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Frank Dean Lucas (born January 6, 1960) is the U.S. Representative for Oklahoma's 3rd congressional district, serving since 2003, having previously represented the 6th district, from 1994 to 2003. He is a member of the Republican Party and chairs the House Committee on Agriculture. His district, numbered as the 6th district from 1994 to 2003, is the largest congressional district in the state and one of the largest in the nation that doesn't cover an entire state. It covers an area of 34,088.49 square miles and stretches from the Panhandle to the fringes of the Tulsa suburbs—almost half of the state's land mass.
Lucas is a lifelong resident of Cheyenne, a town in western Oklahoma. His family has lived and farmed in western Oklahoma for over a century. He graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1982 with a degree in agricultural economics.
He first ran for the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1984, narrowly losing. A second attempt in 1986 also fell short, but he won the seat in 1988.
On October 30, 2013, [3] Lucas voted to amend the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, adding numerous additional exemptions to the ban on Federal government bailouts of large derivatives dealers[4], placing the interests of banks and investment firms (from whom he's taken over $450,000 in campaign contributions since 2008)[5] above those of taxpaying citizens by making them responsible for Wall Street gambling once again.
On July 24, 2013,[6] Lucas voted to continue funding NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens who are not suspected of committing any crime, in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.[7]
From 2003 through 2005, $14.7 billion in crop subsidies went to the congressional districts of members on the House Committee on Agriculture, an analysis by the non-partisan Environmental Working Group found. That was 42.4% of the total subsidies. Lucas is reported to have brought $422 million to his District.[8] In 2009 Lucas wrote a letter to the White House to protest plans to cut farm subsidies.[9]
Lucas is an ardent conservative. On his campaign Website, he bills himself as providing "effective conservative leadership for Oklahoma." He is a member of the Republican Study Committee. He is a staunch advocate of a federal prohibition of online poker. In 2006, he cosponsored H.R. 4777, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act[10] and voted for H.R. 4411, the Goodlatte-Leach Internet Gambling Prohibition Act.[11] In 2008, he opposed H.R. 5767, the Payment Systems Protection Act (a bill that sought to place a moratorium on enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act while the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve defined "unlawful Internet gambling").
In 1994, 6th district Congressman Glenn English stepped down to become a lobbyist for rural electric cooperatives. Lucas won the Republican nomination for the special election on May 10. He faced Dan Webber, press secretary to former Governor and U.S. Senator David L. Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma. The 6th was already the largest in the state, stretching from the Panhandle to the town of Spencer, in the far northeastern Oklahoma City metropolitan area. However, the state legislature had redrawn it so that it included many poor Oklahoma City neighborhoods that had never voted Republican. Lucas scored a major upset; he won by eight percentage points, carrying 18 of the district's 24 counties. His victory has been seen by some pundits as an early sign of the wave six months later that saw the Republicans take control of the House for the first time in 40 years. Lucas himself won a full term in that wave and has been re-elected seven times, never dropping below 59 percent of the vote, and even ran unopposed in 2002 and 2004.
Lucas' district was renumbered as the 3rd after Oklahoma lost a district in the 2000 Census. His district, already by far the largest in the state, was made even larger. He lost most of his old district's share of Oklahoma City, which was home to 60 percent of the district's population. He once represented much of the downtown area, including the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He still represents that portion of the city located in Canadian County. To make up for this large population loss, the 3rd was pushed further to the east, picking up part of the Tulsa area (including a small portion of Tulsa itself) and some rural areas. As a result, his district now includes 48.5 percent of the state's land mass, and is large as the state's other four districts combined.