Stephen Lynch (politician)

Stephen Francis Lynch (born March 31, 1955) is an American businessman, lawyer, and politician who has served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts since 2001. A Democrat, he represents Massachusetts's 8th congressional district, which includes the southern fourth of Boston and many of its southern suburbs. Lynch was previously an ironworker and lawyer, and served in both chambers of the Massachusetts General Court. Born and raised in South Boston, Lynch is the son of an ironworker. He went into the trade after high school, working in an apprenticeship and later joining his father's union. He became the union's youngest president, at age 30, while attending the Wentworth Institute of Technology. He received his J.D. from Boston College Law School in 1991. In 1994, Lynch was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. During his tenure, his advocacy for South Boston helped propel him to the Massachusetts Senate in 1995, when he won a special election to succeed state senator William Bulger. Lynch won a special election to represent the state's 9th district in the United States House of Representatives in 2001, and has been reelected ever since. His district was redrawn into the 8th district in 2013. He sits on the Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform Committees. Lynch ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2013 special election for the U.S. Senate, losing to Ed Markey.

Early life, education, and business career The fourth of six children, Lynch was born on March 31, 1955, in the neighborhood of South Boston. He was raised with his five sisters in the Old Colony Housing Project. His father, Francis Lynch, was an ironworker. His mother, Anne (née Havlin), was a post office worker. Both parents came from fourth-generation South Boston families. He attended St. Augustine Elementary School and South Boston High School. During high school vacations he began working in construction alongside his father. After graduating from high school in 1973, Lynch became an apprentice ironworker. For the next six years he worked on high-altitude structural ironwork throughout the country for various companies, including General Motors and U.S. Steel. In 1977 Lynch was arrested for smoking marijuana at a Willie Nelson concert at the Illinois State Fair, leading to a $50 misdemeanor fine. In 1979 he was arrested for assault and battery of six Iranian students attending an anti-American protest in Boston, a charge that was later dropped. Around this time, he developed "a problem with alcohol", leading him to join Alcoholics Anonymous. (He reportedly left AA after meeting his future wife several years later, but continued to attend occasional meetings through the 2000s.) When a 1979 blizzard forced his project in Wisconsin to shut down, he spent the extra time taking courses at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Shortly thereafter, his father was diagnosed with cancer, and so Lynch returned to Boston. In the early 1980s, he was elected to the executive board of the Iron Workers Local 7 union. At age 30, he was elected president of the board, the youngest in the local's history. During this time he spent his nights and weekends attending the Wentworth Institute of Technology, from which he graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in construction management in 1988. That year Lynch led a three-week labor strike, refusing to sign a contract with the Associated General Contractors despite pressure from within his union. The union international ultimately signed the contract without Lynch's approval, causing him to file suit against them. He later remarked, "Nothing I ever do will be as volatile as being union president during those times." The incident forced him to miss the first three weeks of classes at Boston College Law School, where he had enrolled. Nevertheless, he graduated with a J.D. in 1991. After graduating he joined the law office of Gabriel O. Dumont, Jr., representing labor unions and unemployed workers. Throughout law school and the following years, he often worked pro bono, representing housing project residents at Boston Housing Authority (BHA) hearings. In one high-profile 1994 case, Lynch provided free legal services to 14 teenagers, all white, who were accused of physically attacking a Hispanic teenager and harassing the family of his white girlfriend over a period of six months. Lynch claimed the youths had been "overcharged" and helped some of them avoid criminal charges and eviction by the BHA. Lynch was a onetime tax delinquent. In the mid-1980s the city of Boston placed liens on four properties he owned due to several thousand dollars of unpaid property taxes. He owed Massachusetts $2,000 in overdue taxes from 1985 to 1988, and for several years owed the IRS $4,000.

Massachusetts House of Representatives

In early 1994 he phoned Paul J. Gannon, the Democratic state representative from the 4th Suffolk district, to announce a run against him. While both candidates were labor advocates with similar backgrounds, Lynch called himself "the conservative candidate". He criticized Gannon for not supporting the Veterans Council, which had prevented a gay rights group from marching in the local St. Patrick's Day Parade, and said that this issue was the main reason he was entering the race. He described himself as against gay rights and legalized abortion. Lynch's base of supporters in the projects allowed him to win the Democratic primary by 600 votes before he went on win the general election. As a state representative, Lynch opposed a plan by Governor Bill Weld and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to construct a $200 million football stadium by the publicly owned South Boston waterfront. He led the opposition to a proposed asphalt plant in South Bay, and sponsored an amendment to a state bond bill that banned its construction. While in the state House, Lynch advocated an amendment to Massachusetts's hate crimes law that would allow people accused of homophobic crimes to use a "gay panic" defense, reducing the penalties for the offense.

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