Rob Portman

Rob Portman

Robert Jones Portman is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator for Ohio. Portman previously served as a U.S. Representative, the 14th United States Trade Representative, and the 35th Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 2010, Portman announced his candidacy for the United States Senate seat being vacated by George Voinovich. He easily defeated then-Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher and was reelected in 2016.

About Rob Portman in brief

Summary Rob PortmanRobert Jones Portman is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator for Ohio. Portman previously served as a U.S. Representative, the 14th United States Trade Representative, and the 35th Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 2010, Portman announced his candidacy for the United States Senate seat being vacated by George Voinovich. He easily defeated then-Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher and was reelected in 2016. On January 25, 2021, he announced that he would not seek a third term in 2022. His great-grandfather on his father’s side, surnamed \”Portmann\”, immigrated from Switzerland; Portman also has Scots-Irish, English, and German ancestry. He is married to Jane Dudley, whom he married in 1986. He has three children. He was a member of the Ohio House of Representatives from 1993 to 2005. In 2004, he had a lifetime rating of 89 from the American Conservative Union, and ranked 5th among Ohio’s 18 members of the Republican National Committee. He also served as an associate White House Counsel under President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1991. In 2005, he was appointed as the U. S. Trade Representative by President George W. Bush. In May 2006, Bush appointed Portman as the Director ofthe Office of management and budget. In 2008, he served as the director of the National Security Council’s National Economic Council. In 2009, he resigned from the NSC to take up a post in the State Department. In 2011, he took up a position in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Technology.

In 2012, he became the head of the Bureau of Educational and Research grants at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Washington, D.C. His wife, Jane Dudley Portman, is an attorney at the law firm Graydon Head & Ritchey LLP, a law firm in Cincinnati. His son, Robert Portman II, is a Republican who served in the Ohio State Senate from 2010 to 2012. His father started the Portman Equipment Company, a forklift dealership, where he and his siblings worked growing up. His grandfather, Robert Jones, purchased the Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, Ohio, and refurbished it and decorated it with antique collectibles and Shaker furniture until 1969, when they retired. His mother, Joan, was a liberal Republican, and Portman inherited his sympathy for the Republican Party. He attended Dartmouth College, and majored in anthropology and earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1978. He then entered the University of Michigan Law School, earning his Juris Doctor degree in 1984 and serving as vice president of the student senate. In 1993, he entered a special election to fill the seat of Congressman Bill Gradison of Ohio’s second congressional district, who had stepped down to become president of Health Insurance Association of America. In 1994, he won the election to represent Ohio’s 2nd congressional district. In 1998, he defeated attorney Lee Hornberger 53,020 to 22,652.