PA-01: Scott Wallace (D)
About Scott:
Scott Wallace is running for Congress to be a voice for Pennsylvania families, working to end the dysfunction and division in Washington. Scott was born and raised in Bucks County. His father ran a chicken hatchery on Swamp Road in Doylestown and was president of the Buckingham Township Civic Association, and his mother was President of Planned Parenthood of Bucks County.
In his younger days, Scott worked as a carpenter’s assistant, waited tables, pumped gas, sold hot dogs, sold pianos and organs, sold Fuller brushes door-to-door, and flipped burgers at the Doylestown Burger Chef before graduating from Haverford College and eventually Villanova Law School.
After clerking for a federal judge from Bucks County, Scott went to Washington DC to make a difference. He worked as counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, under Pennsylvania’s own Senator Arlen Specter, where he helped write comprehensive crime legislation, the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, and legislation to protect runaway and homeless youth.
Scott served as the general counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, working to investigate the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans, and to help both Republicans and Democrats devise legislative solutions for the common good of the country.
The laws they passed forced the government to recognize the disastrous health effects of Agent Orange, to compensate veterans harmed and to give them the right to appeal when the government turned them down. And they wrote bipartisan laws to provide veterans with job training, education, housing loans, and better health care. He also served as chief foreign policy and defense advisor to the Committee Chairman.
Scott then worked for nonprofit public-interest organizations fighting to improve the criminal justice system, to make it more effective and fair, and to waste less taxpayer dollars. He ran numerous projects for the U.S. Justice Department, and fought to promote drug courts, mental health courts and veterans’ courts, which deal with underlying problems, to break the endless cycle of recidivism. He brought grassroots pressure on Congress to successfully pass legislation like the Innocence Protection Act, and college debt forgiveness for students who commit to become a prosecutor or public defender – up to $60,000 in debt relief per student.
For the last 15 years, Scott and his wife Christy have run the Wallace Global Fund, a charitable foundation working to empower women, fight climate change, and create the clean energy jobs of the future. Their work has taken them throughout America and around the world, testing solutions and learning lessons to help empower everyday working people and ensure a sustainable future for their children.
The Wallace family has a long history of public service. Scott’s great-great grandfather, Henry Wallace, served President Theodore Roosevelt designing programs for rural America. His great grandfather, Henry C. Wallace, served both President Harding and Coolidge as Secretary of Agriculture. His grandfather, Henry A. Wallace, served in the same position under President Franklin Roosevelt, and was the architect of all the programs that saved American family farmers during the Dust Bowl and Depression of the 1930’s. He helped design Social Security, and became so nationally beloved that FDR insisted on him as his Vice Presidential running mate, where he served during the third term, in the war years. Scott’s father spent World War II in the Army, and was among the first American troops into Auschwitz after it was liberated.
Scott’s wife Christy served as a U.S. Diplomat, representing our country for two decades around the globe, including danger zones like El Salvador during the civil war. She’s the daughter of a career Marine, a Pearl Harbor survivor.
Scott and Christy live in the same home in Bucks County that Scott was born in, where a kitchen wall contains the childhood height marks of not only himself and his siblings, but also his own grown children: Johanna, 36, a social media consultant in Buffalo, NY; Astra, 35, a lawyer and corporate-marketing executive with a chain of rock-climbing gyms near Philadelphia; and Robert, 22, a composer and pianist studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
The biographical information above was sourced from the campaign website; see link above for more information.
