Tom Feeney

He represented Florida's 24th congressional district.

One of them was the 24th District in the Orlando area.

Some have argued that Feeney drew this district for himself, since it included virtually all of his state House district and term limits prohibited him from running for the state House again.

(The other new district, the 25th, was drawn for fellow Florida representative Mario Díaz-Balart).

Thomas Charles Feeney III (born May 21, 1958) is an American politician from Orlando, Florida.

He graduated from Penn State University in 1980, obtaining a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1983.

Soon afterwards, he moved to Oviedo, Florida, a suburb of Orlando where he still lives, and opened a private practice.

In 1990, Feeney was elected to the Florida House of Representatives as a Republican from Seminole County.

He served two terms there before running for lieutenant governor of Florida as Jeb Bush's running mate in 1994.

After the pair narrowly lost, Feeney joined the James Madison Institute, a conservative think tank, as a director.

He returned to the Florida House in 1996 and was elected as Speaker of that body in 2000.

Feeney first came to national prominence in 2000, shortly after his election as Speaker, when he led efforts to certify the state's Republican presidential electors even though it was still unclear whether George W. Bush or Al Gore had won the state's electoral votes.

Feeney and his colleagues claimed that Florida's electoral votes were in imminent danger of being removed from consideration if the results of the popular vote in the state could not be determined with legal certainty.

While Article 2 of the United States Constitution places this power in the legislature, many Democrats insisted that recounts needed to be completed, and that by doing so, a clear legal victor would emerge.

Feeney and then State Senate president John McKay argued the state Supreme Court's verdict in favor of the Democrats' position on recounts essentially "tainted" the entire process, so that there was (as Feeney stated) "a great risk" Florida's electoral votes would be disregarded altogether in the selection of the next President.

The U.S. Supreme Court's verdict in Bush v. Gore rejected the argument from uncertainty by a margin of 6–3, and halted the recount process on other grounds.

Bush won Florida and the election.

Florida gained two congressional districts after the 2000 census.

In 2001, Feeney was one of the lawmakers who opposed a demand by Bud Selig that the state finance a new baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins.

At that time, Selig had threatened that the Marlins might leave South Florida if they did not receive a tax break.

He was handily elected in 2002, re-elected unopposed in 2004, and took 58% of the vote in 2006.

Feeney was one of the most conservative members of the House.

He drafted a "Principles Card" soon after becoming state house speaker which allowed his fellow Republicans to check if legislation was consistent with conservative principles.

He modified this card when he came to Congress, calling it the Conservative Check Card.

Feeney is a staunch advocate of a federal prohibition of online poker.

Despite his ties to the Bush family, Feeney broke with the White House and opposed the Medicare reform package of 2003 since he felt its centerpiece, a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens, was too expensive.

He was a founding member of Washington Waste Watchers, a government spending watchdog group.

Feeney cosponsored a non-binding resolution against the use of foreign law in federal courts.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said (of the resolution) that "[i]t's none of your business", Feeney said that Scalia's comments were "like being told your favorite baseball player disagrees with your approach to hitting."

The National Taxpayers Union presented Feeney with the "Taxpayers' Friend Award" in 2004 and in 2006.

In 2006, he cosponsored H.R. 4777, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, and voted for H.R. 4411, the Goodlatte-Leach Internet Gambling Prohibition Act.

In 2006, Feeney was named a "Taxpayer Superhero" by the Citizens Against Government Waste.

He received a perfect score from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (ATR).

He was named "Guardian of Small Business" by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).

In September 2006, Feeney was named one of the "20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress" in a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; he was also listed in the first report by the organization in January 2006, when he was one of 13 named members.

The organization said "His ethics issues arise from trips he has taken in apparent violation of House travel and gift rules and from his failure to disclosure his ownership of rental property."

Feeney was subsequently listed in CREW's 2007 and 2008 reports as well.

He was defeated in the 2008 election by Democrat Suzanne Kosmas.

He was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.

In 2008, he opposed H.R. 5767, the Payment Systems Protection Act (a bill that sought to place a moratorium on enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act while the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve defined "unlawful Internet gambling").