About Me
Dr. Judy Chu was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for California's 32nd District in July 2009. She immediately got to work representing the interests of her constituents, voting on several environmental bills and working through the night on her first day in office, during a marathon debate on important healthcare reform legislation as part of her first assignment on the House Education and Labor Committee, where she serves on the Subcommittees on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education and Healthy Families and Communities.
Rep. Chu also serves on the House Judiciary Committee, where she is a member of the Immigration and Citizenship, Commercial and Administrative Law, and Constitution and Civil Rights subcommittees, and on the Government Oversight Committee, where she is a member of the Information Policy and Census and National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittees.
In addition to her vote in favor of passage of the historic health care reform bill, Rep. Chu has already championed a number of causes in Congress. She has used her extensive experience as a legislator and educator help improve our nation’s education system, helping pass a landmark college affordability bill to boost federal college grants and keep student loan interest rates low, and recently introducing a bill that would maintain adequate federal funding for much needed school lunch programs. She has also unveiled a new framework for awarding School Improvement Grants called Strengthening Our Schools (SOS), which provides a more holistic and research-based alternative to the more punitive and overly restrictive guidelines currently used.
She is working hard to help Americans emerge from the Great Recession, co-sponsoring a bill that would extend and expand the enormously successful Jobs NOW program, which uses federal stimulus funds to subsidize jobs at the local level and has already resulted in more than 11,000 jobs in Los Angeles County alone.
Congresswoman Chu is also a strong advocate for effective, humane and progressive immigration reform, having been an original co-sponsor of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR-ASAP) bill introduced by Rep. Luis Gutierrez.
Congresswoman Chu began her career as an educator and taught psychology at Los Angeles City College and East Los Angeles College for 20 years. She was first elected to the Garvey School District Board of Education over 24 years ago.
She was then elected to the Monterey Park City Council, where she served as Mayor 3 times. From there, she was elected to the California State Assembly, where she was Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which has control over all legislation with a fiscal impact to the state. While in the Assembly, she introduced and helped pass the most successful tax amnesty bill in the nation, which was estimated to bring in $300 million but actually brought in $4.8 billion in revenue for the state budget without raising taxes. She was then elected to the State Board of Equalization, California’s tax board.
Rep. Chu earned her B.A. in mathematics from UCLA and her Ph.D. in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology.
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