Katherine Clark

Katherine Marlea Clark was born July 17, 1963, in New Haven, Connecticut. She attended St. Lawrence University, Cornell Law School, and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She studied in Nagoya, Japan, in 1983.

In her early career, she worked as an attorney in Chicago. She then moved to Colorado where she worked as a clerk for a federal judge Alfred Albert Arraj of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado and later as a staff attorney for the Colorado District Attorneys' Council. She moved to Massachusetts in 1995 and became general counsel for the state Office of Child Care Services.

In 2001, Clark moved to Melrose, where she was elected to the Melrose School Committee, taking her seat in January 2002. Clark first ran for the Massachusetts Senate in 2004 but lost to Republican incumbent Richard Tisei. In January 2005, she was unanimously elected chairwoman of the Melrose School Committee. In 2006, she decided to run for the 32nd Middlesex seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives when incumbent Mike Festa began a run for Middlesex district attorney but withdrew after he dropped out of the race.

Festa resigned his state House seat in October 2007 to become Secretary of Elder Affairs in the Deval Patrick administration, and Clark entered the special election to succeed him. During the campaign, she emphasized her experience as an attorney and made "developing stability in state aid" her top policy issue. She won the Democratic primary in January with 65% of the vote, defeating two other Melrose Democrats. She defeated Republican real estate businessman Mark B. Hutchison 63 to 37 percent. In November 2008, she won re-election to a full term unopposed.

Sworn on March 13, 2008, she represented Melrose and Wakefield. Clark served on the Education, Judiciary, and Municipalities and Regional Government committees.

Clark was sworn on January 5, 2011. She is a pro-choice legislator and has been endorsed in her campaigns by both NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts and the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund.

In 2011, she was co-chair of the Joint Committee on Public Service, where she was lead author of the Senate version of a bill to reform municipal pensions. For her work in 2011, she received legislator of the year awards from the Massachusetts Municipal Association and the Massachusetts Police Association. In 2012, she authored a law that takes steps to ensure that all Massachusetts students are reading at grade level by third grade. Also in 2012, her bill extending restraining orders in domestic violence cases to also cover victims' pets, which are often used as pawns in abusive relationships, was signed as part of a larger law on animal shelters. In 2013, she co-sponsored a bill expanding the state's wiretapping authority, which was strictly limited under existing law, in order to help police better investigate violent street crime. At the same time, she co-sponsored a bill to secure electronic privacy protections, requiring police to have probable cause before investigating the electronic records of individuals. She filed another bill tightening sex offender laws, imposing stricter penalties and making offender data more accessible to agencies and the public. The Women's Bar Association of Massachusetts honored Clark as their 2013 Legislator of the Year for her service on women's issues.

Clark was the Democratic nominee in the 2013 special election for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts's 5th congressional district. The district's longtime incumbent, Ed Markey, had just been elected to the United States Senate six months into his 19th term. In a heavily-contested Democratic primary—the real contest in this heavily Democratic district—she was endorsed by Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley and also received the endorsement of EMILY's List. On October 15, 2013, she won the Democratic primary with a plurality of 32% of the vote. Her closest competitor was Middlesex County Sheriff Peter Koutoujian, who won 22% of the vote. On December 10, 2013, as expected, she easily won the special election.

Clark was sworn into office December 12, 2013, and sits on the House Appropriations Committee. In a 2014 interview with The Boston Globe, she compared the television series House of Cards to life in Washington, saying "It's exactly like here; minus the murders."

Clark was unopposed in her bid for a full term in 2014.

In March 2015, Clark decided not to attend the speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint session of Congress. Clark affirmed a commitment to maintaining and strengthening the relationship between the U.S. and Israel but noted that the invitation was offered without first consulting the Obama administration.

In January 2017, Clark announced a boycott of the inauguration of Donald Trump. She was part of a small group of House and Senate members who chose to boycott Trump's swearing-in ceremony. Her reasons, according to The Boston Globe, for not attending were due to her desire not to "normalize" Trump's promotion of "bigoted, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and racist claims."

On November 28, 2018, it was announced that Clark had defeated California congressman Pete Aguilar to succeed Linda Sánchez as Vice Chair of the House Democratic Caucus.