Joe Kennedy III

Kennedy speaking at the 50th Anniversary of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium (2011)

In April 2006, Kennedy returned to Massachusetts, where he and his brother co-chaired Ted Kennedy's re-election campaign. The same month, Kennedy enrolled in Harvard Law School.[9] There, he worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, providing legal aid to low-income tenants with foreclosure cases in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and as a technical editor for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, on a staff with his classmate and future wife, Lauren Anne Birchfield.[9] In 2007, he and Birchfield co-founded Picture This: Justice and Power, an after-school program for youths in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.[15][16] He began an internship at the Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office in 2008.[14]

After earning his Juris Doctor in 2009, Kennedy was hired at the Cape and Islands Office as an assistant district attorney (DA). He considered running for the Cape-based U.S. House seat held by retiring Rep. Bill Delahunt in early 2010, but decided against it.[17] In September 2011, he joined the Middlesex County, Massachusetts, District Attorney's Office, also as an assistant DA.[18] He resigned several months later, in preparation for the announcement that he would seek political office.[19]

Kennedy (left) campaigning with Elizabeth Warren (center), and his predecessor Barney Frank (right), 2012 Boston Pride Parade

In January 2012, Kennedy announced he would form an exploratory committee to run in the newly redrawn 4th congressional district of Massachusetts.[19][20] Kennedy explained, "I will then begin to reach out to the people of the Fourth District, in order to hear directly from them about the challenges they are facing and their ideas on how we can restore fairness to our system. I will make a final decision about entering the race in the weeks thereafter."[21][22]

He officially entered the election in February 2012.[23] In an announcement video, Kennedy declared, "I believe this country was founded on a simple idea: that every person deserves to be treated fairly, by each other and by their government".[24] In the same video, Kennedy vowed to fight for a "fair job plan", a "better educational system", a "fair tax code", and a "fair housing policy".[24]

While several Democratic candidates had prepared to enter the race, the field nearly cleared once Kennedy announced his candidacy. His family roots made him the overwhelming favorite among Massachusetts Democrats.[25][26] In the September 6 primary, he faced Rachel Brown, a Lyndon LaRouche acolyte, and Herb Robinson, an engineer and musician, winning the primary with around 90 percent of the vote.[27] He was elected to the House of Representatives on November 6, 2012, defeating Republican candidate Sean Bielat, winning over 60% of the vote.

In the 2014 election, Kennedy ran unopposed in the primary and general elections. On November 4, 2014, he was re-elected to a second term with 184,158 votes (98%).[28]

In 2016, after running unopposed in the Democratic primary, Kennedy was re-elected to a third term, defeating Republican David Rosa by more than 40 percentage points.[29]

Kennedy was mentioned as a potential candidate for the 2018 Massachusetts gubernatorial election[30] but declined, running for re-election to the House and saying he had no plans to run for any other office.[31] He was re-elected unopposed.

Joe Kennedy III speaks during a ceremony celebrating the life of his grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, in 2018.

Kennedy was sworn into the 113th U.S. Congress on January 3, 2013, and assigned to the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He praised the technology committee assignment as an opportunity to secure federal funding, including National Science Foundation and Small Business Innovation Research grants, for life sciences companies in his district. As a freshman in his party, he was unable to secure a seat he had sought on the Education Committee.[33]

During a February science committee hearing, Kennedy questioned Texas Instruments president Richard Templeton about the company's efforts to compensate cancer-stricken former employees of its Attleboro, Massachusetts, nuclear facility.[34][35] A prolific fundraiser, he launched his political action committee, the 4MA PAC, in April.[36][37] As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he traveled in May with four other legislators to Afghanistan, where they met with President Hamid Karzai and members of the military.[38] That month, he was named chairman of Governor Deval Patrick's STEM Advisory Council.[39]

On July 24, 2013, Kennedy was one of seven members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus[40] (CPC) to vote against the Amash-Conyers amendment to limit Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which tried to restrict NSA surveillance programs. In contrast, a majority of both CPC members and of Democratic members of Congress voted for the amendment, while Kennedy stood out as a supporter of the party leadership. His vote has been criticized as a sign for a lack of commitment to civil liberties.[41]

Kennedy was a member of the U.S.-Japan Caucus.[42]

On January 26, 2018, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that Kennedy would deliver the Democratic response to President Donald Trump's 2018 State of the Union address.[43][44] His selection came after criticism that the Democratic Party had relied too heavily on its oldest leaders since the 2016 presidential election. In choosing Kennedy, the party was seen as trying to bridge the gap with a new face attached to one of the most famous names in American politics.[45] On January 30, he gave the response to television cameras and a live studio audience in the automotive body shop of Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School at Fall River, Massachusetts.[46] The location was meant to emphasize the role immigrants have in American society. He spent the opening minutes of his speech boasting about the economy and industrial history of Fall River, a city in his district. His audience included Diman Regional Technical School students. He praised Black Lives Matter, and spoke in Spanish about children who were brought into the United States illegally when they were minors.[47] He also took numerous swings at Trump, criticizing the Department of Justice for "rolling back civil rights by the day" and attacking the administration for "targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection".[48] He accused Trump of turning American life "into a zero-sum game",[48] and said that Democrats intended to aid the middle and lower classes. He closed by characterizing the state of the union as "hopeful, resilient, enduring".[48]

Kennedy has co-sponsored legislation to study reparations for slavery, supports measures to expand the civil rights of Native Americans, opposes discrimination in employment, housing, education, and health care, and supports removing barriers to equal opportunities for people with disabilities, including improving access to public transit, housing, voting, and education. He supports LGBTQIA+ rights, recognition of a national Transgender Day of Remembrance, and is a member of the Congressional Transgender Equality Task Force. In the area of gender equity, he is an advocate of legislation to end workplace discrimination and wage discrimination, and is a supporter of the Me Too movement.[58]

Kennedy helped raise funds in 2016 for the defeat of Question 4 to legalize cannabis for recreational use in Massachusetts.[59][60] He also voted against the Rohrabacher–Farr amendment in 2015 which limits the enforcement of federal law in states that have legalized medical cannabis.[59][61] In November 2018 he changed his stance towards cannabis and endorsed its legalization at the federal level, however.[62] In January 2020 he co-sponsored a bill to federally legalize cannabis known as the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act.[63]

Kennedy co-sponsored the Green New Deal, and supports aggressive action to reduce carbon emissions, enforce pollution control standards, protect public lands from fossil fuel extraction, promote clean energy alternatives to pipelines and compressor stations, and invest in related infrastructure and scientific research. He supports strict fuel efficiency standards and the elimination of exemptions to the Clean Air Act, and opposed the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump.[64]

Kennedy has helped pass legislation to guarantee access to STEM and vocational education, and co-sponsored legislation to eliminate most student debt. He has also co-sponsored legislation to reduce racial discrimination in housing, favors increasing the portion of federal grants earmarked for minority-owned small businesses, and supports criminal justice reform.[65]

Kennedy supports strengthening Social Security and Medicare, and favors having Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices directly with drug manufacturers.