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Leading off the Post today was a thorough look at the growth in the personal fortunes of members of Congress over the past few decades.
On the House side, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) tops the list, with a net worth of $448,125,017 as of his financial disclosure for 2009. Issa’s wealth comes largely from his pre-political career in the consumer electronics market, specifically as the creator of the talking car alarms whose popularity spiked in the 1980s and early 90s. (That’s Issa’s voice speaking the distinctive line, “Please step away from the car.”)
Where did our own Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton wind up on the list? Nowhere near the top—though six House members including Issa are in nine-digit territory and another 36 sport eight-figure net worths—but she appears to be pretty well off. The Post tabulated her personal wealth as $1,697,521 in 2009, good for 176th highest on the list of 518 current and former House members.
Norton’s 2009 financial disclosure, obtained from Legistorm.com, shows that in addition to her $174,000 salary, she drew income from a “retirement fee” from Pitney Bowes Inc. (she served on its board of directors) and a teaching gig at the Georgetown University Law Center. She also reported several transactions made on a portfolio of mutual funds and bond holdings.
Pitney Bowes paid Norton $12,000. For her class at Georgetown, she received $10,200. In her 2010 disclosure, Norton again reported those income streams at the same levels, in addition to payments on a pair of individual retirement accounts totaling $8,793. Altogether, Norton earned $30,993 outside of Congress last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Among Norton’s financial holdings are stakes in funds administered by a variety of wealth-management companies, including Blackrock, John Hancock, MetLife and Janus. She also holds positions in municipal bonds in San Diego, Illinois and Seminole County, Fla. OpenSecrets calculated her total assets as between $909,038 and $2,536,000 in 2009. (Disclosure rules only require members of Congress to write down ranges rather than specific amounts.) Based off her 2010 disclosure, which is posted at the bottom of this article, Norton’s net worth was between $898,043 and $2,497,000, good for 147th among current House members.
The Post’s story focused on a pair of House members, both Republicans, from a stretch of Western Pennsylvania—Gary Myers, who represented the area in the 1970s, and Mike Kelly, who was elected last year. Myers was a shift foreman in a local factory and founded a “Blue Collar Caucus” when he arrived on Capitol Hill. Kelly, meanwhile, amassed a fortune of more than $34 million as a car dealer before running in 2010. In the quarter-century between their elections, the Post reported, the median net worth of a House member more than doubled from $280,000 to $725,000. At the same time, median household net worth across the country has stagnated or slipped. The Center for Economic and Policy Research recently pegged median net worth across the U.S. at around $100,000.
If anything, the 74-year-old Norton, who has served as the District’s non-voting delegate since 1991, has a relatively stable net worth. The earliest financial disclosure form available on OpenSecrets is for 2004, in which she reported assets of anywhere between $820,023 and $2,076,000.
Below, Norton’s most recent disclosure, covering 2010, filed in May:
