William V. Roth

William V. Roth

William Victor "Bill" Roth Jr. (born July 22, 1921 in Great Falls , Montana , † December 13, 2003 in Washington, DC ) was an American politician ( Republican Party ) who represented the state of Delaware in both chambers of Congress represented.

Life

After attending public schools in Helena and the high-school graduation in this city William Roth studied until 1943 at the University of Oregon before he 1947, the Harvard Business School graduated in 1949 and his law degree from the Law School in Harvard was . He had previously served in an intelligence unit in the US Army during World War II , of which he was a member from 1943 to 1946.

In 1950, Roth was inducted into the California Bar ; four years later he moved to Delaware and settled there permanently. He worked as a corporate attorney for Hercules Corporation , a chemical company based in Wilmington . In 1965 he married Jane Richards , a lawyer who later became a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the third district. The couple had two children.

politics

Roth ran for political office for the first time in 1960, but he narrowly lost the election of lieutenant governor of Delaware to the Democrat Eugene Lammot . In 1966 he stood for the election of Delaware's seat in the United States House of Representatives against the Democratic incumbent Harris B. McDowell and prevailed with 56 percent of the vote; two years later he met McDowell again and won by an even greater margin, so that he could originally have served his mandate until January 3, 1971.

However, he resigned it on December 31, 1970, having previously been elected to the US Senate . There he took his seat the next day because his predecessor, John J. Williams, who was no longer a candidate, had resigned prematurely to allow his successor to join the company earlier. As a result, Roth was reelected four times; the best result he achieved in 1988, when he won against Shien Biau Woo , the Democratic lieutenant governor of Delaware, with 62 percent of the vote.

As a senator, Roth acted conservatively in financial policy terms. From September 12, 1995 to January 3, 2001, he chaired the Senate Finance Committee and in this role always campaigned for tax cuts. In 1981, together with Jack Kemp , he proposed a tax cut law known as the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut . However, he was also one of the few Republicans to vote for a firearms control bill in 1994. In 2000 he ran again for re-election, but only got 44 percent of the vote and was thus defeated by the Democratic governor of Delaware, Tom Carper , who replaced him on January 3, 2001 in the Senate. Almost three years later, William Roth died in Washington.

Web links

• William V. Roth in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• William V. Roth in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• The Senators from Delaware