Comstock, Barbara, 1959-

Barbara Jean Comstock (née Burns; born June 30, 1959) is an American attorney and politician. A member of the Republican Party, she was elected to two terms in Congress representing Virginia's 10th congressional district, serving from 2015 to 2019. From 2010 to 2014, Comstock was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, her family eventually moved to Houston, Texas, and she graduated from Westchester High School in 1977. She graduated cum laude from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1981, with a degree in political science. During college, she interned for Democratic Massachusetts Senator Edward Moore (Ted) Kennedy. But “as I went to the hearings,” she remembered, “I realized that I agreed more with the ideas that Orrin Hatch was talking about.” In 1982 Burns married her high school sweetheart Elwyn Charles (Chip) Comstock, a computer science teacher in McLean, Virginia, and enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. After she completed law school in 1986, she entered private practice as an attorney. After working as a lawyer in private practice, Comstock served from 1991 to 1995 as a senior aide to Congressman Frank Wolf. Comstock then served as chief investigative counsel and senior counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform from 1995 to 1999, working as one of Washington's most prominent anti-Clinton opposition researchers.

Comstock was a founding partner and co-principal of the public relations firm Corallo Comstock before joining law firm Blank Rome in 2004. Prior to running for office, she was registered as a lobbyist. In 2009, she was elected to a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. Comstock was re-elected to her seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2011 and 2013. When Representative Frank Wolf announced his retirement in 2013, Comstock entered the race to fill his seat, capturing 56 percent of the vote in November 2014.

In her first term, Comstock focused her legislative efforts on the needs of students and young families, including STEM education and tax relief. She voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but also broke with her party to vote against the budget put forward by Republicans in 2015, citing changes to federal employee benefits that were important to the many government workers across her district. She also opposed the Transportation Department funding bill that slashed $75 million for the DC-area public transit system Metro. In her second term, Comstock’s bill to preserve the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, a living history museum with disputed land rights along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, passed unanimously and became law in June 2018.13 From her seat on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, she pushed through two bills cowritten with Connecticut Representative Elizabeth Esty. Their bill—the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act—encouraged more women to enter scientific fields and provided for several new initiatives in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to foster interest in science for students in grades K-12. Comstock also worked on multiple measures dealing with neighborhood safety and the modernization of emergency response centers and authored legislation doubling the child tax credit, and successfully advocated for its inclusion in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. In the 115th Congress (2017–2019), amid the #MeToo Movement in which women across the country spoke about experiencing sexual harassment and assault, Comstock was part of a bipartisan effort to institute a new workplace rights and responsibilities training program designed to combat sexual harassment on Capitol Hill.

In 2018 Comstock faced Democratic state senator Jennifer Wexton in the general election. In a wave election that saw Democrats flip more than 60 seats, Comstock lost to Wexton after taking 44 percent of the vote. Following her departure from Congress, Comstock joined the lobbying firm Baker Donelson as a senior advisor.