Jim Leach
- This page is about a former Congressman from Iowa and now Director of Harvard University Institute of Politics at Kennedy School of Government. For other people named James Leach, please see James Leach (disambiguation).
| Jim Leach | |
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| In office 1977–2007 |
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| Preceded by | Jim Nussle |
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| Succeeded by | David Loebsack |
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| Born | October 15 1942 Davenport, Iowa |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse | Elisabeth (Deba) Leach |
| Religion | Episcopalian |
James Albert Smith (Jim) Leach (born October 15 1942), is the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. On September 17, 2007, he was named the interim director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a position he is expected to hold until a permanent director is located after the 2007-2008 academic year. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, this American politician served 30 years as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. In Congress he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He represented the 2nd district of Iowa in the state's east central and southeast area from 1977 to 2007 (previously the 1st district from 1977–2003).
Legislation Leach authored spanned the gamut from creation of an international AIDS Trust Fund to debt relief for the world’s poorest countries; from authorization of an IMF quota increase to making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency; from requiring the federal government to use soy ink to prohibiting Internet gambling; from restraining federal employee growth to redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.
The legislation he is perhaps best known for is Gramm-Leach-Bliley which is considered one of the seminal pieces of banking legislation of the 20th Century, second in import only to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, and won the 1960 state wrestling championship at the 138-pound weight class for Davenport High School. He was educated at Princeton University (where he became a member of The Ivy Club), Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. He then entered the United States Foreign Service and served as a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the U.N. General Assembly. In 1973, Leach resigned his commission in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre when Richard Nixon fired his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and the independent counsel investigating the Watergate break-in, Archibald Cox.
After returning to Iowa to head a family business, Leach was elected in 1976 to Congress (defeating two-term Democrat Edward Mezvinsky) where he came to be a leader of a small band of moderate Republicans. He chaired two national organizations dedicated to moderate Republican causes – the Ripon Society and the Republican Mainstream Committee. He also served as president of the largest international association of legislators – Parliamentarians for Global Action. He was reelected 14 times.
During his 15 terms in Congress, Leach’s voting record was generally restrained on
While he supported the first Gulf War in 1991, Leach voted against the authorization to use force against Iraq in 2002. Once the Congress committed to war, however, he held that it would be folly to assume it could be funded with tax cuts and therefore he was the only Republican to vote against the 2003 tax cut.
A member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, Leach maintained one of the most environmentally sensitive voting records of any member of Congress. His bill to end logging on federal lands never mustered enough support to reach the House floor. Nevertheless, the movement to support it began to have an impact in the development of public parks policies in Congress. In the years to come more members may come to recognize the bizarre stewardship circumstance, described by Leach in a New York Times op-ed, that the U.S. government is the only landlord in America that pays to have its resources denuded.
Serving 18 years in the minority and 12 in the majority, on the abortion trigger issue Leach took a singular path that had a cohesive logic but managed to dissatisfy activists on all sides. He supported the right of choice except during the third trimester but also held that public funding represented a complicit infringement on the values of too many Americans to be defensible. A supporter of stem cell research, he believed little could be more pro-life than invigorating science to advance cures to extend and ennoble life itself.
Leach’s political career was hallmarked by concern for democratic process issues. He championed campaign reform and pressed unsuccessfully for a system of partial public financing of elections whereby small contributions could be matched by federal funds with accompanying limits on the amounts that could be spent in campaigns including the personal resources candidates could put in their own races. In his own campaigns Leach refused to accept political action committee or out-of-state assistance and placed limits on what individuals might give.
Leach was never comfortable with the partisan confrontations that increasingly came to characterize Congress. He concentrated on issues rather than what he described as the game of politics and believed in working constructively with committee leadership as it existed rather than what he might have preferred. As a member of the minority he became known for the development of three unique, unusually substantive reports – one in the 1980s calling for a more progressive approach to Central American politics; a second in the early 1990s on reforming the United Nations written for a national commission he legislatively established and later chaired; and the third issued when he was ranking minority member of the Banking Committee on the challenges of regulating derivatives.
Ironically, Leach came to have more differences on ethical issues with several of his own party leaders than Democratic Speakers like Tip O’Neill and Tom Foley. In the wake of a 1996 Ethics Committee probe of then Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, which cited the Speaker for providing false information under oath to a House committee, Leach broke ranks with tradition and voted against his party’s nominee for Speaker in the subsequent Congress. In one of the few occasions in the 20th Century when any party division was recorded on the initial leadership organizing votes on the House floor, he voted for the former Republican leader, Bob Michel, and received two votes himself, causing Leach to take a distant third in the contest for Speaker of the 105th Congress behind Gingrich and the Democratic nominee, Dick Gephardt.
Leach played a pivotal role in the House’s investigation of the Whitewater scandal. In the 1980s he had objected to political misjudgments that lengthened and deepened losses in the Savings & Loan industry. Accordingly, he felt there should be accountability outside and within the financial services industry. Because criminal referrals had been lodged by a federal agency against the Clintons and their partners in a real estate venture for their role in the failure of a modest-sized Arkansas S&L, Leach as chairman of the House Banking Committee held 4 days of hearings (all in the same week) on the causes and consequences of the failure. While federal taxpayer losses (approximately $70 million) associated with this particular S&L were not as large as with bigger institutions around the country, no S&L anywhere failed with a higher percentage of losses relative to assets than the one in Arkansas.
In the end, the Independent Counsel wrought more than 50 criminal convictions related to the failed S&L, including cases against Clinton’s successor Governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and his business partners in Whitewater.
Leach believed in the appropriateness of public disclosure but never thought the crimes surrounding the failure of the Whitewater-tied S&L should have been considered in an impeachment framework because the Constitution precisely holds that the impeachment process relates to acts committed in federal office. Like many in Congress, he was surprised that the Justice Department chose to refer certain sex related charges to Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Independent Counsel, and even more so when Starr chose subsequently to refer certain of them to the Congress. But in what he described as a close judgment call Leach voted for the article of impeachment that related to felonious lying under oath.
2006
Based on prior Presidential voting, Leach in 2006 represented the most Democratic district in the country held by a Republican. In conjunction with a Democratic tide which swept Eastern Iowa in the election, there were two tipping factors in Leach’s defeat.
The first related to his refusal to allow Republican Party activists to distribute an anti-gay mailing. When Leach told the Republican National Chairman that he would not caucus with the party if they proceeded with such divisive tactics, social conservatives were offended and refused to back him.
Internet Gambling
The second related to his success just before adjournment in passing H.R. 4411, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act The Unlawful Internet Gambling and Enforcement Act. Gambling interests ganged up against him during the election and contended the bill had passed without hearings. [1] Actually it had been subject to extensive hearings over several Congresses, especially on the House side where both the Financial Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee had shared jurisdiction. [2] Leach argued that Internet gambling weakened the economy and jeopardized the social fabric of the family.
The irony is that conservative family groups ended up opposing the member who passed the most pro-family bill in the past decade and gambling interests are now making a run at overturning the measure in this Congress claiming that they have polling data indicating that their opposition was responsible for defeating Leach.
Leach today
After his defeat, Leach’s name was floated as a potential replacement to John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. On December 8 2006, Leach’s House colleagues Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) and Jim Walsh (R-New York) sent a letter to President Bush urging the President to nominate Leach for the post. However, the nomination instead went to the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Today Leach teaches at Princeton and serves on the board of several public companies and three non-profit organizations – the
Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of
the
Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received decorations from two foreign governments. He is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edger Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. A three-sport athlete in college, Leach was elected to the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the International Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.
On September 17 2007, Leach was named as Interim Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government after former director Jeanne Shaheen left to pursue a U.S. Senate seat in New Hampshire.
Leach resides in Iowa City and Princeton with his wife Elisabeth (Deba), son Gallagher, and daughter Jenny.
References
External Links
- Jim Leach at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
- 2004 campaign finance data
- Voting record maintained by the Washington Post
- June 21, 2007 speech by Leach on US foreign policy to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, MP3
| Preceded by Edward Mezvinsky |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 1st congressional district 1977–2003 |
Succeeded by Jim Nussle |
| Preceded by Jim Nussle |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 2nd congressional district 2003–2007 |
Succeeded by Dave Loebsack |
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