Fred Upton

Fred Upton (2013)

Frederick Stephen "Fred" Upton (* 23. April 1953 in St. Joseph , Berrien County , Michigan ) is an American politician of the Republican Party . Since 1987 he has represented the state of Michigan in the US House of Representatives .

Career

Fred Upton first attended the Shattuck School in Faribault ( Minnesota ) and then studied until 1975 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor . Between 1976 and 1980 he was on the staff of Congressman David Stockman . Between 1981 and 1985, Upton worked for the Office of Management and Budget .

In the 1986 election , Upton was elected to the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC in the 4th Congressional constituency of Michigan , where he succeeded Mark D. Siljander on January 3, 1987 . Since 1993 he has represented the 6th congressional constituency of his home state there as the successor to Milton Robert Carr . He was last re-elected in 2018 with 50.2% of the vote.

In Congress, Upton is a staunch opponent of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform ( Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010). From 2011 to 2017, he was Chairman of the House of Representatives’s Energy and Trade Committee . He is also a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction .

In 2007, Upton was one of the supporters of the Energy Independence and Security Act under President George W. Bush . a. initiated the gradual elimination of conventional lightbulbs . As recently as 2009, he described climate change as a serious problem that must be countered by all means. However, when he aspired to chair the Energy and Trade Committee in 2010, he revised his positions in this area. With Tim Phillips , head of Americans for Prosperity , an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers ( Koch Industries ), he published an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he took a climate- skeptical position and called the taxation of carbon dioxide emissions unconstitutional. Such projects by the National Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would cost millions of jobs and would therefore have to be prevented. As chairman of the committee, he then pushed a policy for which the Los Angeles Times named him in 2011 as the greatest opponent of planet earth in Congress. In a particularly influential position, he was one of the many MPs who voted in 2010 under the influence of massive campaigns by Koch Industries, Americans for Prosperity and other organizations against new environmental protection regulations and also against MPs who were eligible for election who supported such a policy the interests of the fossil fuel based branches of the economy.

Upton is married with two children. A niece is the model Kate Upton .

Web links

Commons : Fred Upton  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Fred Upton in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Web presence at the Congress (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michigan Election Results: Sixth House District . In: New York Times, January 28, 2019.
2. ^ Michael Grunwald: Long live the light bulb . Time Magazine, May 9, 2013.
3. ^ ^{A b} Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-3855-3559-5 , p. 276.
4. ^ Darren Samuelsohn: Upton to revisit light bulb ban . Politico, November 18, 2010.
5. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York et al. a. 2016, p. 277.
6. ↑ Fred Upton, Tim Phillips: How Congress Can Stop the EPA's Power Grab . Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2010.
7. ^ Dan Turner: Year in Review: Congress' 10 biggest enemies of the Earth . Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2011.
8. ^ Coral Davenport, Eric Lipton: How GOP Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science . New York Times, June 3, 2017.