[2] The district stretched along several counties in western and central Florida, including territory in the metropolitan area of Tampa Bay.

[3] She served as a staffer in the New York State Senate, working there for 17 years and eventually rising to the role of legislative director.

She says she believed she saw "a message" in a nosebleed suffered by death row inmate Allen Lee Davis during his execution on July 8, 1999.

[9] However, she was skeptical of the president's proposal for personal accounts, saying that he hadn't done a good job of selling it to seniors.

The bill, modeled after the Florida law of the same name, had the objectives to punish sex offenders and reduce their ability to re-offend.

He also said that Brown-Waite would support "a properly-worded resolution" that would put forth a no-confidence vote in Congress for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who resigned in 2007).

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").

[20] In September 2006, Brown-Waite was told about an incident from 2003 or 2004 when an apparently inebriated Mark Foley had tried to gain access to the pages' dormitory.

Brown-Waite launched her own investigation and alerted Republican leadership on September 29 both about the dorm incident and about pages who had been made to feel uncomfortable by Foley.

Foley resigned that day and the scandal erupted that evening with news of the lurid instant messages he had sent former pages.

Land o' Lakes Republican Jim King joined the race as a conservative candidate, attacking the moderate Congresswoman from the right on matters of national security, immigration, taxation, and supporting the troops, which is one of Brown-Waite's signature issues.

[25][26] Three Democrats declared their candidacies: 2006 nominee John Russell, H. David Werder and Carol Castagnero.

Castagnero placed third in the Democratic primary for governor in 2006[27] and took 40% of the vote against State Senator Paula Dockery in 2004.

On November 26, 2007, it was reported that after years of hosting town hall meetings on the issue and calling for full hearing on the implications of the FAIR Tax,[29] Brown-Waite had endorsed the FairTax proposal on September 24.