Jim Cooper

The Cooper family owns the River Side Farmhouse, built for his great-great-grandfather, Jacob Morton Shofner, in 1890; the Gov. Prentice Cooper House, built for his grandfather in 1904; and the 1866 Absalom Lowe Landis House in Normandy, Tennessee, all of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Cooper attended the Episcopal boys' boarding school Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of the Chi Psi fraternity, received the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, and earned a B.A. in history with highest honors and honors in economics in three years.

James Hayes Shofner Cooper (born June 19, 1954) is an American lawyer, businessman, professor, and politician who served as the U.S. representative for TN's 5th congressional district (based in Nashville and containing parts of Davidson, Cheatham, and Dickson Counties) from 2003 to 2023.

He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he was a member of Oriel College and earned a B.A./M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977.

In 1980, he received a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Cooper spent two years working for the law firm Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP in Nashville, and then ran for Congress in 1982.

In 1982, Cooper won the Democratic primary for the 4th district, which had been created when Tennessee gained a district after the 1980 census.

The new 4th ran diagonally across the state, from heavily Republican areas near the Tri-Cities, Knoxville and Chattanooga to the fringes of the Nashville suburbs.

The district stretched across five media markets – the Tri-Cities (Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol), Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama.

The district touched four states – Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi – and nearly touched North Carolina and Georgia.

Cooper defeated Cissy Baker, an editor in Washington for CNN and the daughter of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, with 66% of the vote, becoming the youngest member of Congress at age 28.

He is a member of the Democratic Party and was a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, and represented TN's 4th congressional district from 1983 to 1995.

His district included all of Nashville.

He chaired the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the House Armed Services Committee, and sat on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, United States House Committee on the Budget, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, more committees than any other member of Congress.

At the end of his tenure, he was also the dean of Tennessee's congressional delegation.

Cooper is the third-longest serving member of Congress ever from Tennessee, after Jimmy Quillen and B. Carroll Reece.

Due to Cooper's rare split tenure in Congress in two entirely different districts, his career was divided in two fields: regulatory and health care legislation in the rural 4th district and military affairs in the urban 5th.

Cooper built seniority and respect on two different sets of committees, becoming what The New York Times op-ed writer Joe Nocera called "the conscience of the House, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era."

Cooper announced that he would not seek reelection in 2022 after accusing Tennessee's Republican-led state legislature of partisan gerrymandering in the redistricting cycle.

The new congressional map, which split Davidson County into 3 separate districts, turned TN-5 from a Democratic-leaning seat into a Republican one.

Cooper was succeeded by Republican Andy Ogles.

Cooper was born in Nashville and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

He is the son of former governor Prentice Cooper and his wife Hortense (Powell).

His paternal grandfather, William Prentice Cooper, served as mayor of Shelbyville and speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Cooper was reelected five more times with little substantive opposition, running unopposed in 1986 and 1988.

Before Cooper's election, much of the eastern portion of the 4th had not been represented by a Democrat since the Civil War.

In 1990, Cooper was one of only three House Democrats to vote against the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

During Cooper's first period in Congress, he served first on the Financial Services Committee and then on the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

With Representative Fred Grandy and Senator John Breaux, Cooper coauthored the Cooper-Breaux bipartisan health reform plan, which dramatically increased health insurance coverage with the support of the business community.

Cooper became the leading expert on rural electrical cooperatives, later authoring "Electric Co-operatives: From New Deal to Bad Deal?"

in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.

In 1992, Cooper co-authored a bipartisan health-care reform plan that did not include employer mandates compelling universal coverage.

Called "Clinton-Lite", this initiative was strongly opposed by Hillary Clinton despite its strong backing from both parties.

In 1994, Cooper ran for the Senate seat vacated by Al Gore's election to the Vice Presidency in 1992, but lost to Republican attorney and actor Fred Thompson.

Cooper received just under 40% of the vote.

It was a bad year overall for Democrats in Tennessee, as Republican Bill Frist won Tennessee's other Senate seat held by Jim Sasser and Don Sundquist was elected governor.

The 4th district seat was also won by a Republican, Van Hilleary, as the GOP gained a majority of the state's congressional delegation for only the second time since Reconstruction.

After losing his Senate bid, Cooper moved to Nashville and became an investment banker at Equitable Securities.

Later, he co-founded Brentwood Capital Advisors, a boutique investment bank based in Nashville.

He also served as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management until 2015.