In the News

 

 

By CQ Roll Call

 

 

 

Moore is an unfailing advocate for the poor and the programs meant to assist them. She’s also intrigued by the financial services sector, calling it the next frontier in civil rights. But her work includes bipartisan attempts to tweak the marketplaces and products that companies and investors rely on — and she says that transparency and disclosure are the key to those efforts.

 

Referencing her personal history, Moore calls herself “a poor person who can see the business purpose of things.” She became interested in politics as a student in Milwaukee’s public schools in the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement. At 18, during her freshman year at Marquette University, Moore became pregnant and began receiving welfare benefits. Still, she continued her studies in political science, earning her bachelor’s degree after eight years — an outcome she credits to federal programs for low-income students.

 

Moore relishes the person-to-person contacts of public service. (She had her knees replaced in 2013 “so I could do doors again,” she said.) After college, she worked as a VISTA volunteer and organized a community credit union in her North Milwaukee neighborhood to help combat predatory lending. She also worked as a neighborhood development specialist for Milwaukee’s city government. “My organizing principle is helping poor people — women, children — but also making the connection with commerce,” she said.

 

Moore pursues her goals as a member of the Financial Services Committee, which she has sat on for her entire House career. “My sister likes to tease me about members of Congress being less popular than lice and cockroaches,” she said in 2014. “So I like to say that I am embracing my inner cockroach. I get in the cracks and make something happen.”

 

Some opportunities are straightforward: During the 2010 debate on the financial regulatory overhaul known as Dodd-Frank, she pushed for a $1 billion loan program to assist unemployed individuals at risk of home foreclosure. It was included in the law. Other opportunities have been more oblique: In 2014, Moore was one of the lead Democrats calling for a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which has helped drum up business for companies in her district.

 

And some opportunities have involved untangling the byzantine web of financial regulation. Dodd-Frank established a new regulatory framework for derivatives, the often complex instruments that companies use to hedge risk. Moore is unquestionably liberal — she belongs to the Congressional Progressive Caucus — but she has been criticized by liberal groups for writing and supporting bills to loosen regulations established under Dodd-Frank. “I do not see derivatives as a dirty word,” she said. “I have come to understand that these businesses must hedge.”

 

Similarly, Moore has worked with Republican partners to address other unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank, such as rules that might compel financial advisers to avoid smaller investors for fear of liability risks.

 

Of course, Moore’s outreach efforts exist side-by-side with pointed criticism of the Republican majority. She sits on the Budget Committee, and in the 113th Congress (2013-14) she again harshly criticized GOP blueprints for spending reductions and entitlement program changes. While Moore respects the “intelligence and integrity” of Chairman Paul D. Ryan of the neighboring 1st District, she said that pressures within the Republican Party forced him to produce a fiscal 2015 budget that is a “polemic against the poor.” She is wary of proposals to convert assistance programs to block grants for the states: “Block grant means cut.”

 

A good deal of Moore’s focus is on the downtrodden or abused. In May 2009, she shepherded into law a reauthorization of assistance programs for the homeless. The law expanded the definition of “homeless” — and thus eligibility for aid — to include those fleeing from domestic violence with no place to go, as well as individuals and families who are within 14 days of losing their housing. A major victory with that law was the inclusion of language to protect the identity of domestic violence victims who receive homeless assistance. Moore’s fear was that abusers could track their victims through federal databases.

 

Moore herself is a victim, and she took her story to the House floor in March 2012 when another reauthorization was under discussion — this time, for federal programs to prevent and prosecute violent crimes against women. “Domestic violence has been a thread throughout my personal life, up to and including being a child repeatedly sexually assaulted, up to and including being an adult who has been raped,” she said. “This is not a partisan issue, and it would be very, very devastating to women of all colors, creeds and sexual orientations for us not to address this.” After some partisan disputes over extensions of the programs to illegal immigrants, Native Americans and same-sex couples, a reauthorization was enacted early in the 113th Congress.

 

Moore was born in Racine, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a World War II veteran and a factory worker and her mother was a teacher. Like her mother, Moore writes, composing satirical poetry to vent her frustrations about political or policy debates — from time to time she will share them with an audience. Moore said her father taught her self-reliance, a trait that propelled her through school and her career.

 

She served as student council president of North Division High School, where she pushed city officials to replace an aging building that lacked science labs and showers for athletes. Moore also organized a school walkout over a lack of textbooks describing the post-slavery history of African-Americans.

 

After holding several government jobs, she was elected to the Wisconsin Assembly in 1988. In her first re-election bid she beat Republican Scott Walker, the state’s current governor. Moore was heavily involved in the failed 2012 campaign to recall Walker, which was spurred by his efforts to modify collective bargaining rights for public employees.

 

Democrat Gerald D. Kleczka decided to retire from the House in 2004, and Moore easily won a three-way primary for her party’s nomination. That November, she took almost 70 percent of the vote to become the first African-American member of Congress from Wisconsin. She has won re-election with ease, most recently taking 72 percent of the vote in 2012.