Harold Ford Jr.

Taking office at the age of 26, he was one of the youngest members of Congress in US history and the youngest in the 105th and 106th Congresses.

He was reelected four times without substantive Republican opposition, by an average of 80 percent of the vote.

This act repealed much of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, which had been enacted to prevent any one organization from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.

The resulting repeal allowed many banks and insurance companies to gamble with money raised from savings and checking bank accounts or insurance policies.

Harold Eugene Ford Jr. (born May 11, 1970) is an American financial managing director, pundit, author, and former U.S. Congressman who served from 1997–2007 in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party from TN's 9th congressional district, centered in Memphis.

He is a member of the Ford political family from Memphis, and is the son of former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., who held the same seat for 22 years.

He went on to earn a B.A. in American history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

After graduation, Ford went into government, serving as a staff aide to the Senate Budget Committee.

In 1993, he became special assistant at the United States Department of Commerce.

Ford returned to university for a J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1996.

When Harold Sr. decided not to seek a 12th term in Congress in 1996, Harold Jr. entered the race and became the favorite in the Democratic primary, which was widely regarded as the real contest in the heavily Democratic, black-majority 9th district.

Ford arranged his schedule for his last semester of law school so he would not have Monday or Friday classes and would be able to fly home to Memphis for an extended weekend each week to continue his campaign.

As was expected, he easily won the Democratic primary, followed by his election in November.

On 4 November 1999, Ford voted in favor of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act,.

In 2000, Ford was the keynote speaker for the 2000 Democratic National Convention supporting then Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic nomination for President.

On October 10, 2002, he was among the 81 House Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing the invasion of Iraq.

After the Democrats lost seven Congressional seats in the 2002 elections, Ford announced his candidacy for House Democratic Leader, challenging then-House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, arguing that current leadership was ineffective.

Ford was defeated but exceeded initial expectations in the amount of support he received.

Although his name was mentioned as a possible Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2004, he was ineligible for the office due to his age (four months shy of 35 on Inauguration Day 2005).

A June 7, 2005, article in The Washington Times reported that from 1998 to 2003, Ford took 61 privately funded trips but did not file travel disclosure forms with the House clerk for the trips, as required by the chamber's ethics rules, until August 2003.

In 2006, Ford made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the retiring Bill Frist.

He was also the last chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

Ford's uncle is John N. Ford, who is Harold Sr.'s brother and was a member of the Tennessee State Senate until he was convicted on federal bribery charges in 2007 as part of the Operation Tennessee Waltz scandal.

Ford lived the first years of his life within the living quarters of his family-owned business N.J. Ford And Sons Funeral Home, which at the time was located in the Riverside neighborhood.

He was baptized at his family church, Mt. Moriah-East Baptist Church.

He attended Double Tree Elementary School, a public Montessori school in the Westwood neighborhood, but graduated from the private St. Albans School, a prestigious university-preparatory school in Washington, D.C., which he attended after his father became a Congressman.

Several economists, notably Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, point to the repeal of Glass–Steagall as helping to create the conditions of the 2007 financial crisis.

Ford also wrote a book, More Davids Than Goliaths: A Political Education, published in 2010.

In April 2021, Ford joined Fox News as a political contributor.

He frequently appears on Special Report as a panel member and was named a co-host of The Five in January 2022.

Ford was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the eldest son of former Representative Harold Ford Sr. and Dorothy Bowles Ford.

He has two brothers, Jake and Isaac, as well as two half-siblings, Andrew and Ava, from his father's second marriage.

The Ford family has long been prominent in Memphis's black community.

Ford's grandfather, N. J. Ford, established a funeral home, which gave the family a broad network in the community.

E.H. Crump, a prominent white Democrat, dominated city and state politics in the early 20th century and befriended N.J. Ford.

Between 2011 and 2017, Ford worked for Morgan Stanley as a managing director.

He also regularly appeared on television on politically related programs on NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC.

During his campaign for the House of Representatives, he sat for and failed the Tennessee bar exam; he said that he intended to try again; as of 2014, he had not.

On December 1, 2020, Ford was named Vice Chairman of Corporate & Institutional Banking at PNC Financial Services.

He and his wife live in New York City and have a daughter, Georgia Walker, and a son, Harold Eugene III.