Terminally ill U.S. representative will not seek re-election in 2008 for 7th term

INDIANAPOLIS – Democratic U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, who announced over the weekend that she has terminal lung cancer, will not run for a seventh term, her chief of staff said Monday.\n“She does not plan to seek re-election in 2008,” Len Sistek said.\nIt is unclear whether Carson will complete her current two-year term, which runs through the end of next year, but Sistek said it was his understanding that she wants to do so.\n“She is hopeful that she is going to return to Washington, probably after the first of the year,” he said. “That’s her plan. Whether she’ll be able to make that plan or not, I don’t know.”\nCarson, 69, has been away from Washington since she was admitted Sept. 21 to an Indianapolis hospital for about a week. Her office said she had a deep infection in her leg, near where a vein was removed in January 1997 when she underwent double heart bypass surgery – weeks after she was first elected to Congress.\nCarson said in a statement to The Indianapolis Star published Sunday that she had planned to return to Washington after recuperation, but a doctor then diagnosed her with lung cancer.\n“It had gone into remission years before, but it was back with a terminal vengeance,” Carson said in the statement, which did not disclose the date of her initial diagnosis.\nSistek said he could not discuss Carson’s health status.\nCarson represents Indiana’s 7th District, which includes most of Indianapolis, and most of that district has elected Democrats to the U.S. House in all but one election since 1964.\nShe has suffered from years of health problems, including high blood pressure, asthma and diabetes. She missed dozens of House votes in 2004 because of illness and spent the weekend before the 2004 election in the hospital for what she said was a flu shot reaction – but still won re-election by 10 percentage points.\nHer political career began in the 1960s, when then-U.S. Rep. Andy Jacobs Jr. hired the United Auto Workers secretary to work in his office. It was Jacobs who encouraged Carson to run for the Indiana Legislature in 1972 – the first of her more than two dozen consecutive election victories at the local, state and national levels.\nShe made her first congressional run in 1996 after Jacobs decided to retire after three decades in the House. She went on to defeat a former chairwoman of the state Democratic Party in the primary and a well-known Republican state senator in the general election to become the first black and first woman to represent Indianapolis in Congress.