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Diana DeGette

Diana Louise DeGette (born July 29 1957), is a politician from the U.S. state of Colorado. She has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1997, representing (US-Congressional-District-CO-1.PNG). The district is based in Denver. She is also the Chief Deputy Whip in the 110th Congress after the House Majority Whip James Clyburn. DeGette is of Irish and Eastern European descent; she is married to Lino Lipinsky, a partner in the law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge, and she has two daughters.

Political Career

A fourth-generation Coloradan, DeGette was born in Tachikawa, Japan while her father served in the armed forces. She graduated with honors from Colorado College where she was elected to the prestigious Pi Gamma Mu international honor society in 1979, and earned a Juris Doctor degree from New York University in 1982. She then returned to Denver and began a successful law practice focusing on civil rights and employment litigation.

Long active in Denver politics, she was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in 1992. She was reelected in 1994 and chosen as assistant minority leader. She authored a law that guarantees Colorado women unobstructed access to abortion clinics and other medical care facilities, popularly known as the "Bubble Bill". The United States Supreme Court found DeGette's "Bubble Bill" constitutional in Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703 (2000). She also authored the state Voluntary Cleanup and Redevelopment Act, a model for similar cleanup programs.

1st District Congresswoman Pat Schroeder didn't run for a 13th term in 1996. DeGette's principal opponent in the 1996 primary was former City Council member Tim Sandos, whom Denver Mayor Wellington Webb endorsed shortly before the primary. DeGette won the primary with 55 percent of the vote, which all but assured her of election in the heavily Democratic district (the 1st District has been in Democratic hands for all but six years since 1933). Schroeder, who stayed neutral during the primary, endorsed DeGette once DeGette became the Democratic nominee. DeGette won in November 1996 with 57 percent and has been reelected four times against token Republican opposition. She won a fifth term in 2004 with a district-record 76 percent, and did not face major-party opposition in 2006.

In Congress, she serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee, where she is the only Coloradan. She also serves as the co-chair of the Congressional Diabetes Caucus and the Pro-Choice caucus. She has risen through the ranks of the Democratic leadership and now serves as a chief deputy whip. With the Democrats' victory in the 2006 midterm elections, DeGette briefly considered running for House Majority Whip, but bowed out in favor of Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. Still, her membership on the Energy and Commerce Committee — one of the "exclusive" committees of the House — will make her the most powerful Coloradan in the 110th Congress.

DeGette received national attention in 2005, when the House of Representatives passed her legislation to lift President Bush's limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. DeGette, who had had been working on the measure since 2001, enlisted the support of Representative Michael N. Castle (Republican from Delaware), who became DeGette's principal Republican cosponsor of the legislation. The DeGette-Castle bill passed the Senate on July 18 2006. President Bush vetoed the bill the next day — his first veto.

In 2007, DeGette served as the House Democrats' designated whip on the bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program (HR 3162). Although President Bush announced his opposition to the legislation, the House passed the bill on August 1, 2007 by a vote of 225 to 204. The Senate adopted a different version of the legislation the next day.

DeGette was also instrumental in the passage of the Udall Amendment to the House Energy Bill, which the House approved by a vote of 220 to 190 on August 4, 2007. The Amendment creates a national Renewable Energy Standard that requires electric suppliers to produce 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources, 4 percent of which can come from efficiency, by the year 2020. DeGette was a leading cosponsor of, and lead whip for, the Amendment.

On September 12, 2007, DeGette announced that she would introduce the Colorado Wilderness Act of 2007 in Congress the next week. If passed, DeGette's bill would protect 62 separate areas across Colorado, making up nearly of public lands and wilderness.

She is a cosponsor of legislation to provide the District of Columbia voting representation.

On January 24, 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Representative DeGette to the House Page Board.

On November 26, 2007, DeGette announced her endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton for president, and was named national co-chair of Clinton's Health Care Policy Task Force and adviser on stem-cell research. DeGette is a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August 2008.

Books

On August 4, 2008, DeGette's first book Sex, Science, and Stem Cells (book's website), was released by The Lyons Press. In this work, DeGette claims that there are "110 million Americans suffering from diseases who stood to gain from potential applications" of stem-cell science. She goes on to claim that "Over time, I realized that the politicization of science by the Republicans and the religious right was at its most insidious over any issue relating to human reproduction....This brought me to the inevitable conclusion that too many of our elected officials are simply incapable of thinking rationally about sex. I could think of no other explanation.