Rep. Dennis Hastert (R) Elected 1986, 10th 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.
DC Office	235 CHOB20515, 202-225-2976; Fax: 202-225-0697; Web site: www.house.gov/hastert
State Offices	Batavia, 630-406-1114; Dixon, 815-288-0680.
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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 of Illinois 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 Aurora, now the third-largest city in Illinois, plus antique St. Charles with its annual Scarecrow Festival; local debates rage over whether to tear down the dams on the Fox River. To the south is Kendall County, the fastest-growing county in Illinois, where new subdivisions are growing up outside the old town of Yorkville. 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 Lee County, 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 since 1999 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. 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; 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 and was elected. 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. 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 he has 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 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 558 rules--the resolutions that set the terms and conditions of debate-- and lost on only two. But Hastert, though he has none of the grandiose vision of Newt Gingrich, has also been good at strategy. 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.

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 and helped the Battleground 2000 program raise some $21 million. 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. His Republicans did hold their majority, narrowly, on November 7.

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. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said, "He has basically made sure that the president doesn't have to be presented any legislation that would split our party and compromise the president's objectives for policy." Hastert's relations with Bush have been good (though he refused to deal with White House staff on the transportation bill in 2003-04) 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. 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. 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 Democratic 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 a political issue off the calendar; 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.

In 2003 Hastert concentrated on adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. As one of his aides said, "This is the thing he thinks will keep us in the majority for a while." The Bush White House wanted to have the benefits provided entirely by private insurers, outside the Medicare structure; Hastert waved that off as a nonstarter. The Senate first passed a bill to the liking of Democrats like Edward Kennedy. House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas drafted a different measure, with health savings accounts and nationwide competition between Medicare and private insurers. The conference committee worked for many days, with clashes between Thomas and Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley. Hastert stepped in at many points and finally pressed Thomas to drop the nationwide competition. Thomas walked out and said he was going to fly home to California; Hastert insisted he come back. Competition was limited to a few geographic areas, and the AARP promptly endorsed the bill. When it came to the floor in November 2003, Hastert hoped that many Democrats would support it, but only a few did, and with many conservatives opposed to the creation of a new entitlement, Hastert decided to hold the 15-minute roll call open until he could switch enough votes. It was held open for nearly three hours--an unprecedented amount, and one criticized by Democrats; John Dingell said, "Never have I seen such a grotesque, arbitrary and gross abuse of power." Hastert was more taciturn. "I wasn't about to give it up until we got it done," he said. "Our job was to get people on board. It took some time."

Other tasks proved more difficult. In spring 2004 Hastert squeezed out narrow majorities for a budget resolution which would not require that tax cuts be offset by spending cuts. The Senate, because of the votes of four Republican senators, took the opposite stand, and the two versions were never reconciled. Hastert was frustrated. "The House of Representatives tried to bow and scrape and do everything we could to go along with the Senate. Our members will not be tied down." And he attacked John McCain, one of the four Republican senators. But that left room for Hastert to get the House to vote to extend the child tax credit, repeal the marriage penalty and make permanent the 10% bracket. Hastert was also at odds with the Senate on intelligence issues. In early 2004 he refused to allow a 60-day extension of the deadline for the 9/11 Commission's report, but eventually backed down. The commission's report in July 2004 recommended major changes in intelligence, and a bill sponsored by Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman won near-unanimous support in the Senate. The House took a different view. The Republican leadership in September unveiled a bill with provisions making it easier to deport immigrants involved in terrorism, to monitor terrorism suspects with no known organizational affiliation and to increase the penalties for false statements in terrorism cases. Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner added other immigration measures, including a requirement that states not issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

Hastert spent much time trying to reconcile the two and even flew to Maine for a 7 a.m. meeting with Collins in October. No bill was passed before the election. On November 20 Hastert held a meeting of House committee chairmen and found them unwilling to accept the Senate version. He was particularly moved by Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter's belief that it would endanger troops in the field. Enough Democrats were ready to vote for the Senate version for it to pass the House, but Hastert announced he would keep the bill off the floor because it did not have the support "of a majority of the majority." He prodded the White House to resolve the differences and got Dick Cheney to come to the Capitol to mediate. In December Hunter agreed on a provision that stated that the military chain of command would not be altered by the new National Intelligence Director, and Sensenbrenner's provisions were put aside, with a promise that they could be attached to the first must-pass legislation of 2005. The bill passed 336-75.

There have been headaches for Hastert. He has had to deal with the Transportation Committee's insistence on a highway bill more expensive than the Senate's and far more expensive than the Bush administration wanted; that issue was not resolved in 2004. He had to deal with a breakdown in the ethics truce the two parties' leaders agreed on in the late 1990s. "I said to Gephardt at the time, 'Lookit, when people have misused their office or done something wrong we need to go forward with an ethics charge, but to use the ethics committee as a political football I think is wrong, and we shouldn't do it.' " The truce was broken in June 2004, when Texas Democrat Chris Bell, defeated in his primary after redistricting, filed a complaint against Tom DeLay for, among other things, allegedly offering to support Nick Smith's son in the race to succeed him if Smith voted for the Medicare prescription drug bill. Smith didn't vote for the bill, his son lost in the Republican primary and Smith's story changed during the investigation. But the committee did vote in late September 2004 to admonish DeLay--the lightest sanction possible--for conduct putting the House in a bad light. Democrats crowed, and many Republicans believed the offense was too loosely defined. Hastert moved to change the rule after the election, but backed down when many Republicans complained. He also moved to change the Republican Conference rule requiring a member to resign a leadership position if indicted; some DeLay aides had been indicted by the Travis County, Texas, district attorney, a liberal Democrat who had brought what turned out to be a baseless indictment against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in 1993; many Republicans feared he would do the same thing to DeLay.

Hastert is the dominant force on the Republican Steering Committee which names committee chairmen. He has used that position to reward some members and punish others. In January and February 2005 the Steering Committee removed ethics committee Chairman Joel Hefley--it's normal for ethics chairmen to serve just two terms, Hastert said--and Veterans Committee Chairman Christopher Smith, who was seen as unresponsive to the leadership and supportive of too much spending. In contrast, Hastert decreed that the usual six-year term limit on chairmanships did not apply to Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier.

It has become apparent that for all his bear hugs, his penchant for listening to members, his Midwestern plainspokenness, Hastert is a formidable, aggressive and partisan leader, of the kind often found in Illinois politics. Like a good coach, he has an appreciation for the talents of his players; but like a good coach, he wants very much to win. In his readable and sometimes acerbic autobiography Speaker he noted, "There is a perception in the liberal press that [Tom] DeLay calls the shots and I march to his instructions. That's what the Democrats would like people to believe." But no one with any knowledge of the House believes that any more. As Hastert went on slyly, "They try to demonize Tom all the time, and that just makes things a little bit easier for me." In 2004 he had harsh words for John McCain on the budget issue and, in his book, for Hillary Rodham Clinton for seeking too much money for New York. He issued a sharp statement criticizing Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger for removing classified documents from the National Archives. "Mr. Berger apparently skirted the law and removed highly classified documents, purportedly in his pants … and then proceeded to lose or destroy some of them. Was Mr. Berger trying to cover up facts regarding the intelligence failures during his watch?" During the 2004 campaign he expressed scorn for John Kerry as a legislator. "I've fought a lot of battles on education, on health care, and a lot of times I've been nose to nose with a guy like [Edward] Kennedy. I didn't agree with him on everything, but we've been nose to nose in battle and I respect him for his positions. I've never really encountered John Kerry on positions. It's just kind of, all of a sudden, he's there." In September 2004, when asked if Al Qaeda would operate more comfortably if Kerry were elected, Hastert said, "That's my opinion, yes."

Amid all this work on legislation and national politics, Hastert has become a power in Illinois politics. 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. Hastert has strongly supported Daley's plans to expand O'Hare Airport, pressing for crucial legislation in the House, and has exacted from Daley a promise that the expanded airport will have expressway access on its western edge, nearer to Hastert's district. He has strongly backed the purchase of Chicago-headquartered Boeing's 767 as replacements for aging air tankers.

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, where he paints duck decoys and has a 1954 fire engine in the barn. But there is no demand for him to move on. In January 2003 House Republicans voted to repeal their eight-year term-limit on speakers. In December 2004 George W. Bush said to him, "I hope you're going to run again. We need you." The challenges continue. In early 2005 he still faced deadlock on the transportation bill that so many members wanted. Sensenbrenner's immigration proposals would have to be considered when the Iraq supplemental came up; his requirement that "a majority of the majority" must approve a bill before he will bring it up could doom Bush's rather different immigration proposals, which are unpopular with many Republican members. With Bush calling for changes in Social Security, Hastert said pointedly, "You can't just go, 'Hocus pocus, here's a package we're going to pass on Social Security.' It needs a lot of vetting. … We're deluding ourselves if we think we're going to do this on a unilateral basis. It has to be on a bipartisan basis." His formula for doing business seems unchanged. In January 2005 he said, "My goal is to work across the aisle as much as I can. … I have to bring my caucus together too. And if I'm forced to do everything with just Republican votes, which sometimes we end up doing, then I have to make sure that all our people are on board." He added that he would stay as Speaker "as long as I can be effective and as long as the president wants me to serve and my members want me to serve."

Hastert won easily in 2004; he's never been reelected with less than 64%.

Committees

• Speaker of the House
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Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	0	0	0	0	100	--	100	100	--	92	--
2003	0	--	0	--	--	--	100	75	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	0%	--	91%		*	--	*
Social	0%	--	95%		*	--	*
Foreign	0%	--	89%		*	--	*
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 * 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. DC School Vouchers * 6. Ban Human Cloning *		7. Restrict Gun Liability *  8. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Fund Iraq War Y 11. Bar Cuba Embargo Funds * 12. Intelligence Reorg. Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	Dennis Hastert (R)	191,616	69%	$5,013,947
	Ruben Zamora (D)	87,590	31%	$18,028
2004 primary	Dennis Hastert (R)	unopposed
2002 general	Dennis Hastert (R)	135,198	74%	$2,970,554
	Laurence Quick (D)	47,165	26%	$18,136
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (74%); 1998 (70%); 1996 (64%); 1994 (76%); 1992 (67%); 1990 (67%); 1988 (74%); 1986 (52%)

2004 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 158,428 (55%) Kerry (D) 125,269 (44%)

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 129,745 (54%) Gore (D) 101,369 (42%)

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 + 5
• 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.