Jack Fields - Congressional Career

Congressional Career

In 1980, at the age of twenty-eight, Fields was elected to the U.S. House on the coattails of President Ronald Reagan's electoral victory. He narrowly defeated 8th District incumbent Bob Eckhardt, a seven-term Democrat, by only 4,900 votes to become the first Republican to represent what is now the 8th in 83 years. After the 1980 census, most of the 8th's more Democratic areas were cut out, and Fields was reelected seven more times without serious difficulty.

When the Republican Party assumed majority control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections, Fields was elected chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Committee on Commerce. In that role, he was one of the principal authors of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.