Congressman Paul Tonko represents New York’s 20th Congressional District, including the communities of Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga Springs and Amsterdam. He represents all of Albany and Schenectady Counties and parts of Montgomery, Rensselaer and Saratoga Counties.
He is serving his seventh term, after first being sworn into Congress in 2009.
Paul serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee, the oldest standing committee in the House, created in December of 1795. He is the first Upstate New York Democratic member to serve on the committee since Leo O'Brien, who resigned the post in October 1966. He was elected by his peers in the 116th Congress to chair the Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. He was also selected to continue his service on the Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as on the Natural Resources Committee.
We have never lived in a more turbulent, more complicated time with regard to terrorism and how to keep our nation safe. I believe we have taken great strides in moving toward a more peaceful world with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the historic deal that blocks every pathway Iran has toward developing and employing a nuclear weapon. After great deliberation, I supported the plan after reading it, and I was pleased to hear in January 2016 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified that Iran is complying with the demands we made and is scaling down their nuclear program to one that remains exclusively peaceful.
Effectively blocking Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon doesn’t represent the whole of the challenges we have in the foreign policy arena – and there are bad actors around the globe, both under a flag and without a country. In Congress, I will continue to support policies that first exhausts all diplomatic options and uses the declaration of war and putting American boots on the ground as the absolute last resort. I will continue to urge my colleagues to be more realistic about working with the executive branch to free up resources that destroy ISIS. Most importantly, I will continue ensure that we do not repeat the foreign policy mistakes of the past that spend trillions of dollars and cost us hundreds of thousands of civilian and soldier’s lives.