Michigan: Fifteenth District

Rep. John Dingell (D)

John Dingell (D) Elected Dec. 1955, 26th full term up
Born:	07-08-1926, Colorado Springs, CO
Home:	Dearborn
Education:	Georgetown U., B.S. 1949, J.D. 1952
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Deborah)
Military Career:	Army, 1944–46 (WWII).
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1952–55; Wayne Cnty. Asst. Prosecuting Atty., 1953–55.
DC Office	2328 RHOB, 20515 202-225-4071 Fax: 202-226-0371 Website: www.house.gov/dingell
State Offices	Dearborn:313-278-2936; Monroe:734-243-1849; Ypsilanti:734-481-1100;
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The southeast corner of Michigan is a part of the country most Americans don’t think about much, and it doesn’t look very interesting out the plane window as you approach Metro Airport. The flat marshlands along the shore of Lake Erie give way to flat farm lands, with rivers flowing lazily in summer and flashing with ice in winter. Here and there you see power plants with giant smokestacks and factories. Out on the horizon you can get a glimpse of the sprawl of metro Detroit, of the great auto and steel and chemical plants along the Detroit River; over on the other side is Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan.

The 15th Congressional District of Michigan includes much of this southeastern corner of the state. It owes its shape to Republican redistricters, who in July 2001 devised the nation’s most successful partisan redistricting plan of the decennial cycle. The district includes industrial parts of Wayne County, all of Monroe County and the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas in Washtenaw County. In Wayne County, the 15th includes the western part of Dearborn and most of Dearborn Heights; the most heavily Arab-American parts of Dearborn were put in the 14th District, and these are more middle class, even affluent areas; the line cuts through Dearborn Heights and put one trailer park in two districts. To the south are working class suburbs: Taylor, Romulus (home of Metro Airport), and Woodhaven, site of a big Ford plant. Flat Rock is home to a joint Ford-Mazda auto plant, one of the few Japanese plants in Michigan. Monroe was the boyhood home of General George Armstrong Custer, and in his day agricultural; now it is more industrial, and the southern part is in many ways an extension of Toledo, Ohio. (Michigan and Ohio almost went to war over the Toledo land in the 1830s; Ohio got Toledo and Michigan got the Upper Peninsula as recompense.) Ann Arbor is one of the nation’s largest university towns, oriented to the university but also full of people, from auto executives to perennial graduate students, who like the atmosphere of a town with plenty of book stores, coffee houses and liberal neighbors; it voted 74% to legalize medical marijuana in November 2004. In 2006, it landed the headquarters of Google's AdWords unit, which operates the company's "pay-per-click" advertising method—its main revenue source. Ypsilanti, though it also has a university (Eastern Michigan), is less bookish and more industrial. All of these areas tend to vote Democratic, though Monroe is sometimes marginal, but they house very different kinds of Democrats. In Wayne County, union political operatives have dominated Democratic party politics for 50 years. In Ann Arbor, Democratic politics is dominated by leftist peace activists, environmentalists and feminists.

The congressman from the 15th District is John Dingell, the dean of the House of Representatives and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. His father, John Dingell, Sr., was first elected to the House in 1932, from a district created as a result of the Detroit area’s auto boom. The first Congressman Dingell was one of the most productive urban liberals of his day, a sponsor of Social Security and, starting in 1943, of national health insurance. John Dingell Jr. has been around Capitol Hill almost as long. He was a House page from 1938–43 and served in the Army in World War II; he graduated from Georgetown and its law school, paying his way by working as an elevator operator in the Capitol; he practiced law in Detroit and served as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County. After his father died in September 1955, Dingell was elected to succeed him in December, at 29, from a district entirely within Detroit with large Polish, black and Jewish populations. He still uses his father’s office furniture and every session continues to introduce as H.R. 15 (the number matches the district) the national health insurance bill his father co-sponsored in 1943. He is the only member of the House who served in the 1950s; indeed only two others served in the 1960s (John Conyers and David Obey); it is a measure of his seniority that the second most senior member of the House, Conyers, once served on his staff. He has an interesting personal life, raising his children after his divorce and marrying in 1981 a granddaughter of one of General Motors’ Fisher brothers. Debbie Dingell is vice-chairman of the General Motors Foundation and a Democratic national committeewoman, and an encourager of bipartisan amity as well; she headed the Michigan campaigns for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and helped each win 51% of the vote in this battleground state.

Dingell served as chairman of Energy and Commerce for 14 years, from 1981 to 1995, and was also chairman of its Investigative and Oversight Subcommittee; by common consent he was one of the most powerful and effective chairmen ever. It had wide jurisdiction, handled up to 40% of all House bills, and had the largest budget and staff of any House committee. As institutions will, the committee took on the character of its leader, widely known as ‘‘the truck’’: bright, aggressive, domineering, determined. Dingell and his committee superintended the breakup of AT&T and the sale of Conrail by public offering; Commerce’s cable reregulation law of 1992 was the only bill on which Congress overrode George H.W. Bush’s veto. After a decade of sparring over clean air legislation, Dingell worked together with Health Subcommittee Chairman Henry Waxman to produce the 1990 Clean Air Act.

On other issues, Dingell backed organized labor’s agenda against NAFTA and trade promotion authority. An avid outdoorsman (he hunts deer, elk, caribou and moose), he long opposed gun control but voted for the 1994 crime bill and resigned from the National Rifle Association board. On the old Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, he was responsible for wildlife refuge legislation, and one of his proudest accomplishments is the creation in 2001 of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, on both sides of the river from Zug Island in River Rouge south to Lake Erie. This is not publicly owned land; Dingell has worked to get donations of land or easements from private landowners, land preservation groups and the Army Corps of Engineers, and the refuge has expanded from 394 to 4,399 acres. In many ways, he is an old-fashioned Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat, supporting big government and strenuous regulation, taking a conservative line on some cultural issues and backing an assertive foreign policy; he was the only Michigan Democrat to vote for the Gulf War resolution in January 1991, although he voted against the Iraq war resolution in October 2002.

When the Republican majority took over, Dingell, as the senior House member, swore in Newt Gingrich with good grace and proceeded to work with Republicans and produce legislation. Dingell’s goal remains national health insurance; asked what is a desirable system, he says, “Canada’s, right across the river.” He opposed the Republicans’ Medicare/prescription drug bill in 2003 and went out on the road to criticize it in 2004. “HMOs, foreign diplomats and the mentally insane are the only people in this country who are exempt from the consequences of their decisions.” In 2004 Dingell and the new Energy and Commerce chairman, Joe Barton, asked the FCC for an investigation of a la carte cable channels (customers would pay for only those channels they wanted). Dingell tended toward opposition.

Dingell has sprung into action when Michigan has been adversely affected. In January 2003 the city of Toronto started transporting all its trash—180 truckloads a day, 1.1 million tons a year—in a landfill in southwest Wayne County, in Dingell’s district. Dingell had long complained of Canadian trash dumping, and he and Senator Debbie Stabenow insisted that EPA enforce a 1992 treaty which, they said, required that Canada give notice of each shipment and which allowed the U.S. to reject each one. EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt argued that only hazardous waste was covered by the treaty, but Dingell persisted and got a 12–4 subcommittee vote demanding enforcement. After voters in Romulus approved an Indian casino, Dingell put an amendment approving it on the transportation bill in March 2004, though it was later removed. Dingell has long opposed raising CAFE gas mileage standards, but has not followed the industry lead uncritically. In October 2003 the House accepted his amendment to require NHTSA to raise fuel economy standards enough to save 5 billion gallons of gasoline. He was also pushing an amendment with incentives for the auto companies to develop diesel engines with low sulfur emissions and to offer more diesel cars and trucks. He promised in December 2006 to hold hearings on efforts to create energy-efficient vehicles and viable alternatives to gasoline, including biofuels, electric power trains and diesel engines, and to push for more ethanol pumps at gas stations, next-generation batteries, clean-burning diesel engines and plug-in hybrids.

After Democrats won the House majority in 2006, Dingell prepared to take over as chairman again. “It’s been a long 12 years, and the work has been piling up,” he said. “We will kill the closest snake first. That is what we will do—try to do things in the best order possible and get as much done in the public interest.” He listed as priorities CAFE standards, the decline in manufacturing jobs, health care. To the New Republic, he set out a formidable agenda: “Privacy. Social Security number protection. Outsourcing protection. Unfair trade practices. Currency manipulation. Air quality. We’ll look at the implementation of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. We’ll take a look at climate change. We’ll take a look at the nuclear waste program, where literally billions of dollars are being dissipated. We’ll look at port security and nuclear smuggling, where there’s literally nothing being done. We’ll look at the Superfund program. We’ll take a look at EPA enforcement. On health, we’ll take a look at Medicaid and waivers. The Food and Drug Administration. Generic drug approval. Medical safety. We’ll also take a look at food supplements, where people are being killed. We will look at Medicare Part D. Telecom. We’ll look at FCC actions. . . . Media ownership. Adequate spectrum for police, fire, public safety and addressing the problems of terrorism. . . . We will look also at the overall question of Katrina recovery efforts.” He said he would handle the spectrum issue before considering a major telecom bill, that he would introduce a bill reauthorizing the SCHIP children’s health insurance program and would reexamine the issue of net neutrality. He criticized Republicans for having excluded Democrats from consideration of issues and promised extensive hearings and a willingness to listen to the minority. His predecessor, ranking minority member Joe Barton, said, “As chairman, he had a lot of authority and he used that authority. He was never arbitrary. He was never mean to be mean or ruthless just to be ruthless. He was always fair in the application of the rules. But in his mind, in hindsight, he was a lot fairer than those of us in the minority remember him being.” 

In some respects Dingell does not have as much power as he did in his earlier stint as chairman. He no longer chairs the Investigative subcommittee, but can be expected to have considerable influence over its new chairman, fellow Michiganian Bart Stupak. The House Republican leadership, in order to settle a dispute over the chairmanship, ceded Energy and Commerce’s jurisdiction over securities, accounting and insurance legislation to the Financial Services Committee; Barney Frank, the new Financial Services chairman, got Speaker Nancy Pelosi to say that she would not revisit the jurisdiction issue. In early 2007 Dingell and Frank sparred briefly over data security legislation, then promised to cooperate. Despite Dingell’s statement in November 2006 that he would hold hearings on carbon emissions, Pelosi also created a select committee to consider legislation to address carbon emissions, over Dingell’s objections; its chairman was Edward Markey, an Energy and Commerce member usually allied with Dingell but with different views on the emissions issue. “These committees,” Dingell said, “are as useful in relevance as feathers on a fish.” Moreover, unlike some other major committees, Energy and Commerce has several moderate Democrats who may not back Dingell on some important issues.

Since his first election in December 1955, Dingell has had only two serious challenges, both in Democratic primaries after being redistricted in with another incumbent. In 1964 he ran in a district mostly new to him against another incumbent who had followed his father to the House, John Lesinski of Dearborn, who was the only northern Democrat to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With strong support from the UAW, Dingell won 54%-46%. Then in July 2001 the Republican legislature put him in the same district with Lynn Rivers, an Ann Arbor liberal first elected in 1994, who was born in 1956, Dingell’s first full year in the House. Democratic leaders urged Rivers to run in the neighboring 11th District, but she decided on what she called a “David vs. Goliath match up.” Their voting records were similar, though not identical, but their cultural backgrounds were as different as the working class suburbs of Wayne County and the university town of Ann Arbor. Rivers campaigned as a congresswoman who knew what the ordinary person went through and cast her votes accordingly. Dingell campaigned as a congressman who had gotten many things done and was in a position to do much more. On September 10, 2001, the day before the redistricting bill was to be signed, Nancy Pelosi, then running for minority whip, sent Rivers $10,000—“a minor annoyance,” Dingell said. Rivers emphasized their differences on the partial-birth abortion ban, particular gun control proposals and environmental standards; Dingell voted for the first, opposed the second and tended to support the auto companies (and the UAW) on the third. Dingell parried by pointing to the women’s issues he had been instrumental on—breast and cervical cancer screening, minimum hospital stays after childbirth, children’s health insurance. This was an expensive election; as Dingell recalled, he spent $35,000 against Lesinski in 1964 and $2.5 million against Rivers in 2002; she raised $1.5 million, much of it in bundled contributions from EMILY’s List, making this Michigan’s most expensive House primary ever.

In June, Rivers started running spots in which she recounted her personal struggles. Her plainspoken, perky manner evidently got through: by late July, two polls showed the race even. Dingell fired back with a spot praising his effectiveness on prescription drugs, HMO regulation, children’s health insurance and the Clean Air Act. In contrast, he said, “She’s never authored a single piece of legislation that’s been signed into law.” For him the race came down to the question, “Are you going to replace one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives with one of the least effective members?” In the August primary Dingell won 59%-41%. He won 74%-26% in Wayne County, which cast 43% of the votes, even though part of it was in Rivers’s old district, and 80%-20% in Monroe County, which cast 19% of the votes. Rivers won Washtenaw County 69%-31%.The general election was anticlimactic; Dingell won easily in this Democratic district.

In July 2006 he attracted some criticism when he voted against a resolution supporting Israel against Hezbollah attacks and told a Detroit TV station, “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah, for or against Israel.” Days later he wrote in the Detroit News, “I believe the United States has no truer friend in the Middle East than Israel. . . . There is no doubt that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. . . . There is no room in politics, in Lebanon or anywhere, for groups that use violence and terror to achieve their political ends.” He called for the U.S. to push for a “cessation of hostilities” and to try to get Syria to stop supporting Hezbollah. He was reelected without difficulty. 

In December 2005 Dingell marked the 50th anniversary of his election to the House. At the National Building Museum he was feted by Democrats including Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans Dick Cheney and Joe Barton. On the anniversary he and Debbie Dingell lunched with George and Laura Bush at the White House. He has had two heart operations and an artificial hip. “I creak a little more each year,” he admitted, “but I keep going”—and with an iPod, which he got after his press secretary explained that podcasts were something like Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. “I will burn out when I burn out. I don’t know when the hell it will come. It probably will come in time. But I still give my people a full day’s work. I still give them seven days a week. I still travel the district. I still work hard on legislation.” In February 2009, Dingell will have been the longest-serving House member in history; in January 2013 he will have served longer in Congress than anyone else. A man who persevered in 12 frustrating years in the minority seemed prepared to keep charging ahead as chairman once again. 

Committees

• Energy & Commerce (Chmn. of 31 D).
  

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: D +13
• Area size: 981 square miles
• Urban Population: 87.7%
• Rural Population: 12.3%
• Population 2000: 662,563
• Population 2005 (est): 680,070
• Median Income: $48,963
• Poverty Status: 10.3%
• Military Veterans: 11.1%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 79.2% White; 11.7% Black; 3.7% Asian; 0.4% Native Am.; 0.0% Hawaiian; 2.0% Two+ races; 0.2% Other; 2.8% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 15.0% German%; 8.4% Irish%; 6.7% Polish%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 26.2%; White collar 59.0%; Gray collar 14.7%;