In 2014, after four terms in the Virginia general assembly,
Barbara Comstock won election to the U.S. House of
Representatives from a seat held by her former boss,
Representative Frank Rudolph Wolf of Virginia. “In my
three state delegate races I knocked on over 10,000 doors
each election … because when you’re actually talking to
everybody, door-to-door, you honestly know what their top
priorities are,” Comstock said. “As a representative and a
candidate, I think that’s my best role, the best way of doing
things, because you get good ideas from people. You kind of
cut through the clutter.”1
Barbara Comstock was born Barbara Jean Burns
on June 30, 1959, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her
father, John Ferguson Burns, worked for the Shell
Chemical Company, and her mother, Sally Ann Burns,
was employed by the local public school system.2
Burns’s
family eventually moved to Houston, Texas, and she
graduated from Westchester High School in 1977.
She graduated cum laude from Middlebury College in
Middlebury, Vermont, in 1981, with a degree in political
science. During college, she interned for Democratic
Massachusetts Senator Edward Moore (Ted) Kennedy. But
“as I went to the hearings,” she remembered, “I realized
that I agreed more with the ideas that Orrin Hatch was
talking about.”3
In 1982 Burns married her high school sweetheart Elwyn
Charles (Chip) Comstock, a computer science teacher in
McLean, Virginia, and enrolled at Georgetown University
Law Center in Washington, DC. They have three children:
Dan, Peter, and Caity. Comstock put her law degree on
hold after the birth of her two sons. After she completed law
school in 1986, she entered private practice as an attorney.
In 1991 Comstock took a job as an aide to Virginia
Representative Frank Wolf. Two years later, when several
of Wolf’s Fairfax-area constituents suddenly lost their jobs
in the White House travel office, the Congressman asked
Comstock to investigate. Comstock’s research triggered an
inquiry by the House Government Operations Committee
into whether civil service positions in the executive branch
had been politicized. After Republicans won control of
the House in the 1994 midterm elections, Comstock
became chief counsel of the newly renamed Committee on
Government Reform and Oversight where she continued to
investigate the William J. (Bill) Clinton administration.4
In 2000 Comstock left the House to work on George W.
Bush’s presidential campaign. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Comstock became Director of Public
Affairs in the United States Justice Department, serving
as chief spokesperson for Attorney General John David
Ashcroft until 2003.5
Comstock launched her first campaign for public office
in 2009 when she won a seat in the Virginia house of
delegates from the Fairfax area.6
In the state house, where
she served from 2010 through 2014, Comstock focused on
legislation affecting the burgeoning technology sector in her
northern Virginia district.7
When Representative Frank Wolf announced his
retirement in 2013, Comstock entered the race to fill his
seat. The district stretched across Northern Virginia from
the DC suburbs of McLean and Manassas, and west to the
West Virginia border. Comstock captured the Republican
nomination in April 2014 and ran on a message of
“common-sense conservatism.” She pointed to her legislative
record in the Virginia assembly and—after the 2012 attack
on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya during Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State—highlighted
her time investigating the Bill Clinton administration in the
1990s.8
Following a contentious general election campaign,
Comstock captured 56 percent of the vote in November
against Fairfax County supervisor John W. Foust.9
Comstock entered the 114th Congress (2015–2017) as
the only woman in the Virginia delegation. She received
seats on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
Both assignments were relevant to her Northern Virginia
district, which housed several major tech firms and often
experienced traffic congestion. She was also appointed
chair of the Research and Technology Subcommittee under
Science, Space, and Technology. Comstock called the
subcommittee gavel an opportunity to pursue “innovation
issues that can revolutionize our education, economy, health
care, and national security.”10 She also held a seat on the
Committee on House Administration.
In her first term, Comstock focused her legislative efforts
on the needs of students and young families, including STEM
education and tax relief. She voted to repeal the Affordable
Care Act, but also broke with her party to vote against the
budget put forward by Republicans in 2015, citing changes
to federal employee benefits that were important to the many
government workers across her district. She also opposed the
Transportation Department funding bill that slashed $75
million for the DC-area public transit system Metro.11
In 2016 Comstock won re-election against Democrat
LuAnn Bennett, a real-estate developer and ex-wife of
former Congressman James P. Moran, taking 53 percent
of the vote; she ran well ahead of Republican presidential
nominee Donald J. Trump in many precincts.12
In her second term, Comstock’s bill to preserve the
Claude Moore Colonial Farm, a living history museum
with disputed land rights along the George Washington
Memorial Parkway, passed unanimously and became law
in June 2018.13 From her seat on the Science, Space, and
Technology Committee, she pushed through two bills
cowritten with Connecticut Representative Elizabeth
Esty. Their bill—the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers,
Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women
Act—encouraged more women to enter scientific fields
and provided for several new initiatives in the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration to foster interest in
science for students in grades K-12.14 “Too many girls and
young women decide not to pursue studies in technical
fields … because they look at their teachers and their
role models and they see no one who looks like them,”
Comstock said before the bill passed the House without
objection. The other bill, the Promoting Women in
Entrepreneurship Act, helped women in the STEM fields
bring their innovations and research to market.15
Comstock also worked on multiple measures dealing
with neighborhood safety and the modernization of
emergency response centers. She sponsored a bill expanding
resources available to anti-gang task forces and another
bill expanding federal funding for local fire departments.16
Comstock voted to authorize funding for opioid addiction
treatment and she touted the opening of a new veterans
center in Loudoun County.17 She also authored legislation
doubling the child tax credit, and successfully advocated for
its inclusion in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.18
In the 115th Congress (2017–2019), amid the #MeToo
Movement in which women across the country spoke about
experiencing sexual harassment and assault, Comstock
was part of a bipartisan effort to institute a new workplace
rights and responsibilities training program designed to
combat sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. Comstock
cosponsored resolutions with California Representative
Karen Lorraine Jacqueline (Jacky) Speier to launch the new
staff and Member training program and end the practice
of using public money to settle misconduct settlements.
“For the people who can’t fight back, I feel I can. For the person who’s afraid to say it, I can be their voice,” Comstock
said.19 Comstock’s later support for the nomination of
Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court surprised some
constituents after Kavanaugh was accused of sexual
misconduct as a young man.20
In 2018 Comstock faced Democratic state senator
Jennifer Wexton in the general election. In a wave election
that saw Democrats flip more than 60 seats, Comstock
lost to Wexton after taking 44 percent of the vote.21 After
leaving the House, Comstock joined a private firm where
she helps advise executive branch officials called to testify
before Congress.22
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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