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American politician (born 1954)

James Hayes Shofner Cooper (born June 19, 1954) is an American lawyer, businessman, professor, and politician who served as the U. S. representative for (based in Nashville and containing parts of Davidson, Cheatham, and Dickson Counties) from 2003 to 2023. He is a member of the Democratic Party and was a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, and represented from 1983 to 1995. His district included all of Nashville. He chaired the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the House Armed Services Committee, and sat on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, United States House Committee on the Budget, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, more committees than any other member of Congress. At the end of his tenure, he was also the dean of Tennessee's congressional delegation. Cooper is the third longest serving member of Congress ever from Tennessee, after Jimmy Quillen and B. Carroll Reece. Due to Cooper's rare split tenure in Congress in two entirely different districts, his career was divided in two fields: regulatory and health care legislation in the rural 4th district and military affairs in the urban 5th. Cooper built seniority and respect on two different sets of committees, becoming what The New York Times op ed writer Joe Nocera called "the conscience of the House, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era." Cooper announced that he would not seek reelection in 2022 after accusing Tennessee's Republican led state legislature of partisan gerrymandering in the redistricting cycle. The new congressional map, which split Davidson County into 3 separate districts, turned TN 5 from a Democratic leaning seat into a Republican one. Cooper was succeeded by Republican Andy Ogles.

Cooper was born in Nashville and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He is the son of former governor Prentice Cooper and his wife Hortense (Powell). His paternal grandfather, William Prentice Cooper, served as mayor of Shelbyville and speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives. The Cooper family owns the River Side Farmhouse, built for his great great grandfather, Jacob Morton Shofner, in 1890; the Gov. Prentice Cooper House, built for his grandfather in 1904; and the 1866 Absalom Lowe Landis House in Normandy, Tennessee, all of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cooper attended the Episcopal boys' boarding school Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Alpha Sigma Chapter of the Chi Psi fraternity, received the Morehead Cain Scholarship, and earned a B. A. in history with highest honors and honors in economics in three years. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he was a member of Oriel College and earned a B. A./M. A. in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977. In 1980, he received a J. D. from Harvard Law School. Cooper spent two years working for the law firm Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP in Nashville, and then ran for Congress in 1982.

In 1982, Cooper won the Democratic primary for the 4th district, which had been created when Tennessee gained a district after the 1980 census. The new 4th ran diagonally across the state, from heavily Republican areas near the Tri Cities, Knoxville and Chattanooga to the fringes of the Nashville suburbs. The district stretched across five media markets – the Tri Cities (Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol), Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. The district touched four states – Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi – and nearly touched North Carolina and Georgia. Cooper defeated Cissy Baker, an editor in Washington for CNN and the daughter of U. S. Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, with 66% of the vote, becoming the youngest member of Congress at age 28.

Cooper was reelected five more times with little substantive opposition, running unopposed in 1986 and 1988. Before Cooper's election, much of the eastern portion of the 4th had not been represented by a Democrat since the Civil War.

In 1992, Cooper co authored a bipartisan health care reform plan that did not include employer mandates compelling universal coverage. Called "Clinton Lite", this initiative was strongly opposed by Hillary Clinton despite its strong backing from both parties. In 1990, Cooper was one of only three House Democrats to vote against the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

During Cooper's first period in Congress, he served first on the Financial Services Committee and then on the Committee on Energy and Commerce. With Representative Fred Grandy and Senator John Breaux, Cooper coauthored the Cooper Breaux bipartisan health reform plan, which dramatically increased health insurance coverage with the support of the business community. Cooper became the leading expert on rural electrical cooperatives, later authoring "Electric Co operatives: From New Deal to Bad Deal?" in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.

In 1994, Cooper ran for the Senate seat vacated by Al Gore's election to the Vice Presidency in 1992, but lost to Republican attorney and actor Fred Thompson. Cooper received just under 40% of the vote. It was a bad year overall for Democrats in Tennessee, as Republican Bill Frist won Tennessee's other Senate seat held by Jim Sasser and Don Sundquist was elected governor. The 4th district seat was also won by a Republican, Van Hilleary, as the GOP gained a majority of the state's congressional delegation for only the second time since Reconstruction.

After losing his Senate bid, Cooper moved to Nashville and became an investment banker at Equitable Securities. Later, he co founded Brentwood Capital Advisors, a boutique investment bank based in Nashville. He also served as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management until 2015.

When Thompson opted not to run for reelection to the Senate in 2002, 5th district Congressman Bob Clement (with whom Cooper had served from 1988 to 1995) ran for Thompson's seat. Cooper entered the 5th district Democratic primary along with several other candidates, including Davidson County Sheriff Gayle Ray, Tennessee's first female sheriff, and state legislator John Arriola. Cooper won the primary with 47% of the vote. He won the general election against Republican nominee Robert Duvall (not the actor Robert Duvall), 64% 33%. The 5th, based in heavily Democratic Nashville, has long been one of the South's most Democratic districts. It and its predecessors have been in Democratic hands without interruption since 1875, and no Republican had made a serious bid for it since 1972. Upon his return to Congress, the Democrats gave him back his seniority.

Cooper defeated Republican nominee David Hall, 57%–42%. This is his smallest margin of victory during his time representing the 5th district.

Republicans gained complete control of state government for the first time since Reconstruction. This led to speculation that the legislature might try to draw the 5th out from under Cooper in an effort to gain another Republican district. In the summer of 2011, Cooper and Nashville Mayor Karl Dean told The Tennessean that they had heard rumors that Nashville would be split among three Republican districts. Despite its size, Nashville has been entirely or mostly in a single district since Reconstruction. Cooper said he had seen a map that would have put his Nashville home in the heavily Republican 6th district. The 5th would have been reconfigured into a strongly Republican district stretching from Murfreesboro to the Alabama border, while the rest of Nashville would have been placed in the heavily Republican 7th district. Had it been implemented, the map would have left Cooper with only two realistic places to run—an incumbent versus incumbent challenge in the 6th against freshman Republican Diane Black, or the reconfigured 5th, which had reportedly been drawn for State Senator and Murfreesboro resident Bill Ketron, chairman of the redistricting committee. But the final map was far less ambitious, and made the 5th slightly more Democratic than its predecessor. Notably, Cooper picked up all of Nashville; previously, a sliver of southwestern Nashville had been in the 7th. Cooper defeated Republican nominee B. Staats, 65%–33%.

Cooper was challenged in the Democratic primary by public defender Keeda Haynes, Justin Jones, and former Republican Joshua Rawlings, though Jones withdrew before the primary. Haynes was endorsed by state senator Brenda Gilmore and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, among others. Cooper defeated Haynes and Rawlings with 57% of the vote to Haynes's 40% and Rawlings's 3%. In the general election, Cooper did not face a Republican nominee. He received 99.99% of the vote, with 14 votes going to write in candidates.

In 2012, Cooper created the Golden Goose Award to recognize the human and economic benefits of federally funded research. Each year, the award is given to scientists to highlight examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact. Cooper's inspiration for the award came from his desire to reverse the legacy of former Senator William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece Award", which attacked federal spending he saw as wasteful, often federally funded scientific research. Cooper, known as "Father Goose", was honored at the 2022 Golden Goose Award Ceremony.

On January 25, 2022, Cooper announced he would not run for reelection and would retire from Congress. Cooper made the decision due to the state legislature's controversial move to split Davidson County into three congressional districts in an attempt to gerrymander another Republican district. The final map pushed the 5th into portions of heavily Republican counties to the east and south. Joe Biden easily won the old 5th with 60% of the vote, but Donald Trump would have carried the new 5th with 55%. At the same time, parts of Nashville were drawn into the heavily Republican 6th and 7th districts. Cooper's only options would have been running in the new 5th, which would have been almost two thirds new to him, or challenging Republican incumbents John Rose in the 6th or Mark Green in the 7th. Believing he had no realistic chance of staying in Congress, Cooper opted to retire.

As of 2024, Cooper serves on the advisory board of the National Security Space Association.

Cooper was married to Martha Bryan Hays, an ornithologist, from 1985 until her death from Alzheimer's disease in 2021 at age 66. They had three children. His daughter Mary was the student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cooper's son Jamie graduated from the University of Georgia, and his son Hayes graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is completing his M. F. A. in poetry at Vanderbilt University. Cooper's brother John served as mayor of Nashville from 2019 to 2023 and formerly served on the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County. Cooper married Mary Beltz Falls in March 2022.