Delegate Donna Marie Christensen won election to the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, the first woman to
represent the U.S. Virgin Islands, a multi-island territory
in the eastern Caribbean. During her tenure, Christensen,
who was also the first female medical doctor to serve in
Congress, focused on improving the living conditions and
economic opportunities on the Islands, especially where
they intersected with federal issues. Christensen noted
that being a doctor and serving in Congress were not that
different. “In my practice you always find that there are a
lot of social and other issues that impact the health of your
patients,” Christensen noted. “Many times people would
come in just to talk about whatever problems they were
having, so I kind of looked at it as bringing my office work
from a local level to a larger, national level.”1
Donna Christensen was born Donna Christian on
September 19, 1945, in Teaneck, New Jersey, to Almeric L.
Christian and Virginia Sterling Christian. Her mother
was from New York, and her father, who served in the
U.S. Army in World War II, returned to his native Virgin
Islands with his young family after earning a law degree
at Columbia University. Almeric became a U.S. attorney
and then a chief judge of the Virgin Islands district court. Christensen, who described herself as a girl who “lived
in the library,” attended boarding schools in Puerto Rico
and New York. She earned a BS from St. Mary’s College at
Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, in 1966, and an MD
from the George Washington University School of Medicine
in 1970.2
Christensen completed her residency at Howard
University in Washington, DC, in 1974 and returned to
the Virgin Islands. “I began working in a small emergency
room in 1975, and after being home and hearing some of
the issues that were of concern to the community, I decided
to become active in the community,” she recalled decades
later. “It is home and there were things that were happening
that I thought individuals needed to be more proactive
about, so I decided to involve myself in different issues
like the appointment of local judges, sale of land that was
important to my community and the private industry. But
I was doing it as an organizer myself, organizing different
coalitions and different groups to advocate or oppose an
issue.”3
In addition to running an active family practice, she
also worked as a health administrator, rising to the position
of assistant commissioner of health for the Virgin Islands. In
1974 Christensen married Carl Green, and the couple had two daughters, Rabiah and Karida, before they divorced in
1980.4
In 1998 she married Christian O. Christensen who
had four children from a previous marriage.5
Christensen began her political career in the 1980s as
part of the Coalition to Appoint a Native Judge, which
emphasized judicial appointments from within the
community and later as part of the Save Fountain Valley
Coalition, which called for the protection of St. Croix’s
north side from overdevelopment. She served as Democratic
National Committeewoman from 1984 to 1994 and vice
chair of the Territorial Committee of the Democratic Party
of the Virgin Islands and on the Platform Committee of the
Democratic National Committee. From 1984 to 1986, she
served as a member of the Virgin Islands board of education
and was appointed to the Virgin Islands status commission
from 1988 to 1992.6
Christensen lost her first bid for Delegate to Congress
in 1994, failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Two
years later, she won the party’s nomination. On November
5, 1996, in a three-way general election she finished second
behind the one-term incumbent, Independent Victor O.
Frazer with 27 percent of the vote. Since Frazer only won a
plurality with 47 percent, and not a majority, Christensen
advanced to a special November 19 runoff against Frazer.
In that contest she prevailed with a slim majority, 52 to 48
percent. In her subsequent eight general election campaigns,
Christensen won with comfortable majorities that ranged
as high as 80 percent; she ran unopposed in 2008. Her
narrowest margin of victory (a 56.6 percent majority)
came in a five-way general election in 2012, when three
independent candidates captured a combined third of the
overall vote.7
In 1997, as a freshman Member of the 105th Congress
(1997–1999), Christensen won a seat on the Resources
Committee (renamed the Natural Resources Committee
in the 110th and 111th Congresses [2007–2011]), which
had oversight of America’s territories. She remained on
that committee through the 111th Congress, serving as
chairwoman of the Insular Affairs Subcommittee in the
110th Congress when Democrats regained the House
majority. In the 111th Congress, Christensen earned a
seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which had
jurisdiction over much of the U.S. health care system. She
served on that panel until she left the House in 2015.8
Additionally, Christensen served on the Small Business
Committee from the 106th through the 109th Congresses (1999–2007). In the 108th Congress (2003–2005), she
gained a seat on the newly created Select Committee on
Homeland Security, primarily because of her expertise in
public health; when that committee became a permanent
standing committee in the following Congress, she kept her
seat and served on it through 2009. Christensen spent much
of her time on the Resources Committee trying to stabilize
and strengthen the Virgin Islands’ ailing economy. High
energy costs acted as a major drag on economic growth
and an aging electric grid added to the rising expenses.
The Great Recession of 2008 also hit the economy hard,
culminating in the closure of a major oil refinery and
resulting in government layoffs.9
As part of the effort to help the Virgin Islands’ economy,
Christensen worked to expand key tax incentives (protecting
and expanding the rebate on excise taxes of rum sales),
boost tourism, and target spending. On several occasions
the House passed Christensen’s bill to create a chief
financial officer to oversee the islands’ budget. “This bill
is neither colonial or paternal, as has been claimed, but an
attempt to bring greater transparency and accountability
to the financial management and fiscal practices of the
government of the Virgin Islands,” Christensen said. Her
proposal, however, had strong opposition from Virgin
Islands governors and it repeatedly died in the Senate.10
Christensen also played a key role in expanding
representation for the Northern Mariana Islands, another
U.S. territory, during her tenure as chair of the Natural
Resources’s Subcommittee on Insular Affairs. She
sponsored a bill in the 110th Congress that established the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI)
and granted the territory, the only one without a voice in
Congress, a nonvoting Delegate in the U.S. House. While
managing debate on the bill on the House Floor, she
noted that it “would provide a stable immigration policy
to rebuild the CNMI economy, augment current efforts
to diversify and strengthen the future economy, increase
the opportunities and skills of local residents to fill private
sector employment needs, safeguard the existing foreign
guest worker population from employer abuse, and secure
the region in the interest of national security and give the
CNMI representation in Congress.”11 On December 11,
2007, her bill passed the House with broad bipartisan
support on a voice vote.12 The Senate later folded it into
another measure, and President George W. Bush signed it
into law on May 8, 2008.13
As chair of the Insular Affairs Subcommittee in the
110th Congress, Christensen also held hearings on a
proposal for a constitutional convention in Puerto Rico to
consider greater autonomy for the island and conducted
numerous oversight hearings including the examination
of budget requests for the Interior Department’s Office of
Insular Affairs.14
Health care also remained one of Christensen’s top
priorities. As a longtime Member of the Congressional Black
Caucus (CBC), she chaired the CBC’s Health Braintrust
for 15 years. Her medical career made her a natural fit
for the position, but her role in the CBC gave her vital
experience and a powerful megaphone for someone from
a small territory. “I don’t know where I would be without
the Congressional Black Caucus,” Christensen remarked
late in her career.15 The Health Braintrust platform put her
at the forefront of congressional efforts to end health care
disparities for minority communities and women, to fight
HIV/AIDS both nationally and internationally, and to
extend health insurance coverage.16
From her seat on the Health Subcommittee of Energy
and Commerce, Christensen weighed in on significant
pieces of the Affordable Care Act which was signed into
law by President Barack Obama in 2010. For years, she
had advocated universal access to health care, telling a
reporter in 2001, “It is way past time for this country to
make sure that healthcare is a right and not a privilege.”17
Early in the discussion about a comprehensive reform bill
in the 110th Congress, Christensen emphasized the need
to shrink inequities in the health care system, particularly
for the African-American community, in areas ranging from
maternal and infant health care to preventative medicine.
“Closing these and other gaps will improve healthcare for
everyone in the country, improve our world standing and
reduce the cost of healthcare,” she said in testimony before
the House Ways and Means Committee. “We therefore owe
it to our fellow Americans, all of them, to eliminate the
racial, ethnic, rural and gender health disparities that have
plagued our country for too long.”18
In addition to pushing provisions that expanded
health care access and increased Medicaid coverage for
the Virgin Islands, Christensen advocated using improved
information technology and comparative research studies
to reduce costs. In the years after passage of the Affordable
Care Act, Christensen—who often spoke on health
issues on behalf of the Tri-Caucus of African American, Hispanic American, and Asian Pacific American Members
of Congress—remained a stalwart defender of the bill
in the face of Republican-led efforts to repeal it.19 She
described the bill as “historic” and credited it for creating
a “dramatic change in the lives of people who live in this
country. Not only will we be healthier, we will be more
productive. That means our country will be stronger [and]
more competitive.”20
In 2014 Christensen announced that she would not seek
re-election to a tenth term in the House and would instead
run for governor of the Virgin Islands.21 Her 18-year career
in the House made her the Virgin Islands’ second-longest
serving Delegate, behind only Ron de Lugo, the territory’s
first Delegate in Congress. She admitted that she had been
planning to return to private life before recommitting
herself to public service to address the economic and
social problems that had buffeted the islands in the wake
of the Great Recession.22 Though initially favored to win,
Christensen finished second with 39 percent of the vote in
the November 4, 2014, general election behind Kenneth
Mapp who led the field of five candidates with 47 percent.23
In a runoff on November 18, Mapp prevailed against
Christensen, 63 to 37 percent.24
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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