A New Yorker by birth and a Californian by choice,
Barbara Boxer served in Congress from the Golden State
for 34 years, including 10 years in the United States House
of Representatives and 24 in the United States Senate.
An advocate for families, children, consumers, and the
environment, Boxer retired from the Senate at the end of
the 114th Congress (2015–2017). She had an understated,
straightforward approach to the legislative process, which
she outlined in one of her farewell interviews. “It’s very
easy,” she said. “You introduce legislation that moves us
forward. You fight bad legislation.”1
Barbara Boxer was born Barbara Levy in Brooklyn,
New York, on November 11, 1940, to Ira Levy and Sophie
Silvershein Levy. She graduated with a BA from Brooklyn
College in 1962 and married Stewart Boxer. The family
relocated to northern California in 1965, where the Boxers
raised two children: Doug and Nicole. Prior to her marriage,
Boxer was a stockbroker and economic researcher for Wall
Street securities firms.2 In 2005 the Boxers moved from
Marin County to Rancho Mirage in southern California.3
Boxer first jumped into politics in 1968 while
doing volunteer work for the Eugene Joseph McCarthy
presidential campaign. In 1970 she helped found an
antiwar organization, the Marin Alternative, to protest the
ongoing conflict in Vietnam. Boxer worked for the Pacific
Sun newspaper as a reporter and associate editor from
1972 to 1974. And from 1974 to 1976, Boxer worked for
Congressman John Lowell Burton who represented the
California district encompassing Marin County. In 1972
she ran for a seat on the Marin County board of supervisors,
losing to the incumbent Republican. But four years later,
in 1976, she won election to the board, and served as its
first chairwoman.4 “She faced a lot of adversity from people
who didn’t treat her the way they would treat a man,”
said Sam Chapman, a longtime aide. “But she didn’t give
in. It’s her nature to get fired up. And you knew she was
going somewhere.”5
In 1982 John Burton unexpectedly decided to retire from
the U.S. House and endorsed Boxer to take his place. In the
general election, she defeated Republican Dennis McQuaid
with 52 percent of the vote. She faced no serious challenges
in any of her subsequent re-elections to the House.6
Boxer served in the majority during each of her five
terms in the House. Her initial committee assignments
were to Government Operations (98th–99th and 101st
Congresses [1983–1987, 1989–1991]); Merchant Marine
and Fisheries (98th Congress [1983–1985]); and, briefly,
to Interior and Insular Affairs (1983) and to the Select
Committee on Children, Youth, and Families (1983). She
later served on Budget (99th–101st Congresses [1985–1991]); Armed Services (100th Congress [1987–1989]);
and the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction (1987).
Boxer also became chairwoman of the Government
Activities and Transportation Subcommittee of the
Government Operations Committee.
Boxer gained a reputation as a liberal firebrand in the
House. Her Small Business and Federal Procurement
Competition Enhancement Act became law in 1984,
improving the likelihood that small businesses would win
government contracts.7 And during an Armed Services
Committee hearing that year, she made headlines about
wasteful Pentagon spending by revealing that the military
had purchased a coffee pot for $7,622. In the lead-up
to the Gulf War in 1990, Boxer took a public stand in
opposition to U.S. involvement. She was also part of a
bipartisan group of women Representatives who marched
on the Senate to demand extended hearings on Anita Hill’s
sexual-harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas in 1991.8 “She stands up and fights for
what she believes in,” observed California Representative
George Miller, a colleague from the Bay Area. “And she
doesn’t back up a step.”9
In 1992 both of California’s Senate seats opened after
Alan Cranston decided not to run for a fourth term and
Pete Wilson was elected governor back home. Boxer
declared for Cranston’s seat while San Francisco Mayor
Dianne Feinstein sought to fill Wilson’s remaining term. In
a three-way Democratic primary against a former lieutenant
governor and a fellow U.S. Representative, Boxer won the
nomination with 44 percent of the vote. In the general
election, she defeated Bruce Herschensohn, a conservative
Los Angeles media commentator by five points, 48 percent
to 43 percent.10 Boxer credited the Thomas protest for
raising awareness of the lack of women in the Senate.
“Without Anita having the courage of her convictions,
and without those of us walking over, I never would have
made it to the Senate ever because no one really knew in the
country how few women [in the Senate] there were.”11
Boxer won her two subsequent re-elections to the Senate
by much more comfortable margins. In 1998 she defeated
state treasurer Matt Fong with 53 percent of the vote. And
in 2004, she beat back a challenge by California’s secretary
of state Bill Jones, winning by 20 points, 58 percent to 38
percent. In her final re-election in 2010, Boxer, with the
help of President Barack Obama who flew to California to
campaign with her, defeated businesswoman Carly Fiorina
with 52 percent of the vote.12
Boxer’s Senate service stretched over 12 Congresses and
lasted from 1993 to 2017. She served in the majority for
five Congresses and in the minority for six. The evenly
divided 107th Congress (2001–2003), began under brief
Democratic control (with outgoing Vice President Albert
Arnold Gore Jr. as the tie-breaking vote). It reverted to
Republican control when Vice President Richard Bruce
Cheney was sworn in to office on January 20 (giving
the GOP the tie-breaking vote), but reverted back to
Democratic control in June 2001 when James Merrill
Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party to register as
an Independent.
Boxer’s initial Senate committee assignments included
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (103rd–105th
Congresses [1993–1999]); Budget (103rd–106th
Congresses [1993–2001]); Environment and Public Works
(103rd–114th Congresses [1993–2017]); and the Joint
Economic Committee (103rd Congress [1993–1995]).
She was later assigned to Appropriations (105th Congress
[1997–1999]); Foreign Relations (106th–114th Congresses
[1999–2017]); and Commerce, Science, and Transportation
(107th–114th Congresses [2001–2017]). Boxer also served
on the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater
Development Corporation and Related Matters (104th
Congress [1995–1997]) and the Select Committee on
Ethics (110th–114th Congresses [2007–2017]). Boxer
was chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works
Committee from 2007 to 2015.
The House culture Boxer came from may have favored
majority rule, but the Senate operated differently. “In the
House, if I could just convince my side, it got in the bill,”
Boxer said. “Here [in the Senate] it’s a whole other thing.
You’ve got to be able to convince everybody.”13 Individual
Senators wielded far more power over the legislative process
and just a single Senator could prevent an idea or an
amendment from being considered. “The difference is even
as a freshman in the Senate, you have so much more power.
You have as much power as committee chairmen have in
the House.”14
As Boxer worked to find consensus, she did not shy
away from also exercising her individual power. Early
in her Senate career, she held the Senate Floor for three
days in a row in order to block legislation against plans
to gut environmental and health standards. “People
thought Barbara Boxer was pretty insane to be up there
alone filibustering that issue,” said Lynn Golman of
the Environmental Protection Agency. “But she wasn’t
intimidated.”15 And in 2005, Boxer used the confirmation
hearings for Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as Secretary
of State to reiterate her opposition to the George W. Bush
administration’s foreign policies and the Iraq War. “I will …
not shrink from questioning a war that was not built on
truth,” she announced.16
Working on the Environment and Public Works
Committee provided Boxer with ample opportunities
to work across the aisle, and infrastructure programs
led to several partnerships.17 In an era of heightened
partisanship, Boxer may have disagreed sharply over policy
with Republicans on the committee, but she had strong
personal relationships with many of them. “We really like
each other,” Boxer said about Oklahoma Senator James
Mountain Inhofe, who often opposed Boxer on climate
change issues. “And I think, also, what’s important is we
know how strongly we feel when we oppose each other, but
we never surprise each other by going around someone’s
back and sneaking something into a bill.” Inhofe agreed,
“You can disagree with someone and love ‘em anyway.”18
In 2007, for instance, Boxer and Inhofe worked to
shepherd a long overdue water resources and infrastructure
bill through the Senate. Although President George W.
Bush vetoed the popular bill, both the House and Senate
overrode that veto with a two-thirds majority.19 It was
another seven years before Congress passed a large water
bill again, but in 2014, with Boxer able to round up a
bipartisan majority in the Senate (her committee approved
it unanimously), the Water Resources Development Act
became law in 2014. The negotiations over the bill were
made more delicate by the fact that Congress had agreed to
omit earmarks. Traditionally such bills had enjoyed broad
support when Members of Congress could include funding
for specific projects in their states and districts; without
those incentives, negotiations became more fraught.20
It was also Boxer’s commitment to environmental issues
as chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee
that led to a major legislative initiative to mitigate climate
change. In 2007 the committee approved S. 2191,
sponsored by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut
and John William Warner of Virginia. The bill established a
cap-and-trade program which placed quotas on greenhouse-gas
emissions but allowed businesses to buy and sell unused
shares of the emissions quota depending on their need.
Companies that cut emissions could then sell their reserve
allowances at a profit to other companies which needed
extra cushion to meet federal regulations. Under Boxer’s
leadership, the committee’s amended bill received the
support of a slim bipartisan majority. A later Republican
filibuster prevented the bill from being considered in the
full Senate.21
Boxer revisited the cap-and-trade bill in the next
Congress when Democrats controlled the House,
the Senate, and the presidency. Operating on a tight
deadline before a United Nations environmental summit
in Copenhagen, and with Republicans boycotting the
committee hearings, Boxer used a procedural maneuver
to pass the bill out of committee without the votes of
its Republican members. The bill was missing several
details that Boxer hoped to fill in later, but the procedural
move she used to push the bill out of committee angered
Republicans, and it was not long before the effort ground to
a halt.22
Alongside the broader scope of her tenure as head of
the Environment and Public Works Committee, a few of
Boxer’s own environmental bills became law. She managed
to tighten the federal definition of “lead free,” help control
the spread of invasive species, and named a 12,000-foot
mountain in the eastern Sierras after conservationist and
Olympic skier Andrea Lawrence.23
Over the course of her Senate career, Boxer had several
other notable legislative achievements. She opened federal
funds to states looking to “retrofit” bridges to better
withstand earthquakes, opened scientific research into
organ transplants between HIV-positive patients, improved
mental health care for female veterans, and reaffirmed and
strengthened America’s strategic relationship with Israel.24
Boxer announced her decision not to run for re-election
in January 2015, but she made clear that she would remain
politically active. “I am never going to retire—the work is
too important, but I will not be running for the Senate in
2016,” she said. “I want to come home to the state that I
love so much: California.”25 In the round of exit interviews
that followed her announcement she said, “There is a
time when you want the next generation to step in and
step up.”26
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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