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        <title><![CDATA[Cory Booker - Chief Deputy Whip/Senator:New Jersey]]></title>
        <description><![CDATA[
By Kenneth P. Doyle
     (Bloomberg Government) -- Cory Booker likes to talk about
how government should be driven by a “conspiracy of love” for
everyone, but the liberal Democrat found that philosophy sorely
tested in the era of President Donald Trump with Republicans in
the Senate majority.
     With Democrats holding the White House and a narrow Senate
majority, Booker is part of a broad-based leadership team
assembled by Majority Leaders Chuck Schumer, serving as Vice
Chair of the Policy and Communications Committee of the
Democratic Caucus.
     Though he failed to gain traction in the 2020 Democratic
presidential primaries he remained popular in New Jersey, which
re-elected him to the Senate with 57% of the vote after he
dropped out of the presidential race. He returned to Capitol
Hill for third term with a higher profile and an ally in the
White House.
     “I love Joe Biden,” Booker told CBS after endorsing Biden
in 2020. “Some of my biggest issues, like criminal justice
reform, like racial justice, like economic justice, he is going
to be a strong leader on that.”

              Committee and Legislative Highlights


* Booker drew bipartisan praise for his work on a 2018 criminal
justice law that reduces sentences for nonviolent offenders and
offers job training for prisoners to help them succeed once
released. It was “perhaps one of the greatest honors of my life,
easily one of the greatest honors as a senator,” he said on the
Senate floor. Schumer now is backing Booker’s proposal to
legalize marijuana, which Booker said “is necessary to right the
wrongs of our failed drug war and end decades of harm inflicted
on communities of color.”
* Booker has used his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee
to highlight criminal justice changes. He’s also a member of the
Foreign Relations Committee, Small Business Committee, and
Agriculture Committee, where he chairs the subcommittee Food and
Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics, and Research. When named
to that position at the beginning of the 117th Congress, Booker
said he would work to reform a “fundamentally broken” food
system that favors big agriculture conglomerates while “family
farmers continue to struggle and tens of millions of families
face food insecurity and a lack of access to affordable,
nutritious food.”
 


                    Politics and Personality


* Booker hardened his liberal profile during Trump’s presidency.
He was among five Democrats who voted against an agreement on
government spending and border security that prevented a partial
government shutdown and 16 Democrats who voted against a
bipartisan deal to end a brief shutdown brought on largely by a
deadlock over efforts to extend protections to “Dreamers” --
young people brought to the country illegally by their parents.
* Previously, he went to great lengths to show commitment to
bipartisanship as mayor of Newark and during his early days in
the Senate. However, Booker has always been a reliable
Democratic vote who gets high marks from liberal groups.
* Booker has been a steadfast advocate for New Jersey, where he
grew up, assailing Trump administration proposals to open some
U.S. coastal waters, including those off New Jersey, to oil and
gas drilling. He’s also working to get federal funding for a
long-delayed, massive project to build new railroad tunnels
connecting New York and New Jersey.
 


                         Road to Office

     Booker says his interest in public service began early. As
the family story goes, while riding in his parents’ car to
church services in Newark one Sunday in the 1970s, he spotted a
man painting and asked his father whether the family could help
coat the whole decaying city.
     His hometown, Harrington Park, is 28 miles north of Newark.
The family drove into the city each Sunday because there were no
black Baptist churches in their suburb. The Bookers — IBM
executives Cary and Carolyn and their sons, Cary and Cory — were
among its few Black residents.
     His parents’ own childhoods in the South weren’t so
privileged, and they raised their sons on their stories of
civil-rights activism: marching and boycotting for civil rights
in the 1960s and, when they were transferred by IBM to the New
York area, threatening a lawsuit when a real-estate agent tried
to steer them out of an area where they were interested in
purchasing a home.
     The elder Booker lived to see his son become mayor of
Newark, and died just six days before the 2013 Senate special
election after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease.
     Booker attended Stanford University, where he played tight
end on the football team, was elected senior class president and
earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s
degree in sociology. After attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar,
Booker got a law degree from Yale.
     In 1996, while still at Yale, Cory Booker moved to Newark,
where one-third of the residents live in poverty. After
graduation he became an attorney for the Urban Justice Center, a
New York City-based legal service for the poor.
     “I’m the only senator who goes home to a low-income, inner-
city community,” Booker said in his presidential campaign
announcement video.
     He won election to the Newark City Council in 1998, when he
was 29. After one unsuccessful try for mayor, he was elected to
that office 2006. Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark was
punctuated by high-profile events, including his successful
lawsuit against the previous administration’s redevelopment
actions, an aborted assassination plot against him, and efforts
to get guns off the city’s streets. He also made headlines when
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to improve
Newark’s schools.
     He describes himself as a master networker, and some of his
best connections have been classmates from Stanford. Some of
those pals flourished in finance or technology, particularly
social media. They were his entree to national exposure and a
campaign financing pipeline that included Oprah Winfrey, Steven
Spielberg and Ben Affleck, along with Netscape founder Marc
Andreessen and Christie Walton, an heiress to the Wal-Mart
fortune.
     As mayor, he refused to officiate at weddings as long as
same-sex couples in the state didn’t have the same right to
marry. That changed in October 2014, when he officiated for
seven gay and two heterosexual couples on the first day of legal
same-sex marriage in New Jersey.
     In December 2012, Booker declared his intention to run for
the Senate, even though the incumbent, Lautenberg, then 88 years
old, hadn’t declared a readiness to make way. Lautenberg
announced in February 2013 that he didn’t plan to run again and
died later that year. Gov. Chris Christie appointed a fellow
Republican, Jeff Chiesa, who had been serving as New Jersey
attorney general. Booker won a Democratic primary, handily
defeated three challengers — two U.S. House members and a state
Assembly Speaker. He went on to defeat Republican Steve Lonegan,
a former mayor of a small Bergen County borough, in a special
election to fill Lautenberg’s seat in October 2013.
     Booker easily won a full six-year term in 2014 over
Republican Jeff Bell, a longtime conservative activist. He was
re-elected again in 2020, defeating Republican challenger Rik
Mehta, a former consumer safety officer for the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration.

                         Personal Note

     Booker has never been married and has guarded his private
life. But he confirmed in 2019 he’s been in a relationship in
recent years with actress Rosario Dawson.
     “Both of us, you know, we’ve had relationships, but I’m not
sure if I’ve ever fully given myself over to a relationship as
much as I have with her and allowed myself to be as vulnerable,”
Booker told the Washington Post.
     Updated April 21, 2021
     To contact the reporter on this story: Kenneth P. Doyle in
Washington at kdoyle@bgov.com
     To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bennett
Roth at broth@bgov.com

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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The New York Fed Needs a New Perspective]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[For its next president, the bank should look to Main Street, not Wall Street.]]></description>
            <link>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-26/cory-booker-new-york-fed-president-needs-a-new-perspective</link>
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            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Cory Booker]]></dc:creator>
            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Mar 2018 09:00:24 GMT</pubDate>
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                <media:description>NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, SEPTEMBER 16: Outside view of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on September 16, 2013 in New York City. European stock markets rallied and the US dollar slid after former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers  withdrew his candidacy for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. (Photo by Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)</media:description>
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