In 1996, Delegate Donna M. Christensen won election
to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first woman to
represent the U.S. Virgin Islands, a multi-island territory
in the 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
working as 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.
Growing up, Christensen said she “lived in the library” and
later attended boarding schools in Puerto Rico and New
York. She earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College
at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, in 1966, and a
medical degree 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.” 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. In 1998, she married Christian O. Christensen who
had four children from a previous marriage.3
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 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 named to the Virgin Islands status commission
from 1988 to 1992.4
Christensen lost her first bid for Delegate to Congress in
1994, failing to win the Democratic primary. But two years
later, she ran again and won the party’s nomination. On
November 5, 1996, she challenged the one-term incumbent,
Independent Victor O. Frazer, in a three-way general
election. When no candidate earned more than 50 percent
of the vote, a runoff election was scheduled for two weeks
later. Frazer and Christensen captured the largest shares
of the vote, and in the head-to-head contest Christensen
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 the crowded
2012 general election, when three independent candidates
captured a combined third of the overall vote.5
In 1997, as a first-term Member of the 105th Congress
(1997–1999), Christensen won a seat on the Resources
Committee—renamed the Natural Resources Committee
when Democrats controlled the chamber in the 110th
and 111th Congress (2007–2011)—which had oversight
of America’s territories. She remained on that committee
through the 111th Congress, serving as chair of the Insular
Affairs Subcommittee in the 110th Congress. 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. Additionally, Christensen
served on the Small Business Committee from the 106th
through the 109th Congress (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. Christensen
remained on the panel when it became a permanent
standing committee in the following Congress and kept
her seat until 2009.
Christensen spent much of her time on the Resources
Committee trying to stabilize and strengthen the Virgin
Islands’ ailing economy. High energy costs slowed
economic growth and an aging electric grid added to the
rising expenses. The Great Recession of 2008 also led to
new hardships, culminating in the closure of a major oil
refinery and resulting in government layoffs.6
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 budgeting process in the Virgin
Islands. “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.7
Christensen also played a leading role in expanding
representation for the Northern Mariana Islands, another
U.S. territory, during her tenure as chair of the Natural
Resources Committee’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 the House Floor debate on the bill, 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.” On December 11,
2007, her bill passed the House with broad bipartisan
support on a voice vote. The Senate later folded it into
another measure, and President George W. Bush signed
it into law on May 8, 2008.8
As chair of the Subcommittee on Insular Affairs 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.9
Health care remained one of Christensen’s top priorities.
As a longtime member of the Congressional Black Caucus
(CBC), she chaired the CBC’s Health Braintrust from
1999 to 2015. 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. 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.10
From her seat on the Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Health, 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.” 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 African-American communities, 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.”11
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. 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.”12
In 2014, Christensen announced that she would not
seek re-election to a tenth House term and would instead
run for governor of the Virgin Islands. 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. 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. In a runoff on November 18, Mapp prevailed
against Christensen, 63 to 37 percent. In 2019, Christensen
became a member of a medical nonprofit board and
remained an advocate for health care equity.13
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