Sean Patrick Duffy

By Greg Giroux, Humberto Sanchez and Peter Urban (Bloomberg Government) -- Sean Duffy, a 1990s reality television star and former world champion lumberjack, has a reputation as a serious-minded legislator with a partisan streak leavened by an affable demeanor. In August 2019, Duffy announced he would resign from Congress Sept. 23 after learning that his and his wife’s ninth child, due in October, would be born with complications including a heart condition. “With much prayer, I have decided that this is the right time for me to take a break from public service in order to be the support my wife, baby and family need right now,” Duffy said on Facebook. In the 116th Congress, Duffy emerged as one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies on trade policy amid the administration’s tariff war with China. Trump promoted Duffy’s legislation to allow the president to impose reciprocal tariffs on foreign countries that refuse to negotiate on trade. Duffy called himself a “free trader” but said Trump needed tools to pressure other nations to lower their tariffs. “We don’t want tariffs,” Duffy said on Fox Business Channel in January 2019. “But our trading partners have no incentive to negotiate with us to lower tariffs because they get the better end of the deal. So, if we’re able to let the president raise ours, the real incentive here is to get them, both countries, to lower their tariffs so we get closer to free trade.” A member of the Financial Services Committee, he became the ranking Republican on its Housing, Community Development, and Insurance Subcommittee for the 116th Congress. In May 2019, Duffy said he had a “great working relationship” with subcommittee Chairman Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) and hoped for bipartisan collaboration on overhauling housing finance policy. Duffy said that federal, state, and local regulations, including zoning rules and ordinances, substantially increase housing costs. “You are pricing people out of the ability to purchase a home and putting them on the street because of idiotic, stupid rules that come from government,” Duffy said at a Financial Services Committee markup in March 2019. In the 116th Congress, Duffy worked with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) on a measure that would create a demonstration program to encourage Section 8 housing voucher recipients to move to lower-poverty areas. Duffy led the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee in the 115th Congress, when Republicans controlled the House. He took a lead role on legislation to renew the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides insurance to homeowners in flood-prone areas who are mandated to carry it. Duffy drafted a bill he said would make the program “more actuarially sound,” as he put it. The measure included provisions to use new technology and better maps to improve development of accurate flood estimates. The House passed Duffy’s bill in November 2017, but the Senate didn’t take it up as the program continued to operate on short-term extensions. In the 116th Congress, with Democrats in charge of the House, Duffy said he would reluctantly support a flood insurance bill sponsored by Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). “I don’t think this bill is really addressing the math issues and the deficit issues we have,” he said in June 2019. “But I do think this will go a long way toward improving the program.” In the 114th Congress (2015-16), Duffy was chairman of the Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, where he sounded off against financial regulators. He introduced bills to change the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law written by Democrats. One of Duffy’s bills would have changed the CFPB’s leadership from a single director appointed by the president to a bipartisan, five-member independent commission. The House passed the bill in 2014, but it didn’t advance in the Senate. In 2017, Duffy supported a Republican bill to repeal Dodd- Frank. The legislation included ideas proposed by Duffy, including prohibiting the CFPB from soliciting information on nonpublic personal information without permission. “The Financial CHOICE Act is an off-ramp from Dodd-Frank’s rules and regulations,” Duffy said after the committee approved the bill. The House passed the measure, but the Senate didn’t advance it. Duffy was the lead House sponsor of a 2016 law, signed by President Barack Obama, that was intended to rescue Puerto Rico from its fiscal crisis. The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was designed to provide for an orderly restructuring of the island’s bond debt and create a federally appointed fiscal oversight board. Heritage Action for America, a conservative advocacy group, sharply criticized the legislation as a bailout. Duffy disagreed. “This bill doesn’t spend any taxpayer money bailing anybody out,” he said. Duffy also has sought to remove the gray wolf from the federal endangered and threatened species list. He said gray wolves are killing farmers’ cattle and that their population has expanded enough to warrant delisting under the Endangered Species Act. Duffy’s voting record is solidly in the Republican column. He opposes gun control and government actions to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases. Duffy opposes abortion and in 2016 drew a stinging rebuke from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus over comments he made on the House floor about the disproportionate rate of abortion among blacks. “I hear a lot in this institution from minority leaders about how their communities are targeted. But what I don’t hear them talk about is how their communities are targeted in abortion,” Duffy said. “There are some stunning facts. The African-American community is 15 percent of the country as a whole but accounts for 40 percent of the abortions.” Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) retorted that “Representative Duffy’s hypocrisy on this issue is as predictable as it is offensive.” Duffy has broken ranks and voted with Democrats on labor policy. He’s voted against Republican-sponsored amendments to spending bills that would bar the enforcement of Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements. In July 2019, he was among 29 House Republicans who voted for a Democratic bill to bail out multi-employer pension plans. Early Years Duffy comes from a family tradition of lumberjacking dating back several generations. The 10th of 11 children, he grew up in the northwest Wisconsin town of Hayward, the site of an annual international lumberjack competition. He began log-rolling and pole-climbing as a youth. The lumberjack competitions helped pay his way through college and law school. He twice was champion of the 90-foot pole climb. Duffy, who earned a marketing degree from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota in 1994, was in law school when he took a year off to appear on the MTV reality show “The Real World” in Boston in 1997. A year later, he was on a related show, “Road Rules,” where he met fellow reality star Rachel Campos, who had appeared on a Real World installment in San Francisco and went on to be a Fox News contributor. They married in 1999 and began what would become a large family. “Rachel said it best—we aren’t crazy, we are just full of hope for America’s future!” Duffy said in a May 2019 Facebook post announcing he and his wife were expecting their ninth child. Political Path After graduating from law school in 1999, Duffy worked in private practice for a couple of years in Hayward, in northern Wisconsin. He then became a special prosecutor and later an assistant district attorney. In 2002 he was appointed Ashland county attorney. He won election to that post later in the year and was subsequently re-elected without opposition to three more two-year terms. In 2009, he announced his candidacy for the 7th District House seat that had been held for 40 years by Democrat David Obey, who was then serving his second stint as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. In May 2010, Obey announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. Duffy won the backing of local Tea Party activists and rode the Republican tide en route to an 8 percentage point win over Democratic state Sen. Julie Lassa. Duffy’s 7th District has trended Republican, and he hasn’t had a close re-election contest. In 2018, he was re-elected 60%-39%, comparable to Trump’s 57%-37% win in the district in 2016. Trump got a higher vote share in Duffy’s district than in any other Wisconsin district. Personal Notes “Donald Trump was not the first reality TV star to make it into politics. That was me,” Duffy joked in 2018. While Duffy’s days on MTV have long since passed, there was a mini reunion for a handful of MTV-show cast members who came to Capitol Hill in 2015 as Duffy announced the formation of the Ovarian Cancer Caucus to honor Diem Brown, an MTV-show veteran who died of ovarian cancer in 2014. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), an ovarian cancer survivor, also was there, according to the Washington Post. Updated Aug. 26, 2019 To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Giroux in Washington at ggiroux@bgov.com; Humberto Sanchez in Washington, D.C.; Peter Urban at dc.peter.urban@gmail.com To contact the editors responsible for this story: Loren Duggan at lduggan@bgov.com; Paul Hendrie at phendrie@bgov.com