Rep. Bill Thomas (R) Elected 1978, 14th term
Born:	Dec. 6, 1941, Wallace, ID
Home:	Bakersfield
Education:	San Francisco St. U., B.A. 1963, M.A. 1965
Religion:	Baptist
Marital Status:	married (Sharon)
Elected  Office:	CA Assembly, 1974-78.
Professional Career:	Prof., Bakersfield Commun. Col., 1965-74.
DC Office	2208 RHOB20515, 202-225-2915; Fax: 202-225-8798; Web site: billthomas.house.gov
State Offices	Bakersfield, 661-327-3611; San Luis Obispo, 805-549-0390.
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Bakersfield, at the apex of the southern end of California's Central Valley, has been the focus of great migrations four times--in a gold rush in 1885, when oil was discovered here in 1899, during the 1930s when the Okies drove their jalopies from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas across the Southwest on U.S. 66, and again in the 1980s and 1990s, when Bakersfield and Kern County grew more rapidly than California's biggest metro areas. Bakersfield's oil rigs pump more oil than is produced annually in Oklahoma, but the migration that made the deepest imprint was in the 1930s. The Okies drove over one thousand miles of brown landscape, then through the Tehachapi Pass, and found this vast green valley, with its irrigated fields and its eucalyptus-shaded towns, the richest farming country in the world. The story is told vividly in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, though his vision of the Okies as workers eager to join together with their fellow proletarians and rise up against their bosses did not get the picture quite right. More accurate is Dan Morgan's Rising in the West, which shows the strong Pentecostal beliefs that drove many migrants and, unlike Steinbeck, explains how they prospered in California.

The area around Bakersfield has become the one Southern-accented part of California, the home of country singers Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and a thriving contemporary country music scene, culturally conservative with a strong drive toward discipline and little empathy for the therapy that is so common in Los Angeles, 110 miles south. But Bakersfield's uniqueness may be diluted as southern California spreads north: developers are planning a town of 70,000 on valley land where I-5 plunges downhill from the Tejon Pass.

The 22d Congressional District of California, the southernmost district in the Central Valley, includes most of Bakersfield and Kern County, most of the land area of San Luis Obispo County, over the mountains to the west, and a slice of northern Los Angeles County including half the desert town of Lancaster. At the eastern end in the desert is Edwards Air Force Base where Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 and where the Space Shuttle has frequently landed; not far away is Mojave, the end of the Twenty Mule Team Trail where borate from Death Valley was loaded onto trains. The district's boundaries are designed to maximize the Hispanic percentage of the next-door 20th District, but the population of the 22d is still 21% Hispanic. The 22d includes most of Bakersfield and its surroundings, oil fields and high-income subdivisions, and Kern County desert and mountain communities. The rich farmland produces most of the olives grown in the United States and is the nation's largest dairy-producing region. Politically, Kern County was Democratic territory in the early 1960s--when, for that matter, so was Oklahoma. By the late 1960s, both had become solidly Republican in national politics, and today both seem Republican up and down the ticket. The inland portion of San Luis Obispo County has always been Republican. George W. Bush won 64% of the vote here in 2000 and 68% in 2004, in both cases his best showing in any California district.

The congressman from the 22d District is Bill Thomas, a Republican first elected in 1978 and now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Thomas grew up in Idaho and in Orange County; his father was a union plumber and his parents never graduated from high school; he lived for a time in public housing. He graduated from San Francisco State and taught political science from 1965 to 1974 in the community college in Bakersfield. In 1974 he was elected to the Assembly, a conservative in a liberal-run legislature; when Congressman Bill Ketchum died after the 1978 primary, Thomas ran as the relative moderate at the party convention and won the seat. In his first year in Washington he roomed with another young professor just elected to the House, Newt Gingrich. He is bright and testy; he has, wrote Faye Fiore in the Los Angeles Times, ''an intellect so sharp he is considered one of the brightest members of the House and a temper so mercurial some say he may be one of the meanest.'' In Washingtonian's 2004 poll of congressional staffers, Thomas was number one in the "meanest," "brainiest," "hottest temper" and "workhorse" categories. Thomas says, "Other people have other skills, interpersonal maybe, or [they're] backslappers, or whatever they do. My stock in trade has always been knowledge." Some of that may have come from being beaten again and again by Democrats on elections issues. On the House Administration Committee he was the Republicans' point man on the challenge to Indiana's 8th District result in 1985, in which the Democrats voted in their man though the state authorities said the Republican had won--"rape," said Thomas, who added that if Republicans ever got a majority, "We will not be civilized. We will not assume it's business as usual. We will not go back to playing the lackey." He was also attacked by conservatives for being too moderate, and in December 1992 Gingrich and others ran Paul Gillmor of Ohio against him for ranking-member on House Administration; Thomas won by only 12 votes. "That particular event changed his life. It taught him, in a very serious way, that leadership in the House is a team sport," said Gingrich later.

Now things are different. After Republicans won the majority in 1994, Thomas received two tough assignments from Gingrich. As chairman of House Administration, Thomas managed the Republicans' bills reducing the House budget by $50 million, reducing committee staffs by one-third, providing an independent audit of the House and applying to Congress the laws it applies to others. He opposed Democratic campaign finance measures and proposed his own.

On Ways and Means, and as chairman of its Health Subcommittee, Thomas has been the majority Republicans' lead man on Medicare. He studied the issue intensively, rising at 4:00 a.m. to crack the books, and reflected on the situation of his parents (his mother was killed and his father gravely injured in a Kern County car crash). Thomas played a lead role in the Medicare changes and spending cuts--including steps to give senior citizens additional private insurance options--that were enacted as part of the Clinton-Republican Congress budget agreement of May 1997. In June 2000 and again in 2002 he pushed to passage bills to provide a stand-alone prescription drug benefit for seniors; this allowed Republican House members to say they had passed a bill while the Senate Democrats hadn't. He returned to the issue in 2003.

Throughout 2000 Thomas was running, quietly, for Ways and Means chairman. Chairman Bill Archer, limited to six years by Republicans' term limits, was retiring from Congress. The next committee Republican in seniority was Phil Crane, who had not been nearly as productive legislatively; in March 2000 Crane admitted he had a problem with alcohol, and spent some weeks in treatment. Thomas's problem was his temper. He takes pride in his knowledge, and has shown contempt for those with less. Even his hobbies are unsociable: he likes to disassemble and reassemble old cars and take apart computers. Thomas recognized the problem and assured Republican leaders that he would contain his temper. Crane had backing from some economic and religious conservatives, but Thomas got the backing of Speaker Dennis Hastert, even though both he and Crane are from Illinois. Thomas was the choice of the Republican Steering Committee, a choice ratified by the Republican Conference.

As chairman, Thomas moved first on taxes. Immediately after the September 11 attacks, Thomas began talking about a cut in capital gains tax to stimulate the economy. In October he put together a $100 billion stimulus package that passed the House in October 216-214. In November and December Thomas denounced Tom Daschle and Trent Lott when they insisted that Thomas's negotiating guidelines would violate Senate rules; the package did not pass the Senate until March 2002. In June 2002, after the World Trade Organization declared the Extraterritorial Income Exclusion an illegal export subsidy, Thomas started working on a bill to replace it with a tax credit for multinational corporations and other changes in the tax code, including higher taxes on U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations.

While Thomas was working on the 2001 economic stimulus package, he was also working to renew trade promotion authority, which had lapsed in 1994. He was criticized for not negotiating with Democrats Charles Rangel and Sander Levin, the ranking members on the committee and its Trade Subcommittee, who wanted to require labor and environmental provisions in trade agreements. Instead he negotiated with junior committee Democrats Bill Jefferson and John Tanner. The bill was passed by a 26-13 vote in committee in October. During the next two months, he struggled to get the Democratic votes necessary for passage even while trying to hold Republicans together on the stimulus package; he got some Democratic votes by supporting more Trade Adjustment Assistance health care spending. Trade promotion authority passed the House December 6 by a 215-214 as Speaker Dennis Hastert kept the roll call on past the usual time limit so that Thomas and Tom DeLay could round up a majority. In all, 23 Republicans voted against, 21 Democrats for: a very small number from a party that from the 1830s through the 1970s had free trade as one of its major causes. In May 2002 the Senate passed a trade package including trade promotion authority, approval of an Andean trade agreement and Trade Adjustment Assistance; the House had passed separate bills on each; the Senate bill also included the Dayton-Craig amendment barring any trade agreements that repealed trade retaliation laws. Thomas again scuffled with the Senate over the rules for the conference committee and pressed for a rule for consideration in the House which many opposed as overly constricting. The leadership pulled the rule from the floor June 20 for lack of votes; it was approved June 26 by 215-214. The conference committee was settled in a late night meeting between Thomas and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus; the Senate got $12 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance and health care provisions opposed by Thomas, the House got rid of Dayton-Craig. The conference report passed the House 215-212 on July 26 and the Senate 64-34 on August 1.

Through all this furious activity Thomas depended largely on Republican support and had little contact with Ways and Means ranking Democrat Charles Rangel or with other ranking Democrats on the committee. The level of mistrust built up was reflected in an incident on July 18, 2003. The committee was considering a bipartisan pension bill put together by Rob Portman and Ben Cardin. Thomas asked for a quick vote, before Democrats had time to read the measure; Democrats objected and called for a full reading of the bill. All Democrats but Pete Stark walked out and sat in an anteroom as Thomas made sarcastic comments. Thomas called on Capitol Police to remove Democrats from the anteroom; they refused. In the committee room Stark said he doubted the full measure was being read. Committee Republican Scott McInnis told Stark to "shut up." "Oh, you think you are big enough to make me," Stark said. "You little wimp. I said come over here and make me. I dare you. You are a little fruitcake." Thomas ordered the reading suspended; Stark objected. Thomas said his objection was too late; Stark called him a "fascist." In the full House Democrats objected loudly. "Pretty petty, I think, on both sides," said Speaker Dennis Hastert. Thomas at first refused to apologize. Then on July 24 he went on the floor and tearfully admitted to "poor judgment," being "just plain stupid." "As my mother would have put it, when they were passing out moderation, you were hiding behind the door. … As members, you deserve better judgment from me, and you'll get it."

Some thought this embarrassing incident would impair Thomas's ability to push through major legislation. But it didn't. Thomas had already, on June 27, gotten the House to pass his Medicare/prescription drug bill by one vote. The Senate passed a different bill that day, and the conference committee proceeded rockily. Thomas allowed only two Democrats, Senators Max Baucus and John Breaux, to take part in deliberations--"a coalition of the willing." In August Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley ordered his staffers to boycott meetings for a week after Thomas refused to make a deal on rural health care providers, one of Grassley's great concerns. In September the conference reached agreement on some issues, but in October Grassley complained of being "ridiculed" by Thomas. Thomas presented his own version of the legislation, which included nationwide private sector competition for government Medicare; later he considered making changes in that. At one meeting he so berated HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson that George W. Bush called Speaker Dennis Hastert and demanded that he rein in Thomas. Senate Democrats and rural state members like Grassley bridled at private sector competition for fear that it would not be available outside big metropolitan areas. On November 12 Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a member of the conference committee, and Hastert stepped in with a compromise, limiting private sector competition to four metro areas and one region starting only in 2008. Thomas, furious, stomped out of the meeting room and said he was flying home. He returned that evening after phone calls from Hastert and DeLay. On November 15 tentative agreement was reached; provisions included a $70 billion subsidy to employers so that seniors would maintain their retiree coverage (this netted the bill the support of AARP), discount cards available in 2004 and 2005 and a Medicare benefit beginning in 2006 and tax breaks for high-deductible health savings accounts. On November 22 this package was brought to the House floor. It was opposed by most Democrats and by some conservative Republicans who opposed creation of an expensive new entitlement. In the first 15 minutes, 24 Republicans voted against the bill and only 7 Democrats for it; the roll call remained stuck at 218-216 against. Hastert and DeLay kept the roll call open for a record two hours and 51 minutes as they and others tried to switch Republican votes. They suggested that Democrats might bring forward the Senate version with reimportation of prescription drugs, a more expensive and politically unstoppable entitlement. Eventually Idaho's Butch Otter and Arizona's Trent Franks switched and, with others also then moving, the bill passed 220-215. Democratic leaders understandably complained about the leadership's tactics, but the Senate also passed the bill and it became law.

Thomas had less success on the tax portions of the energy bill. He and Charles Grassley disagreed in 2003 on tax subsidies: Grassley wanted to promote ethanol and wind energy, while Thomas wanted incentives for the Alaska natural gas pipeline and for small oil producers with old wells like those in Kern County. The Senate was unable to pass the measure, and Thomas refused to append it to the corporate tax bill in October 2004.

The corporate tax bill came to the fore after the U.S. Extraterritorial Income Exclusion, an export tax break, was ruled illegal by the WTO, which authorized the European Union to issue $4 billion in trade sanctions on the United States if it was not repealed by January 2004. Thomas responded with a bill in July 2002 which was opposed by major exporters like Boeing and Caterpillar and did not go forward. In 2003 Thomas faced a rival bill, sponsored by Phil Crane and Charles Rangel, which directly subsidized exporting manufacturers; it quickly attracted support from many Democrats and from Illinois Republican Don Manzullo, who was disturbed by manufacturing job losses in his district. In July 2003 Thomas offered his alternative, with $190 billion in tax cuts and $70 billion from tax increases (the repeal of the ETI providing $50 billion). The different approaches were summarized by National Journal: "Thomas's idea was to use the money from the repeal of the export subsidy to reform tax law on overseas income in ways that would make all multinational companies more competitive globally. By contrast, Rangel and Crane had proposed targeting all new tax breaks to industries that had benefited from the ETI subsidy." When that approach failed to get support, Thomas reduced the tax cuts to $110 billion in October and incorporated a Senate provision allowing overseas profits repatriated within six months to be taxed at 7% (the Senate had 5.25%) rather than the 35% corporate rate, which the Thomas bill reduced to 32%. Defined as manufacturers were producers of software and movies, oil and gas refiners and huge construction firms like Bechtel and Halliburton. This bill was marked up in October but was still opposed by Manzullo and, he said, 25 conservatives. The EU voted in November to phase in sanctions in March 2004, but Manzullo's conservatives and most Democrats kept it short of a majority, and in March Thomas came forward with another version. Here Thomas banned sale-in-lease-out arrangements with local governments, long a target of the Treasury, and changed the 5.2 cent ethanol exemption from the gasoline tax to an income tax credit: both counted as revenue increases. But the latter was opposed by farm state members and Thomas missed an April deadline for going to the floor. To attract more support in May Thomas included two measures, a tobacco buyout with FDA regulation (popular in North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky) and, at the suggestion of Tom DeLay, deductions for state sales taxes for taxpayers in states without income taxes (Florida, Texas, Washington, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming). Thomas included a measure allowing churches more leeway in expressing political opinions without endangering their tax-exempt status, but dropped it when advocates said it was worth less than nothing.

In the conference committee in October, Thomas refused to consider amendments not championed by the 41 conferees and conducted the sessions in public. Dropped from the Senate version were FDA regulation of tobacco (but not the tobacco buyout) and disapproval of the Labor Department's overtime regulations. Charity car sales were limited as well as sales-in-lease-out transactions barred. The bill passed on October 7 280-141; the Senate chimed in four days later. As National Journal wrote, "Thomas accomplished much of his goal, according to business and Capitol Hill sources, through a combination of shrewd negotiating and digging deep to find additional sources of revenue."

Thomas has been reelected easily every two years in his heavily Republican district. In the 1990s he was California House Republicans' point man on redistricting issues. After the November 1998 election, when it became clear that Democrats would control redistricting, Thomas concocted a ballot proposition in 1999 that would turn redistricting over to the California Supreme Court (most of whose justices were appointed by Republicans) and also cut legislators' salaries. The House Republicans' campaign committee, fearful that it could lose eight seats in redistricting, put up $1.3 million to get it on the ballot. But in December 1999 the state Supreme Court ruled it was invalid because it included two subjects. Thomas then split the proposal into two separate initiatives, but in March 2000 the campaign committee declined to put up any more money to get it on the ballot. In 2001 NRCC chairman Tom Davis, acting with the approval of White House political strategist Karl Rove, and David Dreier met directly with California Democratic redistricting consultant Michael Berman and made a deal: Berman would draw a plan with safe seats for all but one of California's Republican incumbents and would make the state's one new seat safely Republican in return for Republican support in the legislature for the plan, which would also provide safe seats for 33 California Democrats. Thomas was the lone member of the delegation who argued against the deal: he feared it would put most of the state's Latinos in Democratic districts, where Republicans would have no incentives to win them over, and he preferred to take his chances on a court challenge to a Democratic plan. But his advice wasn't followed. In 2004, unopposed at home, he gave $1.2 million to other Republican candidates.

In January 2005, as George W. Bush was preparing to make personal retirement accounts in Social Security his number one domestic legislative priority, Thomas suggested a different and broader approach. He argued that personal accounts on their own "cannot, given the politics of the House and the Senate," be passed by both chambers. "Sometimes elevating it to a larger, universal solution makes it easier because you bring more people to the table. The problem with Social Security, narrowly, is that it becomes more of a partisan issue than you would like." He suggested consideration of a value added tax which, he argued, would make the United States more competitive in world trade. "The United States is the world's largest importer and the world's largest exporter, and our tax system is out of sync with the rest of the world. We pay their social costs; they don't pay ours. That at least needs to be examined." As for the payroll tax, "Why go back to the same old solution? When it was 2%, doubling it wasn't a big problem. Now that it's 12%, we actually are dealing with a job killer. The higher the payroll tax the fewer people are hired. Why does that have to be the way we solve the financing problem? Let's find revenue that doesn't continue to kill jobs but also meets our basic needs." He suggested that a flat tax or the single-rate "fair tax" promoted by John Linder would be politically unacceptable. Again in February and March 2005, Thomas seemed to be suggesting melding the Social Security and tax reform issues which the Bush White House wanted handled separately. In his third (and last, unless term limits are waived) term as Ways and Means chairman, Thomas was thinking big. As for his role, he was asked in November 2004 if he would like to see the size of Ways and Means Committee reduced. "Yeah," he said, "I'd like to see it reduced to one."

Committees

• Ways & Means (Chmn. of 24 R).
• Joint Committee on Taxation (Chmn. of 5 Reps.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	5	0	0	0	100	54	100	88	72	76	--
2003	5	--	0	15	--	62	100	80	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	9%	--	84%		20%	--	79%
Social	40%	--	58%		41%	--	59%
Foreign	38%	--	60%		23%	--	76%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Drilling in ANWR Y 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. DC School Vouchers Y 6. Ban Human Cloning Y		7. Restrict Gun Liability Y  8. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Fund Iraq War Y 11. Bar Cuba Embargo Funds N 12. Intelligence Reorg. Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	Bill Thomas (R)	unopposed
2004 primary	Bill Thomas (R)	unopposed
2002 general	Bill Thomas (R)	120,473	73%	$1,591,853
	Jaime Corvera (D)	38,988	24%	$10,426
	Other	4,824	3%
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (72%); 1998 (79%); 1996 (66%); 1994 (68%); 1992 (65%); 1990 (60%); 1988 (71%); 1986 (73%); 1984 (71%); 1982 (68%); 1980 (71%); 1978 (59%)

2004 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 180,584 (68%) Kerry (D) 82,356 (31%)

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 141,156 (64%) Gore (D) 73,338 (33%)

For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Twenty-Second 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 +16
• District Size: 10,454 square miles
• Population in 2000: 639,088; 82.5% urban; 17.5% rural
• Median Household Income: $41,801; 13.7% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 23.1% blue collar; 57.8% white collar; 19.1% gray collar; 14.8% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 66.8% White, 5.6% Black, 2.9% Asian, 0.9% Amer. Indian, 0.1% Hawaiian, 2.5% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 21.0% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 10.7% German, 8.1% Irish, 7.8% English
• Click here for statewide demographic data.