Sen. George Voinovich (R) Elected 1998, 2d term up 2010
Born:	July 15, 1936, Cleveland
Home:	Cleveland
Education:	Ohio U., B.A. 1958, Ohio St. U., J.D. 1961
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Janet)
Elected  Office:	OH House of Reps., 1966-71; Cuyahoga Cnty. Auditor, 1971-76; Cuyahoga Cnty. Commissioner, 1977-78; OH Lt. Gov., 1979; Cleveland Mayor, 1979-89; OH Gov., 1990-98.
Professional Career:	OH Asst. Atty. Gen., 1963-64.
DC Office	524 HSOB20510, 202-224-3353; Fax: 202-228-1382; Web site: voinovich.senate.gov
State Offices	Cincinnati, 513-684-3265; Cleveland, 216-522-7095; Columbus, 614-469-6697; Toledo, 419-259-3895.
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George Voinovich, a Republican, was elected to the Senate in 1998 after a long career in public life. He is of Serbian and Slovenian descent and grew up in heavily ethnic Cleveland. He graduated from Ohio State and its law school, then practiced law in Cleveland. He was elected to the state House in 1966, at 30. He was elected Cuyahoga County auditor in 1971 and county commissioner in 1977. In 1978 he was selected by 69-year-old Governor James Rhodes to be lieutenant governor. In 1979, after Mayor Dennis Kucinich bankrupted Cleveland, Voinovich ran for mayor. It was a strenuous campaign, running as a Republican in a heavily Democratic city, and one touched by tragedy: his daughter was killed in an auto accident at the time. In 10 years in office, he fixed the budget and sparked the city's renaissance. His one defeat came in 1988, when he lost 57%-43% to Senator Howard Metzenbaum. In 1990 Voinovich ran for governor and beat Attorney General Anthony Celebrezze Jr., 56%-44%; in 1994 he was re-elected by the spectacular margin of 72%-25%. Voinovich got the state government's fiscal house in order, with the help of a tax increase in 1992.

In February 1997 Senator John Glenn announced he would retire in 1998, and Voinovich, not eligible to run for reelection as governor, was the obvious favorite; he led in polls for nearly two years. His Democratic opponent was another Clevelander (as a boy Voinovich delivered newspapers to her family's house), Cuyahoga County Commissioner Mary Boyle, who lost the 1994 Senate primary but this time had no competition for the nomination. Boyle campaigned on education, blaming Voinovich for allowing Ohio schools to decline; she called for HMO regulation and a minimum wage increase. Voinovich mostly ignored her attacks and outspent her by almost 3-1, running ads that highlighted his record as governor. In November his margin over Boyle was a decisive but not overwhelming 56%-44%.

Voinovich came to the Senate, after 32 years in public office, as a big government Republican, willing to back tax increases as he did in 1992 but dubious about cutting them, as he was in 1999 and 2000. In his previous positions he had been required to balance budgets, and he seemed viscerally repelled by deficits. In 1999 he voted against the Republicans' $792 billion tax cut, against the smaller Democratic tax cut, and against the bipartisan moderates' compromise tax cut. In April 2000 he was one of two Republicans to vote against the Republican budget. In July 2000 he was one of four Republicans to vote against estate tax repeal and the only Republican to vote against marriage penalty relief. He did support the Bush tax cuts in May 2001, when it looked as if the surplus would be permanent. In October 2001 he worked to scale back the tax cuts in House Republicans' stimulus package. In February 2003 he came out against the $700 billion Bush tax cut and in April he and Olympia Snowe insisted they would back no cut higher than $350 billion. That led Finance Chairman Charles Grassley and Majority Leader Bill Frist to say they would insist on that figure from conference, to the rage of the House Republican leadership. When George W. Bush came to Ohio in April 2003, Voinovich was cordial but refused to budge. In 2004 Voinovich declined to back the "paygo" amendment, requiring all tax cuts and spending increases to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere, but enough other Senate Republicans did, and the Senate and House did not agree on a budget resolution. In March 2005 he did back a paygo amendment, along with Lincoln Chafee and John McCain, but they did not have enough votes to prevail in the Senate and agreement on a budget resolution was reached. Voinovich lamented the administration's refusal to include adjustments for reducing the alternative minimum tax in the budget.

Voinovich is interested not only in maintaining government's revenue flow, but in how government works. As chairman of the Government Reform subcommittee on Government Management, Restructuring and the District of Columbia, he found that agencies could not say how much they spend on training. In October 2001 he introduced a bill that he hoped would lead to the first major change in civil service laws since 1978. It provided for chief human capital officers at each agency; hiring from a wider pool of applicants rated either basically qualified, highly qualified or superior (current practice is to choose among those rated, often arbitrarily, the top three); greater leeway for demonstration projects; allowing agencies to buy out workers for $25,000 to reshape their work forces. In June 2002 Voinovich made some changes, pursuant to comments by government employee unions and others, and got the support of subcommittee Chairman Daniel Akaka. In July 2002 Voinovich and Akaka got a version of this bill inserted as the personnel section in the homeland security bill. There it became law in December 2002. This was a major achievement: the new department has 173,000 employees and, together with Defense, which has been seeking its own civil service changes, accounts for most federal government employees. Voinovich, now subcommittee chairman again, submitted another version of his bill to cover the rest in January 2003.

As an Environment and Public Works subcommittee chairman, he steered to passage in September 2000 a giant energy and water authorization, which included the $1.1 billion Everglades restoration project estimated to eventually cost $7.8 billion. But a month later he voted against a water and power appropriation, which included many Ohio projects, arguing that it spent too much money: authorizing committee members like to keep appropriators on a short leash. In January 2003 Energy Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe asked him to manage George W. Bush's Clear Skies Initiative providing a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury. In June he rejected calls for carbon dioxide controls. "Regulation of carbon is not going to happen." In November 2003 Voinovich and Inhofe increased the first year mercury emissions, bringing target dates closer and providing for one-year extensions if needed to maintain a reliable supply of electricity. But this did not satisfy committee Democrats and Republican Lincoln Chafee. In March 2005 he floated a compromise, with a voluntary carbon dioxide emissions program. It was rejected in committee 9-9 because of Chafee's opposition. "Chafee thinks this is the biggest problem facing the world, and the chairman [Inhofe] has a sign in his office saying this is a hoax," Voinovich said. "There is a limited window here."

Voinovich has sometimes surprised colleagues by his stands on foreign issues. He is the only Serbian-American in the Senate, and as a college freshman wrote a paper on how the United States sold out Yugoslavia at the February 1945 Yalta conference; in 1991 his Serbian relatives were forced out of their homes in the newly independent Croatia. In March and April 1999 he strongly opposed the bombing of Serbia, but he called Slobodan Milosevic a "war criminal" and tried to convince the State Department to support forces to depose him. In July 2004 he opposed the Australian Free Trade Agreement and complained that the administration hadn't done enough to enforce trade laws and to stop China from manipulating its currency. In April 2005, after not attending earlier hearings on the subject, held up the confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations; in May 2005 he spoke out strongly against Bolton in committee but voted with other Republicans to send the nomination to the floor without recommendation.

Voinovich came up for reelection in 2004. In early 2003 he had $2.5 million in his campaign treasury and was getting high job ratings. In March 2003 state Senator Eric Fingerhut, who was elected to one term in the House in 1992 and defeated in 1994, announced he was running. For several months the Democrat getting the most attention was Jerry Springer, the successful host of a talk show aimed at unsuccessful people, who had a successful political career in the 1970s and 1980s as councilman and mayor in Cincinnati; at one point he resigned after it was revealed he had paid for a prostitute with a credit card, but he was later returned to office. But in August 2003, with some apparent reluctance, he took himself out of the race. That left Fingerhut as the only serious Democratic candidate. In 2004 he embarked on a hike across Ohio. But Voinovich outspent him by $9.9 million to $1.1 million and won the election 64%-36%, just shy of beating John Glenn's record percentage in a Senate race set in 1974. Voinovich carried all 88 counties. In 2005 he continued what he called his "crusade" to save Ohio families from the ravages of casino gambling.

Committees

• Environment & Public Works: Clean Air, Climate Change & Nuclear Safety (Chmn.); Transportation & Infrastructure.
• Ethics (Select) (Chmn.).
• Foreign Relations: European Affairs; International Economic Policy, Export & Trade Promotion; International Operations & Terrorism; Near Eastern & South Asian Affairs.
• Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs: Federal Financial Management, Govt. Information & International Security; Oversight of Govt. Management, the Federal Workforce & the District of Columbia (Chmn.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	30	33	29	0	83	60	94	76	82	100	--
2003	15	--	22	11	--	69	100	83	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	33%	--	62%		38%	--	61%
Social	0%	--	59%		46%	--	53%
Foreign	32%	--	65%		42%	--	57%
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. Ban Drilling in ANWR N 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. Energy Bill Y 6. Support Roe v. Wade N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Assault Weapons Ban Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb N 11. Fund Iraq War Y 12. Restrict Missile Defense N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	George Voinovich (R)	3,464,356	64%	$8,956,380
	Eric Fingerhut (D)	1,961,171	36%	$1,166,538
2004 primary	George Voinovich (R)	640,082	77%
	John Mitchel (R)	195,476	23%
1998 general	George Voinovich (R)	1,922,087	56%	$6,756,712
	Mary O. Boyle (D)	1,482,054	44%	$2,236,137