Slack was the representative for West Virginia’s 3rd congressional district and was a Democrat. He served from 1963 to 1980.
He was previously the representative for West Virginia’s 6th congressional district as a Democrat from 1959 to 1962.
Enacted Legislation
Slack was the primary sponsor of 9 bills that were enacted. The most recent include:
- H.R. 4892 (96th): A bill to repeal section 506 of the Communications Act of 1934.
- H.R. 4392 (96th): Department of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary and Related Agencies Appropriation Act, 1980
- H.R. 12934 (95th): Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act
- H.R. 7556 (95th): Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act
- H.R. 3374 (95th): Petroleum Marketing Practices Act
- H.R. 14239 (94th): Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act
- H.R. 4113 (94th): A bill for the relief of Mitsue Karimata Stone.
Does 9 not sound like a lot? Very few bills are ever enacted — most legislators sponsor only a handful that are signed into law. But there are other legislative activities that we don’t track that are also important, including offering amendments, committee work and oversight of the other branches, and constituent services.
We consider a bill enacted if one of the following is true: a) it is enacted itself, b) it has a companion bill in the other chamber (as identified by Congress) which was enacted, or c) if at least about half of its provisions were incorporated into bills that were enacted (as determined by an automated text analysis, applicable beginning with bills in the 110th Congress).
Bills Sponsored
Issue Areas
Slack sponsored bills primarily in these issue areas:
Government Operations and Politics (24%) Economics and Public Finance (17%) Social Welfare (13%) Armed Forces and National Security (11%) Taxation (11%) Health (8%) Law (8%) Labor and Employment (8%)
Recent Bills
Some of Slack’s most recently sponsored bills include...
- H.R. 5993 (96th): A bill to amend the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 to limit ...
- H.R. 5355 (96th): A bill to repeal the carryover basis provisions added by the Tax ...
- H.R. 5204 (96th): Capital Cost Recovery Act of 1979
- H.R. 4892 (96th): A bill to repeal section 506 of the Communications Act of 1934.
- H.R. 4667 (96th): A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 to provide ...
- H.R. 4392 (96th): Department of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary and Related Agencies Appropriation ...
- H.Res. 182 (96th): A resolution to disapprove the final recommendations for the basic route system ...
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Jan 1959 to Apr 1980, Slack missed 459 of 7,306 roll call votes, which is 6.3%. This is better than the median of 8.6% among the lifetime records of representatives serving in Apr 1980. The chart below reports missed votes over time.
We don’t track why legislators miss votes, but it’s often due to medical absenses and major life events.
Primary Sources
The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including:
- unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community project gathering congressional information
- United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 by Howard L. Rosenthal and Keith T. Poole.
- Martis’s “The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress”, via Keith Poole’s roll call votes data set, for political party affiliation for Members of Congress from 1789 through about year 2000
- GovInfo.gov, for sponsored bills