Jack Davis (industrialist)
John "Jack" Davis (born 1933) is an American industrialist and politician from Newstead, New York. Davis ran four times for New York's 26th congressional district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives between 2004 and 2011, three times as a Democrat (twice as the general election candidate against incumbent Tom Reynolds and a third time in a three-way primary) and once as an independent.
Davis's primary motive for his political campaigns is his concern that the country is being destroyed by U.S. free trade policies which he says have led to the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries and the decline of manufacturing in the United States. Noted for his party-switching, Davis has said that had he won the 2011 election, he would have caucused in the House with the Republican and Tea Party caucuses.
A lifelong Republican, Davis switched to the Democrats after being kicked out of a fundraiser headlined by Dick Cheney in 2003 when he tried to ask Cheney questions about free trade policies. He then ran for the U.S. Congress seat in his home district, NY-26, in 2004, 2006 and 2008 as a self-funded candidate, pouring in millions of his own funds and coming close to beating the incumbent Republican Thomas Reynolds in 2006. In the 2008 election, however, he came in third out of three in the Democratic primary. He switched his affiliation back to Republican with the election of fellow wealthy industrialist Chris Lee, becoming an ally and supporter of Lee. After Lee's abrupt departure from Congress in February, 2011 Davis tried and failed to get the Republican nomination to replace Lee, then decided to run as an independent on a newly created Tea Party line.
Davis is the founder and owner of I Squared R Element Company, an Akron, New York manufacturer and seller of heating elements for high temperature furnaces, and has never outsourced jobs. He is also known for filing a successful lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission in 2006, claiming that the so-called "millionaire's amendment" to McCain-Feingold Act was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Alito writing for the 5-4 majority, sided with Davis, striking down the down the millionaire's amendment as violating the First Amendment to the United States Constitution for fundamentally restricting the right of a self-financing candidate to spend his or her own money in a preferred way.
Read more about Jack Davis (industrialist): Early Years and Education and Business Career, Party Affiliations, Political Career, Electoral History
Famous quotes containing the words jack and/or davis:
“This is the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. The House That Jack Built (l. 22–23)
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)