Barbara Boxer, American journalist and politician
Barbara Sue Levy Boxer (born November 11, 1940) is an American former politician who has worked as a lobbyist and foreign agent since leaving the United States Senate, where she represented California from 1993 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the U.S. representative for California's 6th congressional district from 1983 until 1993.
Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Boxer graduated from George W. Wingate High School and Brooklyn College. She worked as a stockbroker for several years before moving to California with her husband. During the 1970s, she worked as a journalist for the Pacific Sun and as an aide to U.S. Representative John L. Burton. She served on the Marin County Board of Supervisors for six years and became the board's first female president. With the slogan "Barbara Boxer Gives a Damn", she was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1982, representing California's 6th district.
Boxer won the 1992 election for the U.S. Senate. Running for a third term in 2004, she received 6.96 million votes, becoming the first person to ever get more than 6 million votes in a Senate election and set a record for the most votes in any U.S. Senate election in history, until her colleague, Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, surpassed that number in her 2012 re-election. Boxer and Feinstein were the first female pair of U.S. Senators representing any state at the same time. Boxer was the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the vice chair of the Select Committee on Ethics. She was also the Democratic Chief Deputy Whip.
On January 6, 2005, Boxer joined Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) in filing a U.S. Congressional objection to the certification of Ohio's Electoral College votes in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.Boxer did not seek re-election in 2016. She was succeeded by former California Attorney General and future Vice President Kamala Harris. In January 2020, Boxer joined Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs as co-chairwoman. In January 2021, it was reported that Boxer was working as registered foreign agent for Hikvision, a Chinese state-sponsored surveillance company implicated in human rights abuses, which prompted the Biden inaugural committee to return a donation she had made. After initially defending her work for Hikvision, she reversed course and publicly announced she had deregistered as a foreign agent. In October, 2021, Boxer, along with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former California State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, led a high-profile mass exodus of employees from Mercury's California office to form their own public affairs and consulting company.