Frank James Sensenbrenner Jr.

spent forty-two years in the U.S. House as the Republican from Wisconsin’s western Milwaukee suburbs, chairing Science and then Judiciary, introducing the USA PATRIOT Act, and serving as a House impeachment manager more times than anyone in American history. Menomonee Falls was the career address: when he was not in Washington he lived there, ran from there, and treated the Falls and WOW suburbs as the safest Republican seat in the state.

He was born in Chicago on June 14, 1943. At four the family moved to Milwaukee’s North Shore; he grew up in Shorewood and graduated from Milwaukee Country Day School in Whitefish Bay in 1961. Stanford and Wisconsin Law followed. Kimberly-Clark money—the Kotex fortune of great-grandfather Frank J. Sensenbrenner—put him in the room, though the congressman never sat on the company board and by 2010 no longer held the stock.

He entered the state Assembly the year he finished law school, then the Senate, then Bob Kasten’s House seat in 1978, winning twenty-one reelections and never dipping under 61 percent. He introduced the PATRIOT Act to the House on October 23, 2001; a decade later he said the NSA’s metadata dragnet was not what he wrote and co-sponsored the USA Freedom Act to claw it back. He authored REAL ID. His wife, Cheryl Warren Sensenbrenner, a disability-rights advocate from Green Bay, died in 2020. He retired from the House in 2021.