Virginia: Tenth District

Rep. Frank Wolf (R)

Frank Wolf (R) Elected 1980, 14th term up
Born:	01-30-1939, Philadelphia, PA
Home:	Vienna
Education:	PA St. U., B.A. 1961, Georgetown U., LL.B. 1965
Religion:	Presbyterian
Marital Status:	married (Carolyn)
Military Career:	Army, 1962–63, Army Reserves 1963–67.
Professional Career:	Legis. Asst., U.S. Rep. Edward Biester, 1968–71; Asst., U.S. Interior Secy. Rogers Morton, 1971–74; Dep. Asst. Secy., U.S. Dept. of Interior, 1974–75; Practicing atty., 1975–80.
DC Office	241 CHOB, 20515 202-225-5136 Fax: 202-225-0437 Website: wolf.house.gov
State Offices	Herndon:703-709-5800; Winchester:540-667-0990;
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When George Washington decided to place the new nation’s capital on the Potomac just upriver from Mount Vernon, where the falls blocked navigation above the port of Georgetown, the land above the fall line on the Virginia side of the river—the rolling green Piedmont of northern Virginia and the fertile mountain-bound lands of the Shenandoah Valley—was buzzing with new settlers. They came up the Potomac and the runs (a Virginia word for small rivers) that flow into it and into the Valley from the great Wagon Road south from Pennsylvania, moving onto lands speculated on by Washington and his peers. During the Civil War, this was some of the most heavily contested land on the continent. The Piedmont, historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, “soaked up more of the blood, sweat and tears of American history than any other part of the country. It has bred more founding fathers, inspired more soaring hopes and ideals and witnessed more triumphs, failures, victories and lost causes than any other place in the country.” But after the Civil War, the land was quiet. The frontier was very far to the west, and on these lands farmers quietly raised hay and grazed cattle and kept horses and hounds for fox hunting. During World War II and immediately after this was still open country: General George Marshall, driving from his office in the Pentagon to the old house he bought in the courthouse town of Leesburg 30 miles away, would pass a few gas stations and crossroads villages and hundreds of acres of farm fields. If he could make the trip today, he would see something very different. For metropolitan Washington has spread out into this bucolic land. There are still some horse farms in the Piedmont, long the first or second homes of some of the richest people in America, but they are increasingly flanked by subdivisions that sprout up in the fields overnight. Fairfax County, by some measures the highest-income county in the nation, had 98,000 people in 1950 and passed the 1 million mark in November 2003. But Fairfax’s explosive growth stopped earlier; from 2000 to 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that a net 91,000 Americans moved out and a net 68,000 immigrants moved in. The explosive growth for the last decade or so has been in Loudoun County, just past Dulles Airport, the fourth fastest-growing county in the United States from 2000 to 2006, up 59% from 169,000 to 268,000. The Washington metropolitan area now extends past Fairfax and Loudoun and over the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington were just that: Bedroom communities where most workers headed into the District of Columbia and where one-third of them were employed by the federal government. Today Northern Virginia is an employment center and focus of innovation on its own. The Dulles Access Road, which ran through rural-looking territory 20 years ago, is now lined with office buildings holding high-tech firms and entrepreneurial startups. Along intersecting Route 28, crossing the Fairfax-Loudoun County line, are the headquarters of tech giants such as AOL and Telos Corp. The federal government is no longer the dominant employer here. Some of Northern Virginia’s private sector is the spawn of government—“Beltway Bandits” and defense contractors—but this area has also become one of the nation’s major centers of high-tech and telecommunications firms.

The 10th Congressional District covers much of Northern Virginia. It starts inside the Capital Beltway and includes most of McLean, home of much of Washington’s political and lawyer-lobbyist elite, and goes beyond the Beltway to include woodsy Great Falls, Herndon and the Route 28 corridor around Dulles Airport. It includes Manassas, site of the Civil War’s first battle and now of a spruced up Old Town, in Prince William County; all of Loudoun County, heavily built-up in the east with some still rural areas west of Leesburg; and the northern half of Fauquier County, which has limited development and is still mostly horse farms. It includes three counties in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, the country around Front Royal and Winchester. In 2004, 34% of the votes were cast in Fairfax County, 33% in Loudoun County, 11% in Prince William and Manassas, 5% in Fauquier and 18% in the Shenandoah Valley. Northern Virginia, home of more defense than domestic government agencies, was long more Republican than the Maryland suburbs, and Fairfax County in 2000 voted 49%-47% for George W. Bush. But since then Fairfax has changed and the Washington suburbs, apparently repelled by religious conservatives and rural-oriented candidates, have become more Democratic. Fairfax, running contrary to the national trend, voted 53%-46% for John Kerry in 2004; Bush carried the 10th District by 15% in 2000 but by only 11% in 2004. The 10th District voted for Republican Mark Earley over Democratic Governor Mark Warner in 2001, but in 2005 it preferred Democrat Tim Kaine to a Republican from far-off southwest Virginia. In 2006, the district narrowly voted for Democrat Jim Webb over Senator George Allen, 50%-49%.

The congressman from the 10th District is Frank Wolf, first elected in 1980. Wolf grew up in Philadelphia, went to law school at Georgetown, worked as a staffer on Capitol Hill and as an Interior Department appointee in the Nixon and Ford administrations and practiced law. In 1976 he ran for Congress and lost the Republican primary. In 1978 he won the nomination to run against Joseph Fisher, a liberal who had won the district (then not extending beyond Fairfax County) in 1974, and lost 53%-47%; in 1980 Wolf ran again and won 51%-49%. He started off, in the suburban Washington manner, maintaining an active constituency service operation and concentrating on issues affecting federal employees.

Over the years Wolf has come to specialize in three other areas—transportation, human rights and gambling. He used his seat on the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee to work on projects in traffic-choked Northern Virginia. He has sought funding for a Metro rail link to Dulles Airport which, astonishingly, was not foreseen by the system’s planners. Wolf has helped obtain funding for the project, $5 million in 2004 and $215 million in all; approval went ahead for preliminary engineering in July 2004. In 2006 Wolf persuaded Governor Tim Kaine to build the Tysons Corner portion above-ground rather than in a tunnel, for fear the increased cost would jeopardize the whole project. In June 2003 Wolf and Tom Davis asked for an additional outbound lane on I-66 in Arlington; in 2006 he got $2 million for the widening for a total of $32 million for the project. From 1995 to 2001, Wolf was chairman of the Transportation Appropriations subcommittee. He opposed earmarking proposals for specific congressmen, even as the chairman of the authorizing committee, Bud Shuster, made the practice an art form; Wolf thus lost much of the appropriators’ leverage. He used the subcommittee chairmanship to put through a national .08% blood alcohol limit for drunk driving and to promote truck safety. In January 2001, House Republicans’ six-year limits on chairmanships caught up with both Wolf and Shuster: Shuster resigned from Congress, while Wolf took the chairmanship of the Commerce, Justice and State Subcommittee.

In that capacity he has worked since the September 11 attacks to change the culture of the FBI. He assisted Director Robert Mueller’s reorganization and called for sharing information across international lines. He opposed the bill to require destruction within 24 hours of gun buyer background checks because he thought the information should be available to terrorism investigators. He is now ranking minority member on the renamed State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Subcommittee.

Wolf has been one of the House’s leading crusaders for human rights and is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. With Nancy Pelosi, he led the annual moves in the 1990s to withdraw normal trade relations with China because of human right violations; he strongly opposed normal trade relations in 2000, citing China’s acts of jailing dissidents, killing Catholic priests, jailing evangelical pastors, persecuting Tibetan Buddhists and aiming missiles at the United States. In 1998 he sponsored the law setting up a religious freedom office in the State Department and requiring annual reports on religious freedom throughout the world. He traveled to El Salvador in 1982, Sudan in 1989, Romania in 1990, East Timor and Tibet in 1997 (only the second time a congressman has been there since the Chinese takeover in 1959), Sierra Leone in 1999 and Ethiopia in 2003, where he saw starvation as ghastly as he had in 1984. He has made five visits to Sudan and reported on how the Sudanese government blocked food shipments, bombed civilians and supported slave raids first in the South and then in Darfur. In September 2006 the House passed sanctions against Sudan because of its actions in Darfur; Wolf said, “Bold action is warranted. The United Nations is working to try to get desperately needed UN troops on the ground but the government of Sudan continues to reject this deployment. Targeted divestment from companies doing business in Sudan is an action that should be taken. The genocide in Sudan can be stopped and it is up to every American to do his or her part. The United States Congress and the president have called it genocide. Therefore anything that can be done should be done.” In October 2005 he began criticizing lobbyists who worked for the governments of Sudan and Saudi Arabia and the Chinese oil company CNOC; he urged members to show caution in meeting with them. Pelosi in 2005 said he was “an unmatched leader in his commitment to human rights.”

Wolf is probably Congress’s leading opponent of gambling. He first proposed the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, passed in 1997; he hailed its call in June 1999 for a pause in granting licenses for new casinos and for federal oversight of Indian and Internet gambling. He has opposed federal recognition of Indian tribes in Virginia.

Wolf and Chris Shays have been the only two members of the House to travel widely in Iraq without Defense Department escorts. On his third visit, in September 2005, he was unable to get around without escorts; he was especially alarmed when he saw armed security guards in a maternity ward in Tikrit. On his return he wrote an article in the Washington Post calling for “fresh eyes” to look at policy, a bipartisan study group. He pressed this idea successfully first with Condoleezza Rice and then with Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley; the result was the Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. But many of the committee’s recommendations, released in September, were rejected, some by the Bush administration, some by the new Democratic leaders in Congress.

With his seat on Appropriations, Wolf has funded many projects in the 10th District. In 2007, with Senator John Warner, he proposed a 175-mile Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Trail running from Gettysburg south to Charlottesville, passing by eight presidential houses, 15 national historic landmarks and many Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields.

Wolf has generally been reelected by wide margins. In 2004 and 2006 he had more vocal challengers than usual. In 2004 James Socas, who made a fortune as an investment banker in San Francisco in the tech boom, moved to the Washington area to work as a Senate staffer and then ran against Wolf. Socas spent $921,000 in all, $499,000 of it his own money, on radio ads harshly attacking Wolf on transportation issues and charging that he was part of an “extremist” Christian group whose members “admire the strength and personal leadership” shown by Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Osama bin Laden. Wolf spent $1.6 million on the race and pointed out that Socas had only recently moved to Northern Virginia and did not own a home in the district. Wolf won 64%-36%, a lesser margin than his 72%-28% win in 2002. In 2006 his opponent was Judith Feder, dean of Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute, who worked at HHS during the Clinton administration. She spent $1.5 million, with help from Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy, and attacked Wolf for supporting George W. Bush on Iraq and for voting with the administration 90% of the time. Wolf spent $1.7 million and criticized her for backing the Clinton health care plan and said she had no transportation policy. Feder did not get the DCCC to put this district on its “Red to Blue” target list, but she trimmed Wolf’s majority. He won 57%-41%; he carried every county and independent city, but won by only 53%-46% in Fairfax County. Feder has said she will run again in 2008.

Committees

• Appropriations (5th of 29 R)
  State, Foreign Operations & Related Programs (RMM); Transportation, HUD & Related Agencies.

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R + 5
• Area size: 1,864 square miles
• Urban Population: 83.3%
• Rural Population: 16.7%
• Population 2000: 643,512
• Population 2005 (est): 779,047
• Median Income: $71,560
• Poverty Status: 4.4%
• Military Veterans: 13.5%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 77.2% White; 6.7% Black; 6.6% Asian; 0.2% Native Am.; 0.0% Hawaiian; 1.9% Two+ races; 0.2% Other; 7.1% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 12.9% German%; 10.5% Irish%; 9.5% English%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 15.9%; White collar 72.5%; Gray collar 11.6%;