The congressman from the 5th District is Dale Kildee, a Democrat first elected in 1976. Kildee grew up in Flint, studied for the priesthood, taught at a Catholic high school in Detroit and at Flint Central. His door-to-door campaigning got him elected to a state legislative seat in 1964, at 35, and enabled him to beat a 26-year veteran of the state Senate in 1974. He won the House seat in 1976, when it was solidly Democratic, without a primary opponent and held it easily until the 1990s. Kildee has an intensity of conviction derived from the liberal tradition lively in the American Catholic church--a tradition with little regard for market economics and a strong sense of obligation to care for the needy. He is always pro-union and he is against abortion and something of a stickler on ethics and attendance. In late October 2000, he unintentionally broke his string of 8,141 consecutive votes, the longest in the House, while he worked on details of an education deal; his previous missed vote was in October 1985 when he had a bleeding ulcer.

Kildee is now a senior member of the Education and the Workforce and Resources Committees. He is a strong ally of teachers' unions, a backer of increased federal aid for education and an opponent of school choice. He and Buck McKeon in 1998 cooperated in lowering interest rates on student loans from 7.8% to 7% for students. He worked with Education ranking member George Miller on the Democratic education proposal in 2001, which would increase funding and school accountability, but did not include any funds for private schools. He has fought against reducing federal standards on special education students.

On other issues, Kildee was the first House member to argue imported minivans should be subject not to the 2.5% tariff for cars but to the 25% tariff for trucks, and was a strong opponent of NAFTA. With John Dingell he opposed the FTC proposal to reduce to 75% the American content required for a Made in U.S.A. label. On Resources, he has concentrated on Indian issues. Kildee can remember as a child traveling to the Grand Traverse reservation, where his grandfather had traded with Indians, and hearing his father talk of the Indians' plight. He took to visiting reservations and noting how the Bureau of Indian Affairs spruced them up for his visits; Kildee carries with his copy of the Constitution a copy of the 1832 Supreme Court decision that recognized Indian sovereignty. He set up with J.D. Hayworth of Arizona a Native American Caucus with more than 80 members. In 1999, he worked to narrowly defeat a House amendment to prevent the Interior secretary from arbitrating alternative procedures for gaming compacts between tribes and states.