Rep. Billy Tauzin (R) Elected May 1980, 12th term
Born:	June 14, 1943, Chackbay
Home:	Chackbay
Education:	Nicholls St. U., B.A. 1964, LA St. U., J.D. 1967
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Cecile)
Elected  Office:	LA House of Reps., 1971-79.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1968-80.
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Below sea level, veined with bayous and creeks and wide streams of water, crossed by only an occasional road or railroad, the wetlands of southern Louisiana are one of America's unique landscapes. Technically, most of this waterlogged land rests on islands in a broad river mouth, through which the waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into the Gulf of Mexico. It is rich with animal life, herons and egrets, shrimp and crawfish, muskrats and alligators. Yet it supports more people than one might think, in surprisingly sturdy small towns, with shopping malls on high ground, and in cabins along the bayous and crossroad towns where Cajun French remains the first language and roadside diners feature crawfish etoufee. But the steep-roofed Cajun houses are not the only structures: Here and there, jutting out of the swampy land, are huge elaborate metal sculptures--refineries and petrochemical plants, processing the oil and natural gas trapped under these wetlands and the shallow continental shelf of the Gulf, and released through 20th century oil rig technology. In the 1960s and 1970s, the oil industry, by providing good jobs for young people here, helped preserve Cajun culture and built a Cajun pride that was seldom articulated a generation ago. Then oil payrolls plummeted and the wetlands were threatened by coastal erosion and battered by Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. The erosion continues, as the wetlands get less water because the Mississippi is not permitted to flood, and the shrimp fishermen, who still sail out in Blessing of the Fleet (La Benediction des Bateaux) ceremonies in April or May, have found their catch declining and their profits threatened by competition from aquaculture-raised Asian and Latin American shrimp. But the petrochemical plants, refineries, aluminum smelters and sugar refineries still provide well-paying jobs in these parts, and most Cajuns have been able to remain in this land of good hunting and good food. The town of Vacherie on the Mississippi River is the most rooted place in the United States: 98% of people here were born in Louisiana and 80% in 2000 lived in the same house as in 1995.

The 3d Congressional District includes about half the Cajun country. It includes most of Louisiana's swamplands, covering Houma, where seven bayous converge; St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, downriver from New Orleans; St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. James and Ascension Parishes on both sides of the Mississippi, once the greatest sugar producers in America, now studded with refineries and petrochemical plants; roughneck Morgan City, which services many offshore oil rigs; and Iberia Parish, the home of McIlhenny's Tabasco sauce. Behind the Mississippi's western levee, hunkered side by side in Vacherie are twin reminders of the region's grandeur and pain: the stately Oak Alley plantation, whose stunning vista stood in for the home of a fictional, aristocratic governor in the 1998 movie Primary Colors; and the Laura Plantation, believed to be the original home of the famous Br'er Rabbit stories, and whose current owners are preserving and displaying the plantation's slave cabins to remind visitors of the facts many would prefer to forget. The ancestral language here is French (23% claim French or French Canadian ancestry), mainly Cajun but also Creole; the ancestral religion is Roman Catholic and the ancestral politics Democratic, though very conservative.

The congressman from the 3d District is Billy Tauzin, first elected as a Democrat and now a Republican, who is now chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Tauzin grew up in Chackbay, worked on an oil rig to put himself through Nicholls State University and LSU law school, where he was a roommate of Senator John Breaux. He was first elected to the legislature in 1971, at 28; he won the 3d District seat in a May 1980 special election. Tauzin ran for governor in 1987, but was doomed when Edwin Edwards entered the race, squeezing him out in Cajun country; he finished fourth, with 10%. In 1989, Tauzin inherited a Merchant Marine subcommittee chairmanship just in time to handle legislation inspired by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Tauzin is knowledgeable, eloquent and can also be wily. Defeated in the committee and on the House floor, he and Senator Bennett Johnston inserted in conference committee on the Alaska Oil Export Act of 1995 a provision for royalty relief for deep-water oil drilling; that, plus advances in technology, led to a resurgence in offshore drilling in 1996.

Tauzin's party switch was not a complete surprise. He was one of two Democrats who supported all provisions of the Contract with America and in February 1995 he and 22 other Democrats formed The Coalition, a conservative group. In August 1995 he finally became a Republican. He was expected to run for Johnston's Senate seat in 1996, but he bowed out after being promised by the Republican leadership the chairmanship of the Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee. Mike Oxley, the next Republican in line, objected, and, as a compromise, Telecommunications lost its Finance jurisdiction to Oxley's subcommittee. Tauzin wants to eliminate the long distance tax and wants cable companies to give consumers a wider range of options (including low-cost service with few channels) and has passed an anti-slamming bill through the House. Tauzin opposes auctioning the digital TV spectrum, regulating liquor advertising and any campaign finance bill giving free or discounted air time to candidates (in his view, unconstitutional, unfair and ineffective).

Tauzin supported the Telecommunications Act of 1996 but afterwards criticized the Clinton FCC for blocking the regional Bells from the long-distance business; George W. Bush's FCC chairman, Michael Powell, shares his view. In 1999 and 2000 Tauzin cannily built a coalition to allow the regional Bells to provide broadband Internet connections. He accumulated a "digital divide" coalition of members from rural districts and from poor urban areas, members of the Black and Hispanic caucuses and conservatives wary of federal broadband subsidies. He met with regional Bell lobbyists in weekly sessions and got the endorsement of committee ranking Democrat John Dingell. In June 2000 he announced he had 218 co-sponsors, a majority of the House, but declined to bring the bill forward because of the opposition of Commerce Chairman Thomas Bliley. In January 2001 Tauzin replaced Bliley as chairman; in May Dingell persuaded Tauzin to accept an amendment to force the Bells to build facilities to provide broadband service in rural, inner city and other unprofitable areas. The committee approved the bill 32-23 in May 2001. Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner insisted on hearings in Judiciary, which passed an amendment requiring antitrust oversight by the Justice Department and reporting the bill to the floor unfavorably. It reached the floor of the House in February 2002, where John Conyers and Chris Cannon pushed an amendment barring the Bells from offering broadband until their share of local telephone service fell below 85%. This was defeated on a procedural motion to move the previous question on a motion to recommit, a procedural maneuver last used successfully in 1910, and Dingell-Tauzin passed 273-157. But Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest Hollings was hostile (he called it "blasphemy, a total fraud") and it went nowhere in the Senate. Probably this issue will be revisited in this Congress.

As subcommittee and committee chairman, Tauzin has held memorable hearings. In September 2000 he dominated the hearings on Firestone tires that had blown out on Ford Explorers, and proposed legislation which passed the House under suspension of the rules in October 2000 and was accepted in full by the Senate, without the criminal penalties Senate Commerce Chairman John McCain wanted. In February 2001 he held hearings on network news coverage of the 2000 elections, in which he found no evidence that networks tried to influence the outcome, but concluded that VNS's flawed models produced "a bias that consistently tended to favor Democrats." In July 2002 Tauzin was asking the SEC whether it had investigated Tyco, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Qwest and Xerox from 1998 on and was asking 13 corporations to reveal how and whether their directors oversaw management starting in the early 1990s. "Some of these corporate criminals need to go to jail," he said at the time.

Tauzin's accession to the chairmanship of Energy and Commerce was not automatic. It was contested by Mike Oxley, who had more seniority as a Republican; Tauzin had more seniority if you (as Newt Gingrich agreed to do) count his years as a Democrat. But House Republicans do not necessarily follow seniority, and each raised about $500,000 for Republican colleagues. The contest was settled by an intricate deal, much as the Telecommunications Subcommittee chairmanship had been settled four years before. Tauzin became chairman of what he renamed the Energy and Commerce Committee. Oxley became chairman of the newly-named Financial Services Committee, essentially the old Banking Committee with Oxley's subcommittee jurisdiction added; the loser in this was Marge Roukema, the ranking Republican on Banking, who retired in 2002. As chairman, Bliley had taken tight control of subcommittees but had not aggressively asserted the committee's jurisdiction. Tauzin followed the opposite strategy, as Dingell had during his years as chairman from 1981 to 1995; he fought immediately to keep some jurisdiction over the SEC and to have the budget resolution framed so the committee would have some jurisdiction over Medicare. In September 1995 Tauzin was named deputy majority whip; he is the first American to have been part of the leadership of both parties in the House.

As chairman, Tauzin took a lead role on many pieces of legislation. In July 2001 he and Dingell agreed on an energy bill amendment directing the Department of Transportation to raise CAFE standards or use other means to reduce SUV energy consumption by 5 billion gallons of gas by 2010. After September 11 he worked with Dingell and with Senators Edward Kennedy and Bill Frist on a bioterrorism bill. They reached a compromise in May 2002, with $1.5 billion for states and $3 billion for hospitals to prepare for a biological attack, increased food inspection and a speedup in approval of generic drugs, assessments of vulnerability to attack by local water systems and $300 million for the Centers for Disease Control. He and Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas co-sponsored the Republicans' prescription drug bill, which passed 221-207 in July 2002. That month Tauzin and Dingell asked the FCC to require computer and consumer electronics manufacturers to include anti-piracy technology in their products. In January 2003 Tauzin reversed himself and supported FTC Chairman Tim Muris's requests for funds for a national do-not-call list for telemarketers, though Tauzin said he had doubts about the FTC's authority.

Tauzin has had no difficulty getting reelected; indeed he had no Democratic opposition since 1992. In September 1996 he became the only party-switcher to be reelected without opposition. He was unopposed in 1998. In 2000 and 2002, against minor party candidates, he was reelected with 78% and 87% of the vote.

Update: February 4, 2004
On February 3, 2004, Tauzin informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert that he would resign his committee chairmanship on February 16 and that he would not seek reelection to a 13th term in 2004.

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DC Office
2183 RHOB 20515, 202-225-4031; Fax: 202-225-0563; Web site: www.house.gov/tauzin

State Offices
Chalmette, 504-271-1707; Gonzales, 225-621-8490; Houma, 985-876-3033; New Iberia, 337-367-8231.

Committees

• Energy & Commerce (Chmn. of 31 R).
• Resources (3d of 28 R): Energy & Mineral Resources; Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife & Oceans.
• Select Committee on Homeland Security (6th of 27 R): Emergency Preparedness & Response.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	0	7	0	0	25	100	58	95	96	92	100
2001	0	--	0	0	--	--	61	100	96	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	15%	--	82%		0%	--	91%
Social	20%	--	69%		0%	--	75%
Foreign	21%	--	74%		15%	--	78%
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 primary	Billy Tauzin (R)	130,323	87%	$1,566,897
	William Beier (I)	12,964	9%
	David Iwancio (I)	7,055	5%
2000 primary	Billy Tauzin (R)	143,446	78%	$1,194,679
	Edwin J. Albares (I)	16,908	9%
	Anita W. Rosenthal (I)	13,488	7%
	Dion Bourque (Lib)	10,118	6%
Prior winning percentages: 1994 (76%); 1992 (82%); 1990 (88%); 1988 (89%); 1986 (100%); 1984 (100%); 1982 (100%); 1980 (85%); 1980 (53%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	133,749	52%
	Gore (D)	115,734	45%
	Other	7,967	3%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Third 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 + 4
• District Size: 12,675 square miles
• Population in 2000: 638,322; 73.0% urban; 27.0% rural
• Median Household Income: $34,463; 18.6% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 33.6% blue collar; 50.3% white collar; 16.2% gray collar; 10.8% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 69.7% White, 24.6% Black, 1.0% Asian, 1.6% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 1.0% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 2.1% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 17.4% French, 8.7% USA, 5.9% German
• Click here for statewide demographic data.