Rep. Curt Weldon (R) Elected 1986, 10th term
Born:	July 22, 1947, Marcus Hook
Home:	Aston
Education:	West Chester St. Col., B.A. 1969
Religion:	Protestant
Marital Status:	married (Mary)
Elected  Office:	Marcus Hook Mayor, 1977-82; Delaware Cnty. Cncl., 1982-86, Chmn. 1985-86.
Professional Career:	Elem. schl. teacher & Vice Principal, 1969-76; Dir., Training & Manpower Devel., CIGNA Corp., 1976-81.
DC Office	2466 RHOB20515, 202-225-2011; Fax: 202-225-8137; Web site: curtweldon.house.gov
State Offices	Bridgeport, 610-270-1486; Upper Darby, 610-259-0700.
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The close-in suburbs of the great eastern cities were home to some of the most curious and long-lasting political machines in America. They were Republican; they conducted business in the accents of ordinary people, ethnic as well as WASP; they had a tolerance for patronage, and for what city reform liberals would call corruption, that was sharply at odds with their embodiment of middle-class morality; they were old, going back to the days when political machines were as much a part of the urban landscape as trolley lines or overhead electrical wires. One such machine was the War Board of Pennsylvania's Delaware County, a ruthlessly effective Republican organization that continues to influence local politics even in its current and greatly diminished form. But while party registration in Delaware County runs 2-1 Republican, in national races voters here recently have voted for Democrats. Delaware County voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry by increasing margins, and it voted 2-1 for Democrat Ed Rendell for governor in 2002. The reasons are partly demographic--in recent decades many Democrats have moved out to the suburbs from Philadelphia--and partly ideological. Republicans of the Newt Gingrich stripe are unfamiliar here, and Sun Belt Republicanism is not popular.

The 7th Congressional District of Pennsylvania includes almost all of Delaware County, except for a few towns with large black populations that are appended to Philadelphia's 1st District. The 7th extends north to include a few Montgomery County suburbs, such as modest Conshohocken, an old Schuylkill River factory town, affluent Upper Merion Township and King of Prussia, an edge city where the Schuylkill Expressway intersects the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The 7th takes in southeastern Chester County, including the commercial hub of West Chester and a few further-out suburbs such as Malvern and part of Paoli. The 7th includes the elite small colleges of Haverford and Swarthmore, and the refined farm country of Chadds Ford, home to generations of Wyeths who used wheat-brown tones to limn the region's seasonal moods on canvas. Its housing is aging but well maintained; its population is above average in income but distinct from the inhabitants of more affluent commuter towns. People here have deep roots in greater Philadelphia, but many rarely venture into Center City.

The congressman from the 7th District is Curt Weldon, a Republican originally backed by the War Board and first elected in 1986. He grew up in Delaware County, graduated from West Chester State College and worked as a teacher and personnel trainer. He first came to public attention in 1977 as mayor of gritty Marcus Hook, the southernmost Pennsylvania town on the Delaware River, the home of oil tank farms and a rusty-looking steel mill. In 1982 he was elected to the Delaware County Council. In 1984 he ran against liberal Democratic Congressman Bob Edgar (who got to Congress when the War Board split 10 years earlier), lost by 412 votes, then ran successfully in 1986 when Edgar ran unsuccessfully for the Senate.

Weldon started off as a local congressman but has become a major force on international issues of the greatest import. Weldon is usually a partisan Republican but not always a free-market enthusiast; like Pennsylvania Republicans of yore, he supports trade restrictions and voted against NAFTA and trade promotion authority. Although he has supported unions on some issues, including family-leave legislation, he favors repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act and voted for the flextime plan to permit workers to take compensatory time off rather than overtime pay. He strongly backs the partial-birth abortion ban.

Weldon is now the second ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. After he spotlighted the discovery of the Soviet radar at Krasnoyarsk in the 1980s, a violation of the ABM treaty, he has been for more than a decade a strong advocate of missile defense. His warnings were vindicated by the July 1998 Rumsfeld report revealing that missile threats could come from rogue states without notice. He helped to write the 1998 law which committed a reluctant Clinton administration and, later, the much more eager Bush administration to full development of missile defense. From 1995 to 2001 Weldon chaired the Research and Development Subcommittee; from 1999 to 2001 he attempted to create a "data fusion center" which he called the National Operations Analysis Hub, to collate intelligence information for all sources; he protested in July 2004 when the 9/11 Commission report failed to mention his efforts.

In 2003 Weldon became chairman of the Strategic Forces Tactical Land and Air Subcommittee. He has been the House's strongest advocate of the Marine Corps's V-22 Osprey, one of whose prime contractors, the Boeing helicopter division, is located in Ridley Park in Delaware County. The tilted-rotor aircraft takes off and lands like a helicopter and flies like a plane. But the Osprey has had serious troubles. It was cancelled by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1989, but reinstated by Congress soon after. Since then, Weldon has assembled an Osprey coalition that has kept it alive despite crashes in 1991, 1992 and 2000. In 2002 the House voted for 12 Ospreys, the Senate for nine. In the meantime, Weldon bristled in December 2001 when Boeing announced layoffs of 1,500 employees at Ridley Park. In February 2004, as committee Chairman Duncan Hunter lined up votes to resist cuts in the Bush defense budget, Weldon warned that other major programs could be cancelled as the Comanche fighting vehicle was; he mentioned specifically the F-22. In May 2004 he proposed a $75 million fund to pay defense contractors to avoid outsourcing of U.S. jobs. In January 2005 he worked to revive the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator bunker-busting bomb, rejected by Congress in 2004.

Weldon has made no secret of his ambition to become Armed Services chairman. In 2000 Floyd Spence was about to leave the chairmanship because of House Republicans' term limits, and next in seniority was the elderly and quiet Bob Stump. Weldon, then seventh-ranking Republican in seniority, ran for chairman, with a detailed program for action and proposals to involve junior members more in decision-making and to encourage members to reach out to labor unions and other constituencies favoring defense spending. Duncan Hunter, the next in seniority after Stump, supported Stump but said he would be a candidate for the chairmanship if the Republican Steering Committee rejected Stump. Weldon lost by 1 vote and charged that Republican leaders had reneged on promises not to support Stump. But the chairmanship of the Military Procurement Subcommittee somewhat assuaged him. In April 2002 Stump announced that he would not run for reelection. Hunter promptly said he would seek the chairmanship; Weldon kept did not raise a fuss. In May Weldon announced he would support Hunter, with whom he had worked closely on many issues.

Weldon's accomplishments have not been limited to committee work. He has taken a special interest in Russia. He was a Russian studies major in college and is fluent in Russian; he has made more than 30 trips to Russia. He presented the Bush administration with a 41-page outline of how to foster partnerships between the U.S. and Russia in preparation for George W. Bush's 2001 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Crawford, Texas. In May 2004 he called for expanding technical cooperation with Russia on missile defense and praised the Russian-American Observation Satellite program established by the George H.W. Bush administration. In February 2004 the Los Angeles Times wrote that Weldon had "gone to bat" for two Russian firms and for two Serbian businessmen who had paid his daughter's public relations firm a total of $1 million. Weldon replied that his relations with the two Serbs had gone back to the 1990s and said that his urging the Navy to look at the drone produced by one Russian firm and lobbying a trade agency to approve a grant to a Russian energy firm to develop a gas field in Siberia were entirely proper. "The stuff I've done with these companies is documented, and it is substantive. I don't have anything to apologize for." He submitted documents to the ethics committee in April 2004 and by June 2005 the ethics committee had made no statement about the case.

Weldon supports high defense spending but also sees great merit in negotiating with potential adversaries. In May and June 2003, after having great difficulty getting a government plane, Weldon led a congressional delegation on a three-day trip to North Korea, the first codel there in five years, "to open a channel of communication." He sketched out a 10-point plan which included a one-year nonaggression pact, to be made permanent if other conditions were met, a North Korean renunciation of nuclear weapons and a return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, diplomatic recognition of North Korea and some $40 billion in aid over 10 years. This was not accepted by the Bush administration, and it stopped Weldon from leading another delegation there in October 2003. Weldon and other members journeyed to Pyongyang again in January 2005 and returned saying North Korea would return to six-party talks if the U.S. stopped acting in a "belligerent manner." Weldon lamented that Bush had named North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" in January 2002 and in January 2005 wrote him and asked that he not make provocative statements in his next State of the Union address. "The key thing is not to make inflammatory statements. We don't need to punch our chest and say how great we are and talk about the negative aspects of other societies."

In January 2004 Weldon led the first congressional delegation to visit Libya since 1979. He set it up after communicating with the Libyans through Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma and at a dinner with Muammar el-Qaddafi's son Saif Islam at the Four Seasons in London. He congratulated Muammar el-Qaddafi on renouncing nuclear weapons and said, "We're here to say thank you and to acknowledge that and to see some of the evidence." Here his statements seem to have been more in line with administration policy and he said, "My goal is to let them know that the president sets our foreign policy with the secretary of state and that we're not there to speak on behalf of the country."

Weldon has drawn on his experience as a former volunteer firefighter and as founder of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus and put into the 2002 and 2004 defense authorizations provisions for the transfer of military technology to firefighters and other first responders, our "domestic defenders" as he calls them, and he called for speedily transferring spectrum from non-digital television to first responders. He was skeptical of Tom Ridge's ability to adequately coordinate homeland security without budget authority and supported creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In September 2002, before the homeland security bill passed, he said the House should see that it reported to only one authorizing committee and one appropriations subcommittee, instead of to the 88 committees and subcommittees currently with jurisdiction over its activities. He proposed a resolution to that effect at the Republican Conference meeting after the November election, and no one rose in opposition. The House adopted his proposals. Speaker Dennis Hastert created a new Select Committee on Homeland Security, on which Weldon serves; Appropriations Committee chairman Bill Young reorganized his committee and created a Homeland Security Subcommittee. In December 2004 he urged Hastert to set up a task force on oceans policy, with a view toward having a select committee on the oceans.

Weldon has been reelected every two years, usually by robust margins. In 2002, he was reelected with 66% of the vote. In 2004, as John Kerry was carrying the district, and despite weak opposition--the first Democratic nominee dropped out when he was ordered to serve in Iraq and the second spent little money--Weldon was reelected with 59%--a solid win, but a significant dropoff in an area that seems to be getting more Democratic.

Committees

• Armed Services (Vice Chmn. of 34 R): Projection Forces; Tactical Air & Land Forces (Chmn.).
• Homeland Security (4th of 19 R): Emergency Preparedness, Science & Technology; Intelligence, Information Sharing & Terrorism Risk Assessment.
• Science (4th of 24 R): Energy; Research.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	15	20	13	27	89	50	100	79	73	100	--
2003	5	--	0	35	--	56	96	75	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	45%	--	55%		45%	--	54%
Social	46%	--	54%		46%	--	54%
Foreign	36%	--	63%		47%	--	53%
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	Curt Weldon (R)	196,556	59%	$678,444
	Paul Scoles (D)	134,932	40%	$23,763
	Other	3,039	1%
2004 primary	Curt Weldon (R)	unopposed
2002 general	Curt Weldon (R)	146,296	66%	$619,156
	Peter Lennon (D)	75,055	34%
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (65%); 1998 (72%); 1996 (67%); 1994 (70%); 1992 (66%); 1990 (65%); 1988 (68%); 1986 (61%)

2004 Presidential Vote Kerry (D) 184,392 (53%) Bush (R) 163,095 (47%)

2000 Presidential Vote Gore (D) 150,805 (51%) Bush (R) 140,862 (47%)

For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Seventh 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: D + 4
• District Size: 294 square miles
• Population in 2000: 646,522; 98.6% urban; 1.4% rural
• Median Household Income: $56,126; 5.4% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 16.1% blue collar; 72.6% white collar; 11.3% gray collar; 12.9% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 88.4% White, 5.4% Black, 3.7% Asian, 0.1% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 0.9% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 1.3% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 21.8% Irish, 14.3% Italian, 13.3% German
• Click here for statewide demographic data.