George's Biography

Congressman George Miller is the Senior Democrat of the House Education and Workforce Committee and chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee. George is a leading advocate in Congress on education, labor, the economy, and the environment.

George has represented Contra Costa and the East Bay of San Francisco since 1975. His current district includes portions of Contra Costa and Solano counties, including Richmond, Concord, Martinez, Pittsburg, Benicia, Vallejo and Vacaville. He is a life-long Democrat and Californian.

George is a member of the Democratic Leadership, appointed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to serve as chair of the House Democratic Policy Committee. In that role he helps House Democrats develop and articulate a wide range of policies to benefit all Americans.

George first ran for office because he had a sense of urgency to serve people and his country. He continues to believe that the test for elected officials is whether they get up every day with that sense of urgency and drive to get things done. He recognizes the solemn responsibility and enormous opportunity he has to help strengthen and grow America’s middle class families by improving the economy and creating good jobs, ensuring access to affordable health care, making college more affordable, improving public schools, protecting our children, and keeping our environment and water supplies clean and secure.

George believes America must honor its commitment to our service men and women and veterans, that seniors deserve affordable services and that we must protect Medicare and Social Security. He works hard at his job because there is so much at stake. His goal is to give voice to the people in his community over the powerful interests that have dominated our political system and to help the people in his community, across the state and across the country reach their full potential.

His top priorities in the 112th Congress are to spur job creation and economic growth, reauthorize the federal k-12 education law, ensure that the historic health care reform law that he co-wrote is fully implemented, and push for greater investment in renewable energy and energy conservation.

He has served on the Education and Workforce Committee since first coming to Congress and was its chairman from 2007 through 2010. From 1991 to 1994 George chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, one of the primary committees overseeing the environment, energy and public lands, and served as the committee’s Senior Democrat until 2000.

George has a long and successful legislative record of accomplishment in a wide range of policy areas.

In the 111th Congress, in the wake of the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression, George helped craft President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to save and create millions of jobs, invest in education and get the economy moving forward again. The law included historic investments to spur education reform, including the Race to the Top program, which has encouraged states to modernize their schools, reward excellent teachers and use data to help increase student achievement.

George was one of three House committee chairs who wrote and helped to pass the historic health care law in the House of Representatives, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, later called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. George worked to pass this historic law in order to deliver fundamental health reforms to slow the growth in out-of-control health costs, introduce competition into the health care marketplace to keep coverage affordable and insurers honest, protect people’s choices of doctors and health plans, and assure that all Americans have access to quality, stable, affordable health care. The health care law also reduces the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over ten years.

George also worked with President Obama to transform the federal student loan programs to ensure they work in the best interest of students, not big banks. By eliminating the banking middleman and wasteful subsidies paid to banks, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2010 saves $60 billion in taxpayer money and invests that money in students and college completion. And the law does all this without increasing the deficit; in fact, the law reduces the deficit over a ten year period. The law raised the Pell Grant scholarship to its highest level in history, decreased interest rates on need-based student loans and invested in community colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Under his leadership in the 111th and 110th Congresses, the Education and Labor Committee shepherded 14 bills that were signed into law and dozens of others that passed the House. According to the historian of the House, in the 110th and 111th Congresses, the Education and Labor Committee was the most productive committee in the history of the House of Representatives.

Following President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the first bill he signed into law was written by George and passed out of the Education and Labor Committee. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act overturned a Supreme Court ruling that restricted a woman’s right to challenge her employer on the basis on pay discrimination.

In response to President Obama’s call to action, George passed out of his committee in March of 2009 the GIVE Act, now called the Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Service Act, to expand national service opportunities. The President signed this bill into law on April 21, 2009.

In 2007, immediately after the Democrats were elected to a majority in Congress after 12 years of being the minority, it was George’s bill that increased the minimum wage -- from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour -- for the first time in 10 years. George is leading more than 100 of his Democratic colleagues to try to pass a new bill, the The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012 (H.R. 6211) to increase the minimum wage in three 85-cent steps, over three years, from $7.25 to $9.80 per hour.

Also in 2007, George authored and passed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, at that time the largest expansion of federal financial aid for college since the GI Bill. The bill was passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. The law cut interest rates for Stafford Loans in half, increased Pell grants, and provided loan forgiveness to qualified public service employees with student loan debt – without increasing the deficit.

George is one of the four original congressional authors of the most recent iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, the main federal law affecting k-12 public schools. And he has been pushing for a bipartisan effort to rewrite the law for several years.

George is an expert and leader in Congress on California water issues and national environmental policy. In 1992, he passed and enacted into law under Republican President George H. W. Bush the historic California water reform law known as the Central Valley Project Improvement Act to ensure a more balanced use of California’s scarce fresh water resources. He also co-authored with Senator Dianne Feinstein the 1994 California Desert Protection Act. George has a long history of other legislative achievements on a wide range of education, labor, and environmental issues.

George is a strong believer in responsibly tackling our nation’s deficit and debt. He wrote the first bill in Congress to require a “pay-as-you-go” budgeting rule, which was finally implemented under President Bill Clinton but was later undone under President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. Today he is pushing for a balanced approach to our budget problems, including spending cuts to defense and non-defense programs and increases in revenues, such as through closing certain loopholes and demanding that the wealthiest Americans and profitable corporations pay their fair share.

George was born in Richmond, CA, on May 17, 1945 and lives in Martinez. He graduated from Diablo Valley Community College, San Francisco State University, and earned his law degree from the University of California, Davis, Law School. He served on the staff of then-State Senate Majority Leader George Moscone in Sacramento. He is married to Cynthia Caccavo Miller, a life-long resident of Contra Costa County. They have two sons, George and Stephen, and six grandchildren.

Updated: September 2012