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        <title><![CDATA[Sean Patrick Duffy - Secretary:Transportation]]></title>
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By Greg Giroux, Humberto Sanchez and Peter Urban
     (Bloomberg Government) -- Sean Duffy, a 1990s reality
television star and former world champion lumberjack, has a
reputation as a serious-minded legislator with a partisan streak
leavened by an affable demeanor.
     In August 2019, Duffy announced he would resign from
Congress Sept. 23 after learning that his and his wife’s ninth
child, due in October, would be born with complications
including a heart condition.
     “With much prayer, I have decided that this is the right
time for me to take a break from public service in order to be
the support my wife, baby and family need right now,” Duffy said
on Facebook.
     In the 116th Congress, Duffy emerged as one of President
Donald Trump’s closest allies on trade policy amid the
administration’s tariff war with China. Trump promoted Duffy’s
legislation to allow the president to impose reciprocal tariffs
on foreign countries that refuse to negotiate on trade.
     Duffy called himself a “free trader” but said Trump needed
tools to pressure other nations to lower their tariffs.
     “We don’t want tariffs,” Duffy said on Fox Business Channel
in January 2019. “But our trading partners have no incentive to
negotiate with us to lower tariffs because they get the better
end of the deal. So, if we’re able to let the president raise
ours, the real incentive here is to get them, both countries, to
lower their tariffs so we get closer to free trade.”
     A member of the Financial Services Committee, he became the
ranking Republican on its Housing, Community Development, and
Insurance Subcommittee for the 116th Congress. In May 2019,
Duffy said he had a “great working relationship” with
subcommittee Chairman Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) and hoped for bipartisan
collaboration on overhauling housing finance policy. Duffy said
that federal, state, and local regulations, including zoning
rules and ordinances, substantially increase housing costs.
     “You are pricing people out of the ability to purchase a
home and putting them on the street because of idiotic, stupid
rules that come from government,” Duffy said at a Financial
Services Committee markup in March 2019.
     In the 116th Congress, Duffy worked with Rep. Emanuel
Cleaver (D-Mo.) on a measure that would create a demonstration
program to encourage Section 8 housing voucher recipients to
move to lower-poverty areas.
     Duffy led the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee in the
115th Congress, when Republicans controlled the House. He took a
lead role on legislation to renew the National Flood Insurance
Program, which provides insurance to homeowners in flood-prone
areas who are mandated to carry it.
     Duffy drafted a bill he said would make the program “more
actuarially sound,” as he put it. The measure included
provisions to use new technology and better maps to improve
development of accurate flood estimates. The House passed
Duffy’s bill in November 2017, but the Senate didn’t take it up
as the program continued to operate on short-term extensions.
     In the 116th Congress, with Democrats in charge of the
House, Duffy said he would reluctantly support a flood insurance
bill sponsored by Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters
(D-Calif.). “I don’t think this bill is really addressing the
math issues and the deficit issues we have,” he said in June
2019. “But I do think this will go a long way toward improving
the program.”
     In the 114th Congress (2015-16), Duffy was chairman of the
Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
where he sounded off against financial regulators. He introduced
bills to change the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which
was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law
written by Democrats. One of Duffy’s bills would have changed
the CFPB’s leadership from a single director appointed by the
president to a bipartisan, five-member independent commission.
The House passed the bill in 2014, but it didn’t advance in the
Senate.
     In 2017, Duffy supported a Republican bill to repeal Dodd-
Frank. The legislation included ideas proposed by Duffy,
including prohibiting the CFPB from soliciting information on
nonpublic personal information without permission. “The
Financial CHOICE Act is an off-ramp from Dodd-Frank’s rules and
regulations,” Duffy said after the committee approved the bill.
The House passed the measure, but the Senate didn’t advance it.
     Duffy was the lead House sponsor of a 2016 law, signed by
President Barack Obama, that was intended to rescue Puerto Rico
from its fiscal crisis. The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management,
and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was designed to provide for
an orderly restructuring of the island’s bond debt and create a
federally appointed fiscal oversight board.
     Heritage Action for America, a conservative advocacy group,
sharply criticized the legislation as a bailout. Duffy
disagreed. “This bill doesn’t spend any taxpayer money bailing
anybody out,” he said.
     Duffy also has sought to remove the gray wolf from the
federal endangered and threatened species list. He said gray
wolves are killing farmers’ cattle and that their population has
expanded enough to warrant delisting under the Endangered
Species Act.
     Duffy’s voting record is solidly in the Republican column.
He opposes gun control and government actions to regulate the
emissions of greenhouse gases.
     Duffy opposes abortion and in 2016 drew a stinging rebuke
from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus over
comments he made on the House floor about the disproportionate
rate of abortion among blacks.
     “I hear a lot in this institution from minority leaders
about how their communities are targeted. But what I don’t hear
them talk about is how their communities are targeted in
abortion,” Duffy said. “There are some stunning facts. The
African-American community is 15 percent of the country as a
whole but accounts for 40 percent of the abortions.”
     Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) retorted that “Representative
Duffy’s hypocrisy on this issue is as predictable as it is
offensive.”
     Duffy has broken ranks and voted with Democrats on labor
policy. He’s voted against Republican-sponsored amendments to
spending bills that would bar the enforcement of Davis-Bacon
prevailing wage requirements. In July 2019, he was among 29
House Republicans who voted for a Democratic bill to bail out
multi-employer pension plans.


                          Early Years

     Duffy comes from a family tradition of lumberjacking dating
back several generations. The 10th of 11 children, he grew up in
the northwest Wisconsin town of Hayward, the site of an annual
international lumberjack competition. He began log-rolling and
pole-climbing as a youth.
     The lumberjack competitions helped pay his way through
college and law school. He twice was champion of the 90-foot
pole climb.
     Duffy, who earned a marketing degree from Saint Mary’s
University of Minnesota in 1994, was in law school when he took
a year off to appear on the MTV reality show “The Real World” in
Boston in 1997. A year later, he was on a related show, “Road
Rules,” where he met fellow reality star Rachel Campos, who had
appeared on a Real World installment in San Francisco and went
on to be a Fox News contributor.
     They married in 1999 and began what would become a large
family.
     “Rachel said it best—we aren’t crazy, we are just full of
hope for America’s future!” Duffy said in a May 2019 Facebook
post announcing he and his wife were expecting their ninth
child.


                         Political Path

     After graduating from law school in 1999, Duffy worked in
private practice for a couple of years in Hayward, in northern
Wisconsin. He then became a special prosecutor and later an
assistant district attorney. In 2002 he was appointed Ashland
county attorney. He won election to that post later in the year
and was subsequently re-elected without opposition to three more
two-year terms.
     In 2009, he announced his candidacy for the 7th District
House seat that had been held for 40 years by Democrat David
Obey, who was then serving his second stint as chairman of the
Appropriations Committee. In May 2010, Obey announced he
wouldn’t seek re-election.
     Duffy won the backing of local Tea Party activists and rode
the Republican tide en route to an 8 percentage point win over
Democratic state Sen. Julie Lassa. Duffy’s 7th District has
trended Republican, and he hasn’t had a close re-election
contest.
     In 2018, he was re-elected 60%-39%, comparable to Trump’s
57%-37% win in the district in 2016. Trump got a higher vote
share in Duffy’s district than in any other Wisconsin district.


                         Personal Notes

     “Donald Trump was not the first reality TV star to make it
into politics. That was me,” Duffy joked in 2018.
     While Duffy’s days on MTV have long since passed, there was
a mini reunion for a handful of MTV-show cast members who came
to Capitol Hill in 2015 as Duffy announced the formation of the
Ovarian Cancer Caucus to honor Diem Brown, an MTV-show veteran
who died of ovarian cancer in 2014. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.),
an ovarian cancer survivor, also was there, according to the
Washington Post.
     Updated Aug. 26, 2019
     To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Giroux in
Washington at ggiroux@bgov.com; Humberto Sanchez in Washington,
D.C.; Peter Urban at dc.peter.urban@gmail.com
     To contact the editors responsible for this story: Loren
Duggan at lduggan@bgov.com; Paul Hendrie at phendrie@bgov.com

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            <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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