Jim Moran
James Patrick Moran Jr. from 1991 until 2015.
A member of the Democratic Party, Moran chaired the New Democrat Coalition from 1997 until 2001. He is of Irish descent and is the son of James Moran Sr., a former professional football player, and the brother of Brian Moran, former chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia.
Early life and education
Moran was born in Buffalo, New York, the eldest of seven siblings in a Roman Catholic family of Irish descent. He grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. His parents were Dorothy and James Moran Sr., a professional football player for the Boston Redskins in 1935 and 1936; outside of football he worked as a probation officer. Both his father and mother were Roosevelt Democrats and supporters of the New Deal. Moran attended Marian High School in Framingham, Massachusetts.Moran played college football on an athletic scholarship at the College of the Holy Cross, where his father had been a football star in the early 1930s. Moran received his B.A. in economics in 1967. After attending Baruch College of the City University of New York from 1967 to 1968, he received a Master of Public Administration from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970.
Career
After college, Moran followed his father's footstep to become an amateur boxer. During a campaign in 1992, he admitted that he had used marijuana during his early 20s. Following a brief career as a stockbroker, Moran moved to Washington, D.C.Moran worked for five years at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as a budget officer before serving as a senior specialist for budgetary and fiscal policy at the Library of Congress. From 1976 to 1979, he was on the staff of U.S. Senate Committee on Approrpriations.
In 1979, Moran was elected to the City Council of Alexandria, Virginia. From 1982 to 1984, he was deputy mayor. In 1984, he resigned as part of a nolo contendere plea bargain to a misdemeanor conflict of interest charge, which courts later erased. The incident stemmed from charges that Moran had used money from a political action committee to rent a tuxedo and buy Christmas cards; both of which were later judged by the Commonwealth Attorney to "fit the definition of constituent services", and were dismissed.
In 1985, Moran was elected mayor of Alexandria, Virginia. He was reelected in 1988, and resigned after he was elected to Congress in November 1990.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
In 1990, Moran first won election to the United States House of Representatives, defeating five-term Republican incumbent Stan Parris. During the campaign, Parris, referring to the issue of the Gulf War, said, "The only three people I know who support Saddam Hussein's position are Moammar Gadhafi, Yasser Arafat, and Jim Moran." Moran angrily responded by saying that Parris was "a deceitful, fatuous jerk", and that he wanted "to break his nose". Moran's well-financed campaign also focused on Parris' opposition to abortion. Moran upset Parris, winning by 7.1 percent. He was sworn into office in January 1991.In the next two elections, Moran faced Republican lawyer Kyle McSlarrow. During the 1992 campaign, McSlarrow accused Moran of "lying to the public". Moran responded by portraying McSlarrow as a drug abuser, referring to the candidate's admitted use of cocaine and marijuana while at the University of Virginia. Moran compared McSlarrow to Parris, saying that Parris had "en times more integrity than McSlarrow. He didn't create lies." Moran defeated McSlarrow with 56 percent of the vote. He was helped by the 1990s redistricting, which cut out some of the more Republican-leaning areas of his district.
In 1994, Moran's daughter Dorothy was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. During the campaign, neither Moran nor McSlarrow used the negative tactics of two years earlier. On his campaign strategy that election, McSlarrow said "It would not be a community service to shut down this campaign, but I probably will not talk much about Moran." Moran was reelected with 59 percent of the vote.
In 1998 and 2000, Moran faced Republican and flat tax advocate Demaris H. Miller. In the 1998 campaign Miller accused Moran of flip-flopping in his support of President Bill Clinton, after Moran, who had been a vocal supporter of the Clinton White House, voted in favor of opening an impeachment inquiry following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
In 2002, Moran defeated Republican S. C. Tate and Independent R. V. Crickenberger.
In June 2004, Moran, for the first time since his election in 1990, had a Democratic opponent in a primary. Moran defeated Alexandria attorney Andrew M. Rosenberg, 59% to 41%. In November, he defeated Republican Lisa Marie Cheney.
In 2006, Moran defeated Republican challenger T. M. Odonoghue and Independent J. T. Hurysz.
In 2008, Moran again had a primary challenger; he won with 86% of the vote. In the general election, Moran faced Republican Mark Ellmore and Independent Green Ron Fisher. He won with 68 percent of the vote to Elmore's 30 percent. In November 2009, Ellmore announced he would again challenge Moran, but dropped out of the race four months later. In the June 2010 Republican primary, attorney Matthew Berry narrowly lost to retired U.S. Army Colonel Jay Patrick Murray, after a last-minute mailing attacking Berry's homosexuality. Fisher again was on the ballot. During the campaign, Moran was criticized by military advocacy groups and conservatives for saying, at a local Democratic committee meeting, that Murray had not "served or performed any kind of public service". Moran responded by commending Murray's military service, while saying that he used the phrase in relation to Murray not having engaged in "local civic engagement" and not having served in local office. In November 2010, Moran was re-elected to an eleventh term with 61% of the vote.
In 2012, Moran faced another primary challenge, from Navy veteran Bruce Shuttleworth. A controversy erupted when the Democratic Party of Virginia disqualified Shuttleworth, saying he had fallen 17 signatures short of the 1,000 threshold required. Shuttleworth cried foul and filed a federal lawsuit; the party then allowed Shuttleworth on the ballot. Moran went on to win by a sizable margin. In November, Moran defeated Republican J. Patrick Murray, Independent Jason J. Howell, and Independent Green Janet Murphy, winning 64% of the vote.
Tenure
Moran represented Virginia's 8th congressional district, an area in Northern Virginia that is just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.; the district includes Arlington county, and the cities of Alexandria, Falls Church and parts of Fairfax County. The redistricting that followed the 2000 census also gave Moran a portion of Reston, Virginia. His district is located in the Dulles Technology Corridor and is the home of many federal defense contractors as well as a significant number of those who work in the information technology industry. Many federal employees also reside within the district, mostly due to its proximity to Washington and because the United States Department of Defense and various other agencies are headquartered there.During the mid-1990s, Moran co-founded and later co-chaired the New Democrat Coalition, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers who consider themselves to be moderates with regard to commerce, budgeting, and economic legislation, but vote as liberals on social issues. Moran was also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus operating within the Democratic caucus, which works to advance progressive issues and opinions. He joined the caucus prior to the 111th Congress.
1990s
In 1995, Moran and California Republican Duke Cunningham had to be restrained by the Capitol Police after a shoving match on the house floor over President Bill Clinton's decision to send U.S. troops to Bosnia. "I thought he had been bullying too many people for too long, and I told him so... He said he didn't mean to be so accusatory... After that, he would bring me candy from California", Moran claimed.During the final years of the Clinton administration, Moran was critical of the President. In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Moran was one of only 31 House Democrats to support launching a formal impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton. In August 1998, he told Time magazine that, "This whole sordid mess is just too tawdry and tedious and embarrassing... It's like a novel that just became too full of juicy parts and bizarre, sleazy characters." Moran is also reported to have told First Lady Hillary Clinton that if she had been his sister, he would have punched her husband in the nose. Moran eventually decided not to vote for impeachment, explaining that Clinton had not compromised the country's security, and that he still respected him for what he had accomplished as president. Moran proposed a resolution demanding that Clinton confess to a pattern of "dishonest and illegal conduct" surrounding his sexual involvement with Monica Lewinsky.
21st century
Moran was voted High Technology Legislator of the Year by the Information Technology Industry Council and was voted into the American Electronics Association Hall of Fame for his work on avoiding the Year 2000 crisis and his support of the IT Industry and defense contractors in Northern Virginia. He cosponsored failed bills in 2005 to provide the District of Columbia with a House seat and to prohibit slaughter of horses.On April 28, 2006, Moran, along with four other members of Congress, and six other activists, were arrested for disorderly conduct in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C., and spent 45 minutes in a jail cell before being released. They were protesting the alleged role of Sudan's government in ethnic cleansing in Darfur. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Their protest and civil disobedience was designed to embarrass the military dictatorship's ongoing genocide of its non-Arab citizens."
The day after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, Moran told a local radio station that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban should be reinstated, blaming the National Rifle Association of America and President George W. Bush for blocking gun control legislation. He further warned that if gun control legislation was not passed, then shootings such as the one at Virginia Tech will happen "time and time again." He later dismissed charges that he was politicizing the shooting, telling Politico that "as a legislator, your immediate reaction is to think something could be done to avoid this. I don't know why the idea of figuring out how to avoid it is a political partisan issue."
Shortly before the June 2008 Virginia Democratic primary, Moran endorsed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for the presidency over New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton. Explaining his endorsement, he told a local newspaper that the long-term goal of closing Alexandria's coal-fired power plant would be more attainable under Obama than under Clinton. Obama won the Virginia primary, and carried the state when he won the general election in November.
In May 2009, Moran introduced a bill that would restrict broadcast advertisements for erectile dysfunction or male enhancement medication. He said that such ads were indecent and should be prohibited on radio and television between the hours of 6 am and 10 pm, in accordance with Federal Communications Commission policy. Later that year, Moran and former presidential candidate and former Governor of Vermont Howard Dean held a town hall meeting on the issue of health care at South Lakes High School in Reston, Virginia. The meeting was interrupted several times by protesters, most notably anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, who, along with about half a dozen supporters, caused such a commotion that he had to be escorted out by police. The incident was replayed several times over the next few weeks on television as an example of the tension at town halls that fall.
In February 2010, on the House floor, Moran called for the repeal of Don't ask, don't tell, the military policy of discharging soldiers on active duty who are openly homosexual. He spoke about a letter penned by a gay soldier who was then serving in the Afghanistan War, who had "learned that a fellow soldier was also gay, only after he was killed by an IED in Iraq. The partner of the deceased soldier wrote the unit to say how much the victim had loved the military; how they were the only family he had ever known... This immutable human trait, sexual orientation, like the color of one's skin, does not affect one's integrity, their honor, our commitment to their country. Soldiers serving their country in combat should not have their sacrifices compounded by having to struggle with an antiquated "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. Let's do the right and honorable thing and repeal this policy."
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Moran worked to allocate federal funding to projects in Northern Virginia, usually in the technology and defense industries. He also assisted in authorizing the replacement of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge, a bridge between Alexandria, Virginia, and Prince George's County, Maryland, which had gained a reputation over the years among Northern Virginia residents as the site of numerous rush-hour traffic jams.
On March 9, 2010, Moran was named to succeed Norm Dicks of Washington as the chairman of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee. The chairmanship gave Moran authority over appropriations to the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts; among other things. Moran said he was excited to be able to play a role in protecting the environment and conserving natural resources.