[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 62 (Wednesday, May 18, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
 JOHN PORTER HONORED FOR HIS HARD WORK AND DEVOTION TO HIS CONSTITUENTS

                                 ______


                          HON. C.W. BILL YOUNG

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 18, 1994

  Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Speaker, for the past 14 years, it has been 
a pleasure to serve on the House Appropriations Committee with my 
colleague from Illinois, John Porter. He is a hard-working and very 
dedicated member of our committee and serves as the ranking member on 
our Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee.
  Sunday, he received the long overdue recognition he deserves when The 
Chicago Tribune ran a very positive feature article about his work and 
his devotion to representing the people of the 10th Congressional 
District of Illinois. As Tribune staff writer Michael Killian writes, 
John Porter continuously fights for the people he represents back home, 
stands firmly for the principles he believes in here in our Nation's 
Capital, and seeks freedom and human rights for oppressed people 
abroad.
  Mr. Speaker, John Porter and I share a belief that we are elected to 
do the people's work and not seek headlines. We agree that if we do our 
job to the best of our ability, the word will spread to our 
constituents.
  Obviously this has been a very successful formula for John Porter and 
following my remarks, I would like to include for the benefit of my 
colleagues the Chicago Tribune article. It is always nice to see a 
hard-working colleague receive the public recognition and respect he 
has earned and deserves.

                [From the Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1994]

       John Porter Isn't a Household Name, but He's Working on it

                          (By Michael Killian)

       Washington.--How come John Porter isn't more famous. Dan 
     Rostenkowski is nationally known for his clout. Henry Hyde 
     became ``Mr. Right to Life,'' Bobby Rush went to Congress as 
     the Black Panther-turned-pol. Even newcomer Luis Gutierrez 
     gets calls from around the nation now because CBS' ``60 
     Minutes'' featured him (dubiously) as a congressional 
     reformer.
       But Porter, GOP congressman from the North Shore's 10th 
     District has never made the media big-time, though he has 
     been around for seven terms, his district is one of the most 
     influential in the state and richest in the country and he's 
     the perfect Hollywood image of a congressman.
       Granted, his prematurely snow white hair may be a little to 
     sparse to blow dry at age 58, and his clean-cut, high-school-
     yearbook good looks are somewhat lined and craggy. But Porter 
     still seems the kind of fellow every mother would have wanted 
     her daughter to date (or marry), the kind of non-nerdy 
     straight-arrow who makes both ``most popular'' and class 
     valedictorian.
       He speaks as carefully as he dresses and that's always to 
     beautifully tailored pin-striped perfection. His posture, 
     invariably, is what you find in official portraits. His 
     biographical sketch lists his nickname as ``John.''
       But the Evanston-born former probate lawyer is far from a 
     cardboard cutout.
       When other members of his party were falling all over 
     themselves in slavish support of Reaganomics, blithely 
     ignoring the deficit spending that sent the national debt 
     soaring in the 1980s, Porter steadfastly opposed the Reagan 
     deficits ad kept calling for a function-by-function freeze in 
     federal spending that he claims would have the nation's 
     finances balanced by now.
       As co-chairman of the Republican Task Force on 
     Congressional Reform Porter has long fought the continuing 
     resolutions by which a succession of Congresses financed the 
     government in stop-gap fashion.
       Appropriations Committee colleague C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) 
     praises Porter for having a real genius for separating pork 
     and grease from nuts and bolts in spending bills. ``He's one 
     of the abler members of the House,'' Young said.
       In 1988, as a congressional overseer of the Helsinki 
     Accords, Porter went to Moscow with a list of 694 dissidents 
     who'd been barred from leaving the Soviet Union. Within a 
     week, all but one were released.
       Still, Porter isn't widely known.
       ``I'm famous in my district--and in Hong Kong,'' he says, 
     the latter an allusion to his human-rights activities in 
     Asia.
       ``I've never felt my greatest human need was to get my name 
     in newspapers,'' he said, ``I just came down here to do a 
     job.''
       If he is known mostly to his district, which runs from 
     Evanston's northern boundary up to Wisconsin and west to 
     Arlington Heights and Wheeling, it's in large part because 
     the North Shore has been his home, personally and 
     politically, all his life, and he's fixated on that 
     territory, though reapportionment has moved his district's 
     border around over the years.
       Porter claims to spend a good 80 percent of his time back 
     in his district--an enthusiasm more common to congressional 
     newcomers than veterans. He has emphasized constituent 
     services to an even greater degree than his Democratic 
     predecessor, Abner Mikva, whose constituent-assistance team 
     Porter called one of the best.
       In addition to working on routine Social Security military 
     and veterans problems, his district-office caseworkers have 
     tracked down and recovered the cremated remains of a 
     constituent's dead husband, which had been missent by the 
     Postal Service to a Congressional cemetary ``Instead of the 
     proper Jewish one.''
       That kind of attention provides political results too.
       In the past, the 10th has been a swing district represented 
     by moderate Republican Don Rumsfeld, Nixonian conservative 
     Sam Young and the unabashedly liberal Mikva, who beat Porter 
     by 450 votes in the latter's first congressional try in 1978. 
     Mikva was appointed to the federal bench in Washington a few 
     months later, and Porter won the 1980 general election for 
     the 10th District seat by 61 percent to 89 percent over 
     Democrat Robert Weinberger.
       Porter has been challenged by doctrinaire right-winger 
     Kathleen Sullivan in the last two Republican primaries but 
     held off her surprisingly strong bid in 1992 by 80 to 40 
     percent and by a vote of 2-1 last March.
       In 1992, George Bush edged out Bill Clinton in the 10th by 
     only 4,000 votes out of more than 260,000 cast. In that 
     election, Porter beat his young, well-heeled Democratic 
     challenger, Michael Kennedy, a 29-year-old Harvard graduate 
     and junior-high classmate of one of Porter's daughters, in 
     another landslide--65 to 85 percent.
       This year, no one filed a candidacy in the 10th District 
     Democratic primary to earn the right to oppose Porter in the 
     November general election, the district's Democratic 
     committeeman subsequently named Andrew Krupp, a 25-year-old 
     Arlington Heights manufacturing executive, as their candidate 
     to run against Porter in the fall.


                          a vanishing species

       Krupp, who is vice president of his family's Riverside 
     Manufacturing Co., has hooked his campaign to the charge that 
     Porter ``is out of touch with the people of his district,'' 
     but not all Democrats find him so alien.
       ``The truth is that John is very representative of his 
     district,'' said Highland Park Mayor, Dan Pierce, a liberal 
     who is the 10th Democratic state central committeeman and who 
     served in the state legislature with Porter in the 1970's. 
     He's conservative on things like the federal budget, but he's 
     liberal on things like women's rights and the environment. 
     He's very good on constituent services and he's not aloof. 
     He's that vanishing species of Republican--the moderate.''
       Porter's chief flaw, according to Pierce, is his party 
     affiliation.
       ``He's a ranking member of a party that's in the perpetual 
     minority and no longer controls the White House,'' Pierce 
     said. ``It's not easy for him to get things done for the 
     district.''
       Pierce cited Porter's failure to persuade the Defense 
     Department to convert Ft. Sheridan into a lakefront 
     recreation area as an example of lack of influence. In 
     response, Porter invokes such local successes as bringing 
     about the Superfund environmental cleanup of PCB-plagued 
     Waukegan Harbor and securing federal funds to build three 
     reservoirs along the North Branch of the Chicago River to 
     ease flood problems there.


                              a love match

       The fameless Porter is not an all-work dull boy. In the 
     1980s he could be seen fooling around the northern Virginia 
     suburb where he lived in sunglasses and a white sports car. 
     He and his wife of 20 years, Kathyrn Cameron Porter left 
     earlier spouses for each other and are one of the great love 
     matches on Capitol Hill. The globe-trotting director of 
     gender and social policy for Conservation International, she 
     was Porter's first administrative assistant when he came to 
     Washington and has been his campaign manager in all his 
     congressional campaigns.
       A Michigan native who worked in George McGovern's 1972 
     presidential campaign (``He hates it when I talk about my 
     sordid past as a Democrat''), she met Porter following his 
     victory in the 1972 Republican primary for a North Shore seat 
     in the Illinois House.
       Three of the Porters' five children--John, David, Donna, 
     Robyn and Ann--are from his previous marriage and two are 
     from hers. They decline to say which are which. ``We raised 
     them as ours,'' she said.
       Porter is perhaps best politically defined by his 
     forthright and ideologically disparate stands on the federal 
     budget, the environment and international human rights.
       He has repeatedly been honored by the conservative, anti-
     government-spending National Taxpayers Union and was one of 
     only six congressmen last session cited as a ``Taxpayer 
     Superhero'' by the Grace Commission's Citizens Against 
     Government Waste, the only Illinoisan and the only member of 
     the Appropriations Committee to be so cited. He fought the 
     Reagan administration on what he considered wasteful 
     defense spending, including the swifty obsolete B-2 
     bomber, Star Wars research and new binary chemical 
     weaponry, which he argued had repeatedly failed in tests 
     and would not be accepted by all NATO countries.
       ``My party, in fact, ran away from me,'' he said ``My party 
     used to stand for balanced budgets and not allowing the 
     national debt to rise. During the 1980's my party began to 
     say, `Deficits don't matter.' I disagree. They quadrupled the 
     national debt.''
       On the environment, Porter has always leaned far to the 
     other side of the ideological fence, and is as outspoken a 
     critic of the despoilation of the world's rain forests. He 
     has introduced bills to place tight curbs on the unregulated 
     export of waste and encourage recycling. He was congressional 
     delegate to the United Nations Conference on Environment 
     better known as the Earth Summit last year in Rio


                        A zeal for human rights

       Porter's zeal on human rights dates to a visit he and his 
     wife made to Russia in 1982, when she was grabbed and strip-
     searched by the KGB after the two of them had met with Soviet 
     dissidents. Porter then joined with Rep. Tom Lantos (D-
     Calif.) in founding Congress Human Rights Caucus, which with 
     more than 200 members, is the second largest caucus on 
     Capitol Hill.
       Porter was born and raised in Evanston (the suburb was 
     removed from his district in the 1980 reapportionment; he now 
     lives just across the line in Wilmette), and got his 
     undergraduate degree from Northwestern University before 
     going on to the University of Michigan Law School. His late 
     father, Harry H. Porter, was the long-time chief judge of the 
     Evanston Municipal Court and later served in the Law Division 
     of Cook County Circuit Court.
       Porter got into politics as part of the so-called suicide 
     squad of Republican candidates for countywide judicial seats 
     in 1970--a time when the old Daley Democratic Machine had a 
     stranglehold on those posts. Though he and the others lost in 
     the balloting, he led the ticket on his slate and won the 
     support of every newspaper and group endorsing in the race.
       ``Then my father died very suddenly,'' Porter said. ``If he 
     had not died he probably would have talked me out of any 
     political career and said, `Have a happy life and practice 
     law.'''
       Instead, Porter ran for the Illinois House in 1972 and won, 
     serving three terms. Though he didn't grab many major 
     headlines, he got 60 bills passed by the House in 
     Springfield, including a ban on leghold traps, government 
     inducements to car pooling, denial of pension rights to any 
     public official convicted of a felony, a prohibition against 
     flammable tents and outdoor-use fabrics, and one requiring 
     disclosure of secret beneficiaries of land trusts involved in 
     business with state government.
       Asked if he has plans for higher office, he replied: ``I 
     certainly do. I've wanted to be president since I was 10 
     years old. At the moment, I do have to win . . . an election. 
     But we do have Senate seats coming up in 96 and 98, and I'm 
     certainly going to look at that.''
       The Senate, of course, could make John Edward Porter really 
     famous. But to get there, he'll first have to make himself as 
     well known in Metropolis, Shawneetown, Quincy and Galena as 
     he is now along Sheridan Road.

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