A longtime television journalist, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky won election to the U.S. House in 1992. Her
brief congressional career turned, quite literally, on a single
vote when the Pennsylvania Congresswoman abruptly
backed the William J. (Bill) Clinton administration’s budget
after being an outspoken critic of the legislation.
Marjorie Margolies was born on June 21, 1942, in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, daughter of Herbert and
Mildred Margolies. “Margie always kept me busy,” her
mother said, recalling a schedule that involved multiple
ballet lessons each week, sports, cheerleading, honor roll
academics, and finishing junior high two years early.1 After
graduating from Baltimore’s Forest Park High School
in 1959, Margolies earned a BA from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1963. She worked as a television reporter
for a Philadelphia NBC affiliate in 1967 and, from 1969
to 1970, she was a CBS News Foundation Fellow at
Columbia University.
In 1970, at age 28, she covered a story on Korean
orphans and was so moved by the experience that she
became the first single woman in the United States to
adopt a foreign child, a Korean girl. Several years later,
she adopted a Vietnamese girl. Covering another story on
adopted children, Margolies met then-Iowa Representative
Edward Maurice Mezvinsky, and they married in 1975.
Together the couple raised 11 children: Margolies’s two
children, Mezvinsky’s four children from a previous
marriage, two sons born to them, and three Vietnamese
boys whom they adopted together. Figuring in the
number of refugee families that they sponsored over the
years, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky estimated that her
household had provided for 25 children. In 1976 she
testified before Congress and was credited with helping
change legislation on adoption and immigration practices
incorporated into the 1976 Immigration and Nationalities
Act.2 When Edward Mezvinsky lost his re-election bid
in 1976, the couple settled in Philadelphia. Margolies-
Mezvinsky commuted weekly to Washington, DC, where
she worked as a correspondent for 12 years for the local
NBC television affiliate, focusing on congressional issues.
She also worked for a Philadelphia television station and for
NBC’s Today Show in New York City. During her career, she
won five Emmy Awards. She also published three books,
including They Came to Stay (1976), about her experiences
as an adoptive parent and a supporter of immigrant families.
Marjorie and Edward divorced in 2007.
When Representative Robert Lawrence Coughlin
announced his retirement from the House, two members of
Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County Democratic Committee
approached Margolies-Mezvinsky to run for the nomination.
Producing reports for four network television programs, she
nevertheless felt she needed to heed her own admonition
to her children: “You’ve got to be prepared to lose before
you can win. You’ve got to get out of the stands and onto
the playing field.”3 From the moment Margolies-Mezvinsky
declared her candidacy for the open seat that encompassed
most of the Montgomery County suburbs northwest of
Philadelphia, it was an uphill battle, since the district was
two-to-one in favor of registered Republicans and had not
elected a Democrat since 1916. Her campaign focused on
job creation, health care, and education. She addressed the
1992 Democratic National Convention and later recalled
as she stood on the podium: “I thought about what Barbara
Jordan had said the night before, invoking Thomas Jefferson
and talking about women being in the halls and councils of
power. And I thought about how important it was that we
get in in numbers that can make a difference, to change the
face and the body of [Congress]. And I thought, here I am,
standing here, part of all this. Me. Herbert and Mildred’s
daughter.”4 In the general election, she faced Republican
Montgomery County commissioner Jon D. Fox. During
the campaign, Margolies-Mezvinsky portrayed herself
as a nontraditional Democrat who sought to reduce the
cost of social programs and avoid hiking taxes.5 She won
in an exceedingly close race with a margin of 1,373 votes
out of more than a quarter million cast, 50.27 percent to
49.73 percent.6
When Margolies-Mezvinsky took her seat in the 103rd
Congress (1993–1995), she received assignments on the
influential Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the
Government Operations and Small Business Committees.
She focused on issues affecting women, from abortion
to health care. Her first vote on major legislation was for
the Family and Medical Leave Act. She also opposed the
“Hyde Amendment,” which prohibited federal funding of
abortions. In 1993 Margolies-Mezvinsky joined women
colleagues in the House who effectively pushed for more
funding and research for breast and cervical cancer and
making preventive tools available to more women. “The
best mammogram means precious little to the woman who
cannot afford it,” she said. “The opportunity for women to
save ourselves rests upon the commitment of this Congress
to put the money on the line for our sisters, our daughters,
and our wives.”7 She also proposed legislation to better
educate doctors about diseases prevalent among women
and to encourage leadership training for women in the
medical field.8
Along with legislation that promoted policies important
to women, Margolies-Mezvinsky supported much of the
Democratic Party’s legislative agenda. She voted for the
Brady Handgun Bill, which passed the House in late 1993.
It required a background check and waiting period for
gun buyers. “Waiting periods work. Waiting periods save
lives,” Margolies-Mezvinsky noted at the time.9 She also
introduced bills that raised the minimum retirement age to
70 by the year 2012 and set cost-of-living adjustments for
Social Security recipients at a flat rate.10
The turning point for Margolies-Mezvinsky came when
she made a last-minute switch to support the 1993 Clinton
budget after months of publicly voicing her opposition to
the bill because it did not contain enough spending cuts.
During her campaign, she had promised not to raise taxes,
and the budget proposed a hike in federal taxes, including
a gasoline tax. On the day of the vote, she appeared on
television and told her constituents that she was against the
budget. Minutes before the vote, however, on August 5,
1993, President Clinton called to ask Margolies-Mezvinsky
to support the measure. She told him that only if it was
the deciding vote—in this case, the 218th yea—would
she support the measure. “I wasn’t going to do it at 217.
I wasn’t going to do it at 219. Only at 218, or I was voting
against it,” she recalled.11 She also extracted a promise from
Clinton that if she did have to vote for the budget package,
that he would attend a conference in her district dedicated
to reducing the budget deficit. He agreed (and later
fulf illed the pledge). Nevertheless, Margolies-Mezvinsky
told Clinton “I think I’m falling on a political sword on
this one.” When she finally walked onto the House Floor
to cast the decisive vote, passing the measure 218 to 216,
Democrats cheered while Republicans jeered, “Goodbye,
Marjorie!”12 She later recalled that “I knew at the time
that changing my vote at the 11th hour may have been
tantamount to political suicide… . [but] the vote would
resolve itself into one simple question: Was my political
future more important than the agenda the President had
laid out for America?”13
Margolies-Mezvinsky’s vote, coming as it did after
her specific promises, created wide resentment among
her district constituents. “I ran into a wall of anger,” she
recalled when she returned to her district throughout the
fall of 1993.14 In 1994 the Republican National Committee
targeted her and 14 other vulnerable House Democrats
(many of them first-term women) who had voted for the
Clinton budget. That fall, Margolies-Mezvinsky again faced
off against Jon Fox, who attacked her relentlessly for her
vote. He won by a slim margin of 8,000 votes, with 49
percent to her 45 percent in a four-way race.15
After Congress, Margolies-Mezvinsky chaired the
National Women’s Business Council and served as the
director and deputy chair of the U.S. delegation to the
United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women.
She served as executive director of the Women’s Campaign
Fund, a group that backed women candidates who
supported abortion rights. In 1998 she left that post to run
unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. In
1999 Margolies-Mezvinsky initiated a challenge against
incumbent U.S. Senator Richard John (Rick) Santorum
of Pennsylvania but soon withdrew when her husband’s
finances came under investigation. Although Edward
Mezvinsky was convicted on federal fraud charges in 2002,
investigators cleared Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky of
wrongdoing.16 In 2014 Margolies unsuccessfully sought
the Democratic nomination for the 114th Congress
(2015–2017).17
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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