11, the mood of the House changed. Hastert and Gephardt, together with Senate leaders Tom Daschle and Trent Lott were taken to a secure location far from the Capitol and emerged with much closer bonds. But Hastert also continued to forge a record that Republicans could run on in 2002. He got the House to pass a Republican bill providing prescription drugs for seniors; the Senate never passed a bill on the issue. Republicans went to the floor to give the president trade promotion authority with fewer than 218 commitments and, with little Democratic help, prevailed by 215-214 in December 2001 and then again by 215-212 in July 2002. When the corporate misdeeds of Enron, WorldCom and other companies filled the headlines, Hastert saw that the issue could be political poison for Republicans. The House passed a corporate accountability bill fashioned by Financial Services Chairman Michael Oxley in April 2002, but it was attacked in the press and by Democrats as too lenient. In July, Hastert pressed Oxley and other Republicans to pass the bill sponsored by Senator Paul Sarbanes and passed 97-0 by the Senate, to put in place legislation and take off the calendar a political issue; Oxley and others resisted, but Hastert prevailed, and House Republicans could go home in the August recess and say they had acted against corporate misconduct. Hastert's power increased when he got the Republican Conference to require Appropriations subcommittee chairmen to be approved by the party's Steering Committee--additional leverage for the leadership interested in holding spending within limits in its continuing institutional battle against appropriators interested in controlling the level of spending themselves.

Amid all this work on legislation and national politics, Hastert has become a power in Illinois politics--a far more important factor in his state's politics than any speaker in living memory. He has worked closely with Mayor Richard M. Daley on any number of projects and Daley obviously appreciates having a Chicago area Speaker of the House. In May 2001, Hastert and 3d District Democrat William Lipinski reached agreement on a congressional redistricting plan which strengthened almost all of the state's incumbents; the loser--and there had to be one, because the state lost one of its 20 seats in the 2000 Census--was Downstate Democrat David Phelps, a low seniority member in a position to do little for Chicago. Hastert has strongly supported the plan Daley in December 2001 negotiated with Governor George Ryan to expand O'Hare Airport, and in July 2002 brought to the House floor a bill which would have frozen it into federal law, so that it couldn't be rejected by a future governor; on the first vote Hastert failed to get the necessary two-thirds, thanks to opposition from Henry Hyde and Jesse Jackson Jr., but Hastert brought it to the floor three days later and lobbied for it furiously and successfully. He was disappointed that Senator Richard Durbin was never able to do the same in the Senate. In November 2002 Hastert lobbied the Bush administration to approve a loan application from United Airlines, which has 19,000 employees in the Chicago area; when that was turned down by the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, with the crucial vote cast by Treasury official Peter Fisher, he indicated his displeasure with Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was told to resign in December. After Illinois Republicans' debacle in the 2002 elections, he in effect chose a new state party chairman, Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, and had much to say in the choice of the new Illinois House Minority Leader, his Kendall County neighbor Tom Cross.

Hastert has told friends that he yearns to retire from the hectic pace of the speakership; he has sold his house on the Fox River and lives on a farm nearby in Kendall County. But there is no demand from House Republicans that he move on. On the contrary, at the motion of the new Majority Whip, Roy Blunt, House Republicans voted in January 2003 to repeal their eight-year term-limit on the party's leader. The accidental Speaker, it seems, has become the indispensable Speaker. But Hastert may choose to retire in 2004 or 2006, at the height of his powers, as Tip O'Neill did in 1986.

Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, House Race Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form below:

DC Office
235 CHOB 20515, 202-225-2976; Fax: 202-225-0697; Web site: www.house.gov/hastert

State Offices
Batavia, 630-406-1114; Dixon, 815-288-0680.

Committees

• Speaker of the House
.

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	*	--	*		*	--	*
Social	*	--	*		*	--	*
Foreign	*	--	*		*	--	*
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Dennis Hastert (R)	135,198	74%	$2,970,554
	Laurence Quick (D)	47,165	26%	$18,136
2002 primary	Dennis Hastert (R)	unopposed
2000 general	Dennis Hastert (R)	188,597	74%	$2,299,072
	Vern Deljonson (D)	66,309	26%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (70%); 1996 (64%); 1994 (76%); 1992 (67%); 1990 (67%); 1988 (74%); 1986 (52%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	129,745	54%
	Gore (D)	101,369	42%
	Other	7,428	3%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Fourteenth 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 + 6
• District Size: 2,866 square miles
• Population in 2000: 653,647; 86.2% urban; 13.8% rural
• Median Household Income: $56,314; 7.0% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 26.8% blue collar; 59.9% white collar; 13.3% gray collar; 10.3% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 74.0% White, 4.6% Black, 1.8% Asian, 0.1% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 1.0% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 18.5% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 18.9% German, 9.9% Irish, 6.0% English
• Click here for statewide demographic data.