Who is Joe Scarborough?

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Who is Joe Scarborough?

Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is the new head of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Civil Service, the panel charged with initiating legislation and overseeing federal employees' pay and benefits. Scarborough represents Florida's First District, tucked in the state's panhandle.

Here is a detailed biography from the Almanac of American Politics, which is published by National Journal Group, Inc.

The congressman from the 1st is Joe Scarborough, a Republican first elected in 1994. Scarborough grew up in Pensacola and after school ran a beauty contest company and then practiced law and was active in community affairs. In October 1993 he helped collect 3,000 signatures to protest the city government's 65% property tax increase. He had never run for office, but had long been interested in politics: his family remembers him at five, in 1968, coloring in states red and blue depending on whether they went Democratic or Republican. When Democratic Congressman Earl Hutto, a conservative elected with only 52% in 1990 and 1992, decided to retire, Scarborough ran for Congress. He was one of five Republicans in the race, and far from the best known. The best-known Republican was Lois Benson, a one-term legislator and four-year Pensacola Council member, generally conservative but pro-choice on abortion. She won 31.4% in the primary, but Scarborough, conservative and anti-abortion, built on petition contacts and bought 30-minute cable broadcasts and received 30.6%; in October he won the runoff 54%-46%.

His Democratic opponent, Vince Whibbs Jr., was just the kind of politician who had held such conservative seats for years -- the son of a long-time Pensacola mayor, a Marine veteran and local businessman and lawyer, an opponent of gun control, supporter of school prayer and the balanced budget amendment. "I've never voted for a Democrat," Whibbs said, but added that he could do more for the district as part of the Democratic majority. Scarborough, in contrast, said, "The federal government should protect our shores and get out of citizens' way." He talked about "retaking America" and returning to the small government of Jefferson and Madison. "We need to send someone who will say 'no' when everyone else is saying 'yes."' He advocated a five-year federal spending freeze, school vouchers and tax credits for home schoolers and a ban on offshore oil drilling. Voters here were looking not for favors from a Democratic Congress but for new policies from a Republican Congress. Scarborough won by the whopping margin of 62%-38%.

Scarborough fit in happily in the new Republican Congress. His fellow freshmen elected him their political director and new Speaker Newt Gingrich named him to head a Republican task force on education. He continued prodding Gingrich and other leaders to be more aggressive, casting one of 10 Republican protest votes against the FY96 budget and urging intransigence in budget negotiations in December 1995. Scarborough was not all stereotype. One of the youngest freshmen, he kept a coonskin cap in his office and liked to wear jeans on Fridays. He called for ending corporate welfare, including royalty relief for offshore oil drillers and aid to large tobacco and sugar companies. He sponsored a bill to force the United States to leave the United Nations after a four-year transition, saying it was "a passive bystander, an expensive toy but hardly a critical tool." He opposed offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1996 Scarborough had desultory opposition and won with 73% of the vote, the second highest for a House Republican in a contested race. Unchastised, it would seem, by the 1996 results, he was elected co-chairman of the New Federalists in the 105th Congress.