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        <title><![CDATA[Earl F Blumenauer - Former Representative: Oregon]]></title>
        <description><![CDATA[
By Vignesh Ramachandran
     (Bloomberg Government) -- He’s almost never without his
signature bowtie and bicycle lapel pin — the latter a stylistic
flourish that underscores Earl Blumenauer’s advocacy for his
bike-friendly hometown of Portland.
     Blumenauer, who had a long career in state and local
politics before his election to Congress in 1996, wants an
alternative vision to address eclectic issues including
transportation infrastructure, marijuana legalization, climate
change, animal rights, health care and food policy.
     Transportation and scrapping punitive marijuana policies
are among Blumenauer’s top priorities in the 117th Congress.
     An avid bicyclist who served on the Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee since his first decade in the House,
Blumenauer has pushed for funding for projects such as
streetcars and bicycle lanes in Portland, Oregon’s largest city.
He called Portland, with its mix of transit, parks and dense
urban development, “a national laboratory for livability.” A
bridge that connects two of Portland’s fastest growing
neighborhoods — Lloyd and the Central Eastside — over Interstate
84 is under construction and will be named after Blumenauer.
     Blumenauer co-chairs the Congressional Bike Caucus with
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.). The caucus promotes safer streets,
pro-bike policies and livable communities. He has written bills
to create tax credits for electric bicycles, to fund local
“Vision Zero” road safety initiatives, and to encourage transit-
oriented development.
     He rode a bicycle to his first White House meeting in 1996,
and cycles to work most days. “I’ve burned hundreds of thousands
of calories. I’ve never had to look for a parking space. I’ve
never been stuck in traffic,” he said.
     Even before President Joe Biden launched his effort for
major federal investment in infrastructure, Blumenauer was
prodding Congress to enact a long-term transportation funding
plan after dozens of short-term patches. He has repeatedly
advocated for legislation that would increase the federal motor
fuels tax, which hasn’t been increased since 1993.
     Blumenauer often reminds his colleagues that Ronald Reagan
in 1982 called for a gas tax increase to resurface highways and
repair bridges. He once brought a life-sized cutout of the
Republican president to a House floor speech advocating for more
robust transportation funding. Blumenauer has advocated for an
infrastructure subcommittee to be added to the Ways and Means
Committee, where he’s a senior member.
     Marijuana legalization is a decades-long priority for
Blumenauer, who represents a state where both medical and
recreational cannabis are legal. As a young state legislator in
the 1970s, Blumenauer voted to decriminalize the drug.
Blumenauer says he’s more optimistic than ever for federal
marijuana regulation changes in the 117th Congress, and he
believes it can bring both parties together. Blumenauer is
founder and co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus.
     “One of the nice things about reform of our cannabis laws
is this is an area that doesn’t have to be intensely partisan,”
he told MJBizDaily, a cannabis industry news site. “This is an
area where voters in red states have spoken, as well as New
Jersey and Oregon.” He has applauded efforts that provide
legitimate cannabis businesses access to banking. Financial
institutions also want to provide banking services to what’s
become a “multi-billion dollar enterprise” but the federal
government “has an absolutely insane policy to deny these
businesses that are legal at the state level from having access
to financial services,” Blumenauer said on Bloomberg Television
in February 2019.
     Even though President Biden remains an opponent of
marijuana legalization, Blumenauer believes Biden likely carried
Arizona in the 2020 election because of voter turnout to support
a cannabis legalization ballot measure. “The American public has
signaled what they want,” Blumenauer told the Willamette Week in
a Dec. 2020 interview. “The polls at the ballot box are the most
compelling.”

               Committee & Legislative Highlights


* Assuming the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee’s
Trade Subcommittee in 2019, Blumenauer was key member of the
working group on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that
President Donald Trump signed in Jan. 2020. Oregon is a trade-
dependent state, including the corporate headquarters of Nike
Inc. and Columbia Sportswear Co. and the American headquarters
of Adidas AG; chipmaker Intel Corp. is a big employer, too.
* Blumenauer joined forced with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)
to reintroduce legislation to eliminate qualified immunity that
shields government officials, including police officers, from
civil suits unless it can be shown they violated a clearly
established constitutional right. “From Oregon to Massachusetts,
we have repeatedly seen our country’s policing system, and then
the justice system, fail people of color,” Blumenauer said in a
statement. “Enough is enough. Systematic change is long
overdue.”
* In 2021, Blumenauer introduced a bill to reinstate a tax that
requires polluters to pay for the cleanup of toxic and hazardous
waste sites, funding what’s known as the Hazardous Substance
Superfund. “By renewing the Superfund tax, the industries that
had a hand in creating the problem — not taxpayers — will once
again be held accountable for cleaning it up,” Blumenauer said
in a statement. Blumenauer has also championed legislation to
eliminate provisions in the tax code that benefit oil and gas
companies.
* During the COVID-19 pandemic, Blumenauer first proposed a bill
to help struggling restaurants affected by coronavirus
restrictions and safety. The 2021 American Rescue Plan included
a $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund, but there was
more demand than funding available and Blumenauer has worked
with other legislators to determine how to increase funding.
 


                     Politics & Personality


* Blumenauer is a leading advocate of a Green New Deal to
mitigate climate change, introducing the original legislation
with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “Our climate is in
a crisis, and we need big ideas and massive energy to create the
movement that will address it,” he said in a 2019 press release
unveiling the initial proposal. In 2021, Blumenauer unveiled
legislation for declaring a national climate emergency with Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ocasio-Cortez. 
* Although he represents a mostly urban district, Blumenauer has
referred to the farm bill as the “most important yet
underappreciated piece of federal legislation Congress regularly
considers” because of its effects on “human health, nutrition,
carbon reduction, economic development, land conservation, and
animal welfare.” He also has worked on animal welfare
legislation and changing how reauthorizations of farm programs
treat farmers, ranchers, and people receiving nutrition
assistance. He also has expressed optimism about development of
alternatives to meat. “It wouldn’t take a lot of investment in
alternative protein to take it to a whole different level. It’d
be a rounding error in terms of the money going through
Congress,” he said in an April 2021 interview in the New York
Times. 
* In 2020, Blumenauer condemned the Trump administration’s use
of federal force in Portland during summer protests. Blumenauer
was among legislators who called on then-Acting Department of
Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to resign. In 2020, as
several Portland police officers were deputized as federal
officials, Blumenauer had a bill that would have limited the
authority of the U.S. Marshals Service to deputize local law
enforcement officers unless consent is received from local
government. The bill did not receive a vote.
 


                         Road to Office

     Blumenauer was born and raised in Portland, where his
father was a construction worker and his mother was a bank
worker.
     As a student at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, he led a
1969 drive to lower Oregon’s voting age to 18 from 21. In 1970,
he testified on the issue before a Senate subcommittee led by
Sen. Birch Bayh, who was a chief architect of what became the
26th Amendment.
     Blumenauer was elected to the Oregon Legislature in 1972 at
age 24, just two years out of college. He served in the state
legislature for six years, picking up a law degree from Lewis &
Clark even as he also worked at Portland State University.
     He was elected in 1978 as a commissioner in Multnomah
County, which envelops Portland. He served for about a decade on
the city council in Portland, where he was commissioner of
public works and managed the city’s transportation functions,
land-use planning and environmental services. He waged an
unsuccessful race for Portland mayor in 1992.
     In January 1996, Democratic Rep. Ron Wyden was elected to
the Senate in a special election, and Blumenauer easily won an
election to succeed him in the Portland-based congressional
district. Blumenauer has breezed to re-election in this heavily
Democratic swath of Oregon.

                         Personal Note

     Blumenauer is well-known for his annual holiday homemade
fruitcakes, handed out to colleagues on both sides of the aisle
in what he’s called “drive-by fruitcaking.” The gourmet ice
cream chain Salt & Straw, based in Portland, offers a seasonal
flavor based on Blumenauer’s fruitcakes.
     Updated June 22, 2021
     To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew
Small at asmall@bgov.com; Bennett Roth at broth@bgov.com

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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Congress Can Fix Flood Insurance This Year]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Harvey and Irma motivate both parties to pass long-needed reforms.]]></description>
            <link>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-18/congress-can-fix-flood-insurance-this-year</link>
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            <category><![CDATA[view]]></category>
            <dc:creator><![CDATA[Sean Patrick Duffy]]></dc:creator>
            <pubDate>Mon, 18 Sep 2017 11:30:08 GMT</pubDate>
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                <media:description>TOPSHOT - Flood damage from Hurricane Irma is seen September 14, 2017 in Naples, Florida. / AFP PHOTO / Brendan Smialowski        (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)</media:description>
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