Earl Pomeroy

Earl Pomeroy

Earl Ralph Pomeroy III (born September 2, 1952 in Valley City , Barnes County , North Dakota ) is an American politician ( Democratic Party ). From 1993 to 2011 he represented the 1st Congressional constituency of the state of North Dakota in the US House of Representatives .

Family, education and work

Earl Pomeroy studied at the University of North Dakota until 1974 and at the University of Durham in England in 1975/76 . He then graduated with a law degree from the University of North Dakota Law School. In 1979 he was admitted to the bar and began to work as such.

Pomeroy's marriage to Laurie Kirby ended in divorce in 2002. You have two adopted children. In 2009 he married the teacher Mary Berglund. Privately, he lives in Mandan , North Dakota.

Political career

From 1981 to 1985 Pomeroy was an MP in the North Dakota House of Representatives for the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party , the state-level branch of the Democratic Party; between 1985 and 1992 he was the insurance commissioner for the government of his state. In the election to the US House of Representatives in 1992 he was elected to the House of Representatives for the 1st Congressional constituency of North Dakota and on January 3, 1993 succeeded his fellow party member Byron Dorgan , who was also elected to the US Senate. In the following years he was confirmed in office with more than 50 percent of the votes, but did not achieve the same outstanding election results of his party colleagues from North Dakota in the US Senate, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan. Only in the last two re-elections did he win with well over 60 percent of the vote.

Pomeroy served on the Agriculture Committee and the Committee on Ways and Means .

In the 2010 election, Pomeroy was defeated by Republican Rick Berg with 45 to 55 percent of the vote. In general, his approval of Barack Obama's unpopular health care reform (" Obamacare ") in North Dakota was seen as the main reason for his defeat; Berg had also criticized Pomeroy as being partly responsible for the explosion in national debt . Pomeroy's mandate ended on January 3, 2011; his seat fell to a Republican for the first time in thirty years.

Positions

Pomeroy was a staunch opponent of President George W. Bush's administration . He supported the authorization of the Iraq war started by Bush by Congress, but became increasingly critical; So he voted in 2007 against the surge in troops ( "Surge" ). He visited Iraq several times as a member of Congress to obtain information.

His position on Obama's 2010 of adopted health care reform, which was controversial in North Dakota from the outset, changed: while Pomeroy meantime the Committee against the bill and the Stupak - Pitts - law expansion had uttered (against the simultaneous promotion of abortion), agreed he in the decisive plenary vote in the House of Representatives for the law.

Web links

• Earl Pomeroy in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rep. Earl Pomeroy Marries in Valley City. In: The Jamestown Sun , July 2, 2009.
2. ↑ Dale Wetzel: GOP's Berg beats The Pomeroy for ND US House seat. In: The Washington Post , November 2, 2010.
3. ↑ Lauren Hall-Lew, Rebecca L. Starr, Elizabeth Coppock: Style-Shifting in the US Congress: The vowels of “Iraq (i)”. In: Juan Manuel Hernandez Campoy, Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa (Ed.): Style-Shifting in Public. New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. John Benjamin, Amsterdam 2012, pp. 45–63, preprint, p. 5 [unpaginated] (PDF) .
4. ↑ Patrick Springer: Pomeroy plans fifth trip to assess Iraq war zone. ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Inforum.com , November 28, 2007 (English). 
5. ↑ WHIP COUNT: House Democrats' positions on the health care reform bill. In: The Hill , March 21, 2010 (English).