Rep. Richard Baker (R) Elected 1986, 9th term
Born:	May 22, 1948, New Orleans
Home:	Baton Rouge
Education:	LA St. U., B.A. 1971
Religion:	United Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Kay)
Elected  Office:	LA House of Reps., 1972-86.
Professional Career:	Real estate developer, 1972-86.
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Baton Rouge is the central node of Louisiana, on the boundary between the French-speaking, Catholic Cajun country and the heavily Baptist Deep South, its skyscraper Capitol and Exxon refinery sitting just beyond the levees that line the Mississippi River. Baton Rouge still bears the impress of the man who dominated Louisiana politics for much of the 20th century, Huey P. Long. Here Long became governor at 36 in the old (and still-standing) Gothic Capitol, when Baton Rouge had only 30,000 people, and was assassinated in 1935 in the hallway of the 34-story Art Deco Capitol he built, next door to the Governor's Mansion, which he also built. To the south are the buildings of Louisiana State University, much of which he built, in an amazingly short time. Today Baton Rouge is the center of a metro area of 603,000, almost all on the east bank of the Mississippi, and reaching far inland to Livingston Parish. Baton Rouge tries to maintain all of Louisiana's traditions; according to James Carville, who comes from nearby Carville in Iberville Parish (where three generations of his family served as postmaster), it has ''the best restaurants per capita of any city in the United States.''

The 6th Congressional District includes just about all of metropolitan Baton Rouge, plus three small mostly rural parishes to the north. The city of Baton Rouge itself in 2000 had a 50% black majority; suburban East Baton Rouge Parish was 40% black and fast-growing Livingston Parish to the east 4% black. Overall the district is 33% black. Historically, all of this territory was Democratic. In the 1980s the Baton Rouge area moved toward the Republicans and in the 1990s it was fairly closely balanced. In 2000 East Baton Rouge Parish voted 53% for George W. Bush and Livingston Parish 68% for Bush; overall the 6th District was 55% for Bush.

The congressman from the 6th District is Richard Baker, a Republican first elected in 1986. Baker has spent most of his adult life in public office. He came to Baton Rouge to attend LSU, then in 1972, at 23, was elected as a Democrat to the Louisiana House from a blue-collar district in Baton Rouge. He became a Republican in 1985, and in 1986, when Baton Rouge Republican Congressman Henson Moore ran for the Senate, Baker ran for the House and beat a Democratic state senator 51%-46%. In 1992 he was redistricted in the same district with Republican Congressman Clyde Holloway and was opposed as well by the Democratic mayor of Alexandria. The new district lines put Baker at a disadvantage, and he trailed 37%-33% in the September primary. But he won the November runoff 51%-49%, with 71% in his home territory of East Baton Rouge and Livingston parishes.

Baker has had a conservative voting record and is chairman of the Capital Markets and Insurance Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee. He worked on financial services deregulation, one of the most heavily lobbied issues in the 1990s; the issue was how, under what terms and conditions, to dismantle the wall separating banks and other institutions created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Baker generally favored deregulation, and served on the conference committee that finally reached agreement in November 1999.

Baker's greatest legislative enterprise has been to change the operation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which purchase and securitize home mortgages. These are for-profit enterprises, indeed hugely profitmaking in recent years, yet the fact that they each have $2.25 billion lines of credit with the U.S. Treasury creates an impression in the marketplace that the government will bail them out if they become insolvent. Baker admitted that they were well-managed and not at risk, and argued that that was the best time for reform. In February 2000 Baker introduced legislation to create a new regulatory agency for the GSEs and terminate their line of credit, increase disclosure requirements, toughen capital mandates and give regulators more say in approving new activities. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac vigorously opposed the bill and predicted it would never pass. In a March hearing a Treasury undersecretary testified in favor of much of the bill, including repeal of the lines of credit. Sometimes tumultuous negotiations followed. In October they reached agreement. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to increase their equity capital and subordinated debt to 4% of assets and to disclose more information to investors. By February 2001 Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines was praising Baker, but they still disagreed: Baker still wanted an independent regulator, while Raines was opposed. In summer 2001 Baker introduced a bipartisan bill to require Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to register their stock with the SEC; they agreed to do so voluntarily, but do not issue SEC prospectuses for the securitized instruments they sell to investors--who are, they say, sophisticated enough to evaluate them. In 2002 the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight issued long-delayed regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and subjected them to "stress tests," to discover how their portfolios would fare in times of economic stress.

In 2000 Banking Chairman Jim Leach reached the end of House Republicans' six-year term limits, and Baker sought the chairmanship over the more senior Marge Roukema. But in the days after the November 2000 election, Baker presented a fallback position to the Republican leadership. An even bigger chairmanship struggle was going on in the Commerce Committee, between Louisiana's Billy Tauzin and Mike Oxley. Baker would support Oxley for the Banking Committee chairmanship, with Commerce's jurisdiction over securities and insurance transferred to Banking. Baker would keep his Financial Services subcommittee chair plus the securities jurisdiction; Roukema would get another subcommittee. And so it happened: Baker was in a position to continue his work on the GSEs, Oxley got a chairmanship and Roukema decided to retire in 2002. On two major bills in the next two years Baker and Oxley worked together. One was terrorism insurance, proposed after the September 11 attacks. Unlike the White House and the Senate bills, Baker and Oxley's bill would require insurers to pay a large deductible before the federal government would pay anything, and the federal government would make loans rather than direct payments to insurers. After much negotiation, agreement was reached in November 2002. The deductible would be a percentage of direct premiums for covered commercial property casualty risk, rising from 7% in 2003 to 15% in 2005, and federal coverage of losses would be capped at $100 billion.

The other big issue was auditor independence. Oxley and Baker avoided flamboyant hearings; they cancelled a hearing after former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay said he would take the Fifth Amendment. In February 2002 they rolled out a bill which would create an accounting oversight board inside the SEC, require far more disclosure and would bar external auditing firms from doing certain financial systems consulting and internal auditing. Ranking Democrat John LaFalce criticized the bill for not completely separating accounting and consulting and for not placing the oversight board outside the SEC; he also called for CEOs to sign certified financial reports subject to criminal penalties. The committee approved the Oxley-Baker approach in April 2002 and the bill passed the House later that month. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Banking Committee Chairman Paul Sarbanes was preparing a bill with bipartisan support which went farther than Oxley and Baker but not as far as LaFalce. That bill was languishing when disclosure of the WorldCom accounting scandal in June propelled it forward. It passed the Senate by a wide margin and in conference, at the prodding of the Bush White House, Oxley and Baker yielded on most points of disagreement; the bill was passed and signed before the August recess. In the process, Baker proposed a Federal Account for Investor Restitution (FAIR) Fund, with money raised from monetary penalties levied against corporations and funds disgorged from executives guilty of fraud or malfeasance to be paid over to defrauded investors; this was included in what became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. In November 2002 Baker urged that it be expanded to include money recovered by states; he was critical of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for usurping federal authority in negotiating a $3 billion global settlement with brokerage houses, but was pleased when Spitzer supported a restitution fund.

On other legislation, Baker in December 2002 called for giving life insurers, but not property and casualty and auto insurers, the option of federal chartering: an issue to be much lobbied in 2003 and 2004.

With one major exception, Baker has not had difficulty winning reelection since 1992. That exception was in 1998, when he was challenged then by Democrat Marjorie McKeithen, the granddaughter of former Governor (1964-72) John McKeithen and daughter of Secretary of State Fox McKeithen. Strongly opposed to gun control and abortion, McKeithen knocked on 40,000 doors and charmed voters with her north Louisiana accent. She criticized Baker for voting to raise his own pay $30,000 while voting against increases in the minimum wage. Baker attacked her for being a trial lawyer and for not voting consistently in local elections. Baker raised $1.4 million, McKeithen almost half that. In the end, Baker squeaked by, winning 50.7%-49.3%. McKeithen decided not to run again in 2000, and Baker was reelected easily in that year and in 2002.

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DC Office
341 CHOB 20515, 202-225-3901; Fax: 202-225-7313; Web site: www.house.gov/baker

State Offices
Baton Rouge, 225-929-7711.

Committees

• Financial Services (4th of 37 R): Capital Markets, Insurance & Government Sponsored Enterprises (Chmn.); Financial Institutions & Consumer Credit; Housing & Community Opportunity.
• Transportation & Infrastructure (14th of 41 R): Aviation; Highways, Transit & Pipelines; Water Resources & Environment.
• Veterans' Affairs (8th of 17 R): Health.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	0	7	11	0	25	100	55	95	100	85	100
2001	0	--	0	0	--	--	64	100	96	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	7%	--	89%		19%	--	80%
Social	20%	--	69%		0%	--	75%
Foreign	4%	--	87%		0%	--	85%
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	Richard Baker (R)	146,932	84%	$790,953
	Rick Moscatello (I)	27,898	16%
2000 primary	Richard Baker (R)	165,637	68%	$916,205
	Kathy J. Rogillio (D)	72,192	30%
	Other	5,649	2%
1998 primary	Richard Baker (R)	97,044	51%	$1,444,171
	Marjorie McKeithen (D)	94,201	49%	$664,611
Prior winning percentages: 1996 (69%); 1994 (81%); 1992 (51%); 1990 (100%); 1988 (100%); 1986 (100%)

2000 presidential
	Bush (R)	142,239	55%
	Gore (D)	111,602	43%
	Other	5,716	2%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Sixth 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: 3,210 square miles
• Population in 2000: 638,324; 75.5% urban; 24.5% rural
• Median Household Income: $37,931; 16.6% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 23.6% blue collar; 61.5% white collar; 15.0% gray collar; 11.2% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 62.7% White, 33.2% Black, 1.4% Asian, 0.2% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 0.7% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 1.6% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 10.3% French, 7.4% USA, 6.3% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.