Marsha Blackburn (née Wedgeworth; June 6, 1952) is an American politician and businesswoman. A Republican, she has served as the U.S. Representative for Tennessee's 7th congressional district, first elected in 2002. She is the Republican Deputy Whip and Chair of the Subcommittee on Communications and the Internet.
Blackburn first ran for Congress in Tennessee's 6th congressional district in 1992, losing to incumbent Democrat Bart Gordon. She served in the Tennessee Senate from 1999 to 2003.
In October 2017, Blackburn announced her campaign for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Bob Corker in 2018.
Video Marsha Blackburn
Early life and education
Born Marsha Wedgeworth in Laurel, Mississippi, she attended Mississippi State University, earning a B.S. in home economics in 1973. In college, she joined Chi Omega and worked as a student manager for the Southwestern Company, selling books door-to-door. She is a former beauty-pageant winner.
Maps Marsha Blackburn
Early political career
Blackburn's professional career began in 1973 when she was hired as a sales manager for Times Mirror, Inc. In 1975 she was named Director of Retail Fashion and Special Events of the Castner Knott Division of Mercantile Stores, Inc. She held this position until 1978, when she became the owner of Marketing Strategies, a promotion-event management and image consulting firm. She continues to run this business.
Blackburn was a founding member of the Williamson County Young Republicans. She became chair of the Williamson County Republican Party in 1989. Blackburn replaced George Miller. She served as Chair until 1991. Al Nations succeeded her. In 1992, she was a candidate for Congress and a delegate to the 1992 Republican National Convention. She lost the congressional race, but remained active in politics.
In 1995, Blackburn was appointed executive director of the Tennessee Film, Entertainment, and Music Commission by Tennessee governor Don Sundquist, and held that post through 1997. In 1998, she was elected to the Tennessee Senate, where she served for six years and rose to be minority whip.
In 2000, she took part in the effort to prevent the passage of a state income tax championed by Sundquist.
U.S. House of Representatives
Tenure
In 2002, Republican Ed Bryant gave up his seat as representative from Tennessee's 7th District so that he could run for the Senate. Blackburn ran against Democrat Tim Barron for the seat and was overwhelmingly elected. In 2004, she ran unopposed and was re-elected.
In 2006, she successfully ran for a third term in the House of Representatives. In November 2007, she unsuccessfully ran for the position of Republican conference chair.
Blackburn joined Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential campaign as a senior advisor. In May 2007, she resigned her position in the Romney campaign and endorsed former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson for president. She was re-elected in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016.
In April 2018, she signed onto a letter formally nominating President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize "in recognition of his work to end the Korean War, denuclearize the Korean peninsula and bring peace to the region."
Committee assignments
- Committee on Energy and Commerce
- Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, vice chair
- Subcommittee on Communications and the Internet, chair
- Subcommittee on Health Care
- Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, vice chair - Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade
- Select Investigative Panel on Planned Parenthood, chair
Caucus memberships
- Republican Study Committee, former communications chair
- National Republican Congressional Committee, communications chair
- Congressional NextGen 9-1-1 Caucus
She was also a member of the following caucuses:
- Privacy and Data Security Working Group, chair
- Congressional Songwriters Caucus, co-founder, co-chair
- Reliable Energy Caucus
- International Conservation Caucus
Blackburn served as an assistant whip in Congress from 2003 to 2005, and has served as a deputy whip since 2005.
During the 110th Congress she was the communications chair for the Republican Study Committee. She served as a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee for a third consecutive term. In 2008, she won her primary race by gaining 62 percent of the vote against Shelby County registrar of deeds, and fellow former state senator Tom Leatherwood.
In October 2015, Blackburn was selected to lead the Select Investigative Panel on Planned Parenthood.
She has been accused of allowing Comcast and AT&T to establish monopolies throughout Tennessee.
Political campaigns
Redistricting after the 2000 Census moved Blackburn's home from the 6th district into the 7th district. The 6th District's Democratic incumbent congressman, Bart Gordon, had faced three tough races in the 1990s, including a near-defeat in 1994, in part due to the growing Republican trend in Nashville's suburbs. This was especially pronounced in Williamson County, the richest county in the state and the most Republican county in Middle Tennessee. It appeared that the Democratic-controlled Tennessee General Assembly wanted to protect Gordon by moving Williamson County into the already heavily Republican 7th District.
To maintain approximately equal district sizes (as required by Wesberry v. Sanders) and to compensate for the substantial increase in the 7th's population by the addition of Williamson County, the legislature shifted some of the more Democratic parts of Clarksville to the nearby 8th district. This created a district that, in the words of Memphis Magazine, stretched "in reptilian fashion" for 200 miles from eastern Memphis to southwest Nashville. Some parts of the Middle Tennessee portion of the district were only two miles wide.
In 2002, 7th District incumbent Republican congressman Ed Bryant decided to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Fred Thompson. Blackburn entered the primary to replace Bryant--the real contest in this Republican stronghold. Of the four main candidates, she was the only one from the Nashville suburbs. The other three, future state senate majority leader Mark Norris, conservative activist and future U.S. Attorney and Representative David Kustoff, and city councilman Brent Taylor, were all from Memphis and its suburbs. She garnered the endorsement of the conservative Club for Growth. The three Memphians split the vote in that area, allowing her to win the primary by nearly 20 percentage points.
In the general election, she easily defeated Democratic nominee Tim Barron, winning more than 70% of the vote. She was the fourth woman elected to Congress from Tennessee, but the first not to serve as a stand-in for her husband. (Irene Bailey Baker and Louise Reece had served as caretakers after their husbands died in office, and Marilyn Lloyd replaced her husband on the ballot when he died after the primary election.)
She ran unopposed for reelection in 2004, which is somewhat unusual for a freshman member of Congress, even from a district as heavily Republican as the 7th. A 2004 survey of congressional aides by the Washingtonian identified her as one of the three "best newcomers" in the House of Representatives.
Redistricting after the 2010 census made the 7th district more compact; it lost its shares of Nashville and Memphis while regaining all of Clarksville. However, it is no less Republican than its predecessor; with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+18, it is one of the most Republican districts in the South.
2018 United States Senate election
In October 2017, Tennessee governor Bill Haslam, former Knoxville mayor, declined to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker. Shortly after, Blackburn announced her campaign for the seat. In her announcement, she said that House Republicans are frustrated with Senate Republicans who they believe act like Democrats on important issues, including repealing Obamacare. In the announcement of her candidacy, she described herself as a "hard-core, card-carrying Tennessee conservative", said she was "politically incorrect" and noted with pride that liberals have characterized her as a "wing nut". Blackburn dismissed compromise and bipartisanship, saying "No compromise, no apologies." She also said that she carried a gun in her purse.
Early on in the campaign, the retiring incumbent, Bob Corker stirred controversy when he said that Blackburn's opponent, Phil Bredesen, was "a very good mayor, a very good governor, a very good business person", that he had "real appeal" and "crossover appeal", and that the two of them had cooperated well over the years. After Corker's praise for Bredesen, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Corker that such comments could cost the Republican Party its Senate majority. Shortly after Corker's comments, President Trump tweeted an endorsement of Blackburn. She largely backs President Donald Trump's policies, including a U.S.-Mexico border wall, and shares his opinion regarding National Football League national anthem protests. Vice President Mike Pence also endorsed Blackburn a few days later on April 23, 2018. During the campaign, Blackburn pledged to support President Trump's agenda and suggested that her opponent, Bredesen, would not, saying "Do you think Phil Bredesen would vote with crying Chuck Schumer or would he vote with our president when it comes to support our troops and supporting our veterans?"
Both Blackburn and her opponent, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, disclosed in mid-April that they had raised close to $2 million each during the first quarter of the year.
Electoral history
Political positions
In April 2009, an exchange between Blackburn and Vice President Al Gore received significant publicity. During a congressional hearing on energy policy, Blackburn asked Gore, "The legislation that we are discussing here today, is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?". Gore indicated in response that all income he earned from renewable technology investment went to non-profits.
She opposes abortion. In 2013, Blackburn was chosen to manage debate on a bill promoted by House Republicans that would have prohibited abortions after 22 weeks' gestation, with limited exceptions for rape or incest. She replaced the bill's sponsor, congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ), after Franks made controversial claims that the chances of pregnancy resulting from rape were "very low".
At October 2013 congressional hearings on the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as "Obamacare", Blackburn charged the health.gov website violated HIPAA and health information privacy rights. The next day, when a CNN interviewer pointed out that the only health-related question that the web site asks is "do you smoke?", Blackburn repeated her criticism of the site for violating privacy rights.
She scored 100% on American Conservative Union's 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009 Ratings of Congress.
In November, 2016, Blackburn joined Donald Trump's presidential transition team as vice chair. In a November 2, 2016, interview Blackburn advised the transition team to be "very judicious" with their words.
She supported President Donald Trump's 2017 executive order imposing a temporary travel and immigration ban barring the nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., popularly known as the Muslim Ban.
Health care and pharmaceuticals
Blackburn opposed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), stating, with the passage of the bill, "freedom dies a little bit today." She subsequently supported efforts to repeal the legislation, arguing that it "means well" but fails to live up to its promise. In 2017, while arguing for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Blackburn falsely stated that two popular provisions of the Affordable Care Act (protections for individual with preexisting conditions and the provision allowing adult children to be on their parents' health plans until they're 26) were "were two Republican provisions which made it into the [Obamacare] bill." In her declaration that she would run for the Senate in 2018, she said that the failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act was "a disgrace".
Blackburn co-sponsored legislation that revised the legal standard Drug Enforcement Agency to establish "a significant and present risk of death or serious bodily harm that is more likely than not to occur," rather than the previous standard of "imminent danger," before suspending drug shipments. The legislation passed the House and the Senate unanimously, but was criticized in internal agency documents, Justice Department documents, and by the DEA's chief administrative law judge, as hampering DEA enforcement actions against drug distribution companies engaging in black-market sales.
Science and environment
Blackburn rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, saying in 2015 "The jury is still out saying man is the cause for global warming, after the earth started to cool 13 years ago." Blackburn falsely asserted that there is "not consensus" in the scientific community on climate change, and that climate change remains "unproven".
Blackburn rejects the theory of evolution.
Stem cell research
In March 2016, Blackburn chaired the Republican-led Select Investigative Panel, a committee convened to "explore the ethical implications of using fetal tissue in biomedical research". Before expert testimony was heard, however, Democratic opposition objected to subpoenas demanding "names of researchers, technicians and medical personnel involved in fetal tissue handling".
Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky said that Blackburn had abused her position. Subpoenaed biotechnology executives Eugene Gu of the Ganogen Research Institute and Cate Dyer of StemExpress argued in an article in Nature that the panel was intimidating researchers and patients. Gu went on Science Friday on NPR and detailed his experiences living in close proximity to Blackburn's Congressional district and having armed United States Marshals deliver the subpoena to his home.
Telecommunications
Blackburn opposes net neutrality in the United States, referring to it as "socialistic". Blackburn opposes municipal broadband initiatives that aim to compete with Internet service providers. She supported bills that restrict municipalities from creating their own broadband networks, and wrote a bill to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from preempting state laws that blocked municipal broadband.
In early 2017, Blackburn introduced to the House a measure to dismantle an Obama-administration online privacy rule that had been adopted by the FCC in October 2016. Blackburn's measure, which was supported by broadband providers but criticized by privacy advocates, repealed the rule which required broadband providers to obtain consumers' permission before sharing their online data, including browsing histories. The measure passed the House in a party-line vote in March 2017, after a similar measure had been passed by the Senate the same week. She subsequently proposed legislation which expanded the requirement to include internet companies as well as broadband providers.
As of 2017, Blackburn had accepted at least $693,000 in campaign contributions from telecom companies over her career in Congress.
LGBT rights
Blackburn opposes same-sex marriage. She has consistently earned a 0 rating from the Human Rights Campaign. In 2010, Blackburn voted against repealing the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
In 2013, Blackburn voted in favor of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in the House, but voted against the Senate's version of the Act, which expanded VAWA to apply to new groups, such as men in same-sex relationships, as well as to conduct that the original VAWA had not classified as violence, such as stalking. Blackburn argued that increasing the number of targets for VAWA funding would "dilute the money that needs to go into the sexual assault centers, domestic abuse centers, [and] child advocacy centers," and said VAWA ought to remain focused on supporting women's shelters and facilitating law enforcement against crimes against women, rather than addressing other groups or issues.
Blackburn said that the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was "a disappointment. I have always supported traditional marriage. Despite this decision, no one can overrule the truth about what marriage actually is -- a sacred institution between a man and a woman."
Women's issues
In 2009, Backburn voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Personal life
Blackburn is married to Chuck Blackburn, and they live in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville in Williamson County. The couple have two children. Her husband is the founder of the International Bow Tie Society (IBTS). She is a Presbyterian.
She is a member of The C Street Family, a prayer group that includes members of Congress. She is a former member of the Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board.
See also
- Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
- Congressman Marcia Blackburn official U.S. House site
- Marsha Blackburn at Curlie (based on DMOZ)
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- MSNBC transcript, Meet the Press (February 16, 2014).
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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