Mary Marsha Blackburn (née Wedgeworth; born June 6, 1952)[1] is an American politician and businesswoman serving as the senior United States senator from Tennessee.

[4] Blackburn attended Mississippi State University on a 4-H scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Science in home economics in 1974.

[5][6][7][8] Blackburn was a member of the Chi Omega sorority, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Little Sisters of Minerva (an auxiliary to a male fraternity) and was elected both as secretary and president of the Associated Women Students at Mississippi State University, wherein she worked to advance social issues through the AWS Zero Population Growth and the AWS venereal disease programs.

[8][12][13] In 1992, she ran for Congress in Tennessee's 6th congressional district, losing to incumbent Bart Gordon, and was a delegate to the 1992 Republican National Convention.

[30][31][32][33] Committee assignments In October 2017, Blackburn announced her candidacy for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker.

[48] On August 1, 2024, Blackburn and Democratic state representative Gloria Johnson won their respective party nominations.

[64][65][40] In 2013, she was chosen to manage debate on a bill promoted by House Republicans that would have prohibited abortions after 22 weeks' gestation, with limited exceptions for rape or incest.

[69][70][71] In 2015, Blackburn claimed that 94% of Planned Parenthood's business revolves around abortion services, which FactCheck.org found to be "wrong" and that "no one can say for sure what the percentage is".

[72] In March 2016, Blackburn chaired the Republican-led Select Investigative Panel, a committee convened to "explore the ethical implications of using fetal tissue in biomedical research".

[78][77] In what appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to Chen, Blackburn asserted in response that the U.S. would "not bow down to sexist communist thugs".

[80] In August 2022, Blackburn led a congressional delegation to Taiwan, where she met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

[88] In March 2022, Blackburn called Griswold v. Connecticut, a landmark Supreme Court decision holding that the Constitution protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction, "constitutionally unsound" as a ruling that "gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances".

[61][91] Vox speculated that Blackburn's ties to Trump, who won Tennessee in the 2016 election by 26 points, helped boost her Senate candidacy.

[99] The tweet was in reference to Vindman, a decorated army official and Purple Heart veteran, who became a central figure in Trump's impeachment proceedings in Congress after testifying he heard Trump pressure the president of Ukraine to investigate the son of one of his chief political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.

But after a mob of Trump supporters violently stormed Capitol Hill that day, she voted to certify the results of the election.

[107] Blackburn was among the 31 Senate Republicans who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which raised the U.S. debt ceiling.

"[109] In March 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom criticized Blackburn for accepting over $1 million in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association of America and voting against gun control measures, including the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed in 2022.

[114] At October 2013 congressional hearings on the ACA, Blackburn said the website healthcare.gov violated HIPAA and health information privacy rights.

[115] According to The New York Times in 2017, Blackburn's best-known legislation was her co-sponsorship of a bill that revised the legal standard the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had used to establish that "a significant and present risk of death or serious bodily harm that is more likely than not to occur", rather than the previous tougher standard of "imminent danger", before suspending the manufacturer's opioid drug shipments.

[116] Joe Rannazzisi, who had led the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, said he informed Blackburn's staffers what the effects of a 2016 law she co-sponsored would be.

He said that during a July 2014 conference call he told congressional staffers the bill would cause more difficulties for the DEA if it pursued corporations that were illegally distributing such drugs.

[117] Blackburn and Representative Tom Marino, the main co-sponsor of her House bill, sent a letter requesting an Office of Inspector General investigation about Rannazzisi, saying he tried to intimidate Congress in the July conversation.

[119] In March 2021, Blackburn visited the southern border of the United States with several other Republican senators; she accused President Biden of encouraging a surge of illegal immigration.

[122] In August 2019, she co-signed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not prohibit employment discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender identity.

[129][130] On October 26, 2020, Blackburn voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States.

[135] Blackburn has advocated increased regulation of technology companies and criticized alleged anti-conservative bias on major platforms.

[136] In June 2018, she published an op-ed arguing for greater oversight and restrictions on tech companies that sparked a vocal backlash among Google employees.

[137] During a 2020 Commerce Committee hearing in which she claimed that tech companies stifle free speech, Blackburn asked Google chief Sundar Pichai about the employment status of an employee who had criticized her.

[138][136][139] In the 117th United States Congress, Blackburn introduced the bipartisan Open App Markets Act alongside Senators Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar.

[146][147] In 2017, Blackburn introduced to the House a measure to dismantle an Obama-administration online privacy rule that the FCC adopted in October 2016.