U.S. Government: Elected Officials

  • U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Happy Valley)

    Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer is proud to represent Oregon’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, which covers Linn County, most of Clackamas County, Deschutes County, and parts of Multnomah and Marion Counties.

    Prior to serving in Congress, Lori started her public service career in 2002 on the Happy Valley Parks Committee, where she helped build the Happy Valley 4th of July Festival that it is today. Later, she won a seat on the Happy Valley City Council and became city council president. She was elected mayor in 2010, becoming Happy Valley’s first female and Latina elected mayor. She was re-elected in 2014. In 2022, she was elected the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. She is one of the first Latinas and is the first Republican woman elected to Congress from the state of Oregon.

    Lori is a mom and small businesswoman. She is married to her high school sweetheart, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, and supported the couple as he finished medical school. Later they founded an anesthesia management company and opened several other medical clinics in the Pacific Northwest.

    Lori and Shawn are parents of twin daughters who are making their own footprints in the world. Annie works as a senior recruiter for Anesthesia Associates Northwest, while Emilie is an assistant public defender in Michigan.

  • U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Athens)

    Congressman Andrew Clyde is a combat veteran, small business owner, and a proud Georgian. After earning his commission from the University of Notre Dame, he served as an U.S. Navy officer for 28 years, which included three combat deployments to Kuwait and Iraq. After receiving an honorable discharge, Congressman Clyde made his home in Athens, Georgia and earned a master’s degree in Corporate Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Georgia. He established Clyde Armory in 1991 and grew the company into a nationwide firearms business which currently operates two brick-and-mortar locations in Georgia. Congressman Clyde was first elected to serve Georgia’s Ninth Congressional District in the House of Representatives in November 2020. He currently serves on the House Appropriations Committee. The Congressman and his wife, Jennifer, are residents of Jackson County.

  • U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-Medford)

    Cliff Bentz is a third generation Oregonian, raised on his family’s cattle ranches in Harney County. He attended Whitehorse Ranch and Pine Creek Grade Schools. At age 14, he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle so that he could attend Regis High School (a Catholic parochial school) near Salem, Oregon. While at Regis he lettered in basketball and track, served as student body president and as a delegate to Boy’s State. Following graduation from high school, he attended and graduated cum laude from Eastern Oregon State College. While in college, he served as student body president, as a student member of various student activity committees, and as a member of the honors program. Following college, he attended and graduated with a juris doctorate from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, OR. He joined the Yturri, O’Kief, Rose and Burnham law firm in Ontario, OR in 1977, and he became a partner four years later. As an attorney, he specialized in ranch reorganizations and water law. He is a member of the Oregon and Idaho Bar Associations.

    While practicing law in Ontario, Cliff Bentz also served eight years as a member and then chair of the Oregon Water Resources Commission; as a director and chair of the Ontario 8C public school board; as a board member and vice-chair of Project Dove, a domestic violence prevention organization; as a member and chair of the St. Peter Catholic grade school board; as a member of the Eastern Oregon University Foundation Board; and as a member of the Oregon Historical Society Board. He also participated for over twenty years as a member of the Blessed Sacrament Parish folk mass group.

    In 1987, Cliff Bentz married Dr. Lindsay Norman, a veterinarian. Dr. Norman practices small animal medicine in Ontario. They have two children, Allison and Scott.

    In January of 2008, Cliff Bentz was appointed to the Oregon House of Representatives District 60 seat, and later that year, he was elected to his first of five two-year terms as Oregon State Representative. While in the House, he served on the Revenue, Transportation, Energy and Environment, Legislative Counsel, and Joint Tax Credits committees, and as a member and chair of the Legislative Council on River Governance, the Oregon Hunger Task Force, and other committees and work groups. He resigned from the Oregon House of Representatives in 2018, when appointed to fill the Oregon State Senate District 30 seat. While in the Senate, he served on Finance and Revenue, Judiciary, Energy, and the Joint Tax Credits committees, among others. He resigned from the Oregon State Senate on January 2, 2020, to campaign full-time for Oregon’s Second Congressional District.

    On November 3, 2020, Bentz was elected to represent Oregon’s Second Congressional District. Oregon’s Second Congressional District includes all or part of 20 counties across northern, eastern, central, and southern Oregon.

  • U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.)

    Senator Jeff Merkley comes from a family of fighters. According to family lore, his grandmother lived for a time in a boxcar during the Great Depression. Jeff’s mother stretched a dollar as far as anyone possibly could, and his father overcame a serious illness and went on to work in a lumber mill and become a union machinist. Life wasn’t glamorous, but together, Jeff’s parents saved enough to buy a modest home, take their children on annual camping vacations, and retire comfortably after a lifetime of contributing to their community.

    Jeff learned to take that same determination his father took with him to the lumber mill into the classroom—and with the help of his public school teachers, Jeff went on to be the first in his family to graduate from college. He returned to the same blue collar community in Oregon where he grew up, and led non-profits to help Oregonians put roofs over their heads. When he was elected to the Oregon House, he hit the ground running for working families, creating the state’s first-ever rainy day fund, expanding access to affordable prescription drugs, protecting LGBTQ Oregonians from discrimination, and throwing predatory payday lenders out of the state for good.

    And now, as a U.S. Senator for Oregon, Jeff has continued to be a champion for everyday people—at a time when the people need a champion more than ever.

  • U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.)

    Oregonians know Ron as a senator who listens and innovates. For example, Ron has secured landmark health care and economic wins for our workers and retirees. Always citing the need to “throw open the doors of government for Oregonians,” he holds an open-to-all town hall meeting in each of Oregon’s 36 counties each year. Thus far he has held more than 970 meetings, as well as several virtual town hall meetings sponsored by the nonpartisan Town Hall Project. Wyden’s dedication to hearing all sides of an issue and looking for common sense, nonpartisan solutions has won him trust on both sides of the aisle and put him at the heart of so many of the Senate’s most important debates. In 2011, the Almanac of American Politics described Wyden as having “displayed a genius for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote: “The country has problems. And Ron Wyden has comprehensive, bipartisan proposals for fixing them.”