Comstock, Barbara, 1959-

<p>In 2014, after four terms in the Virginia general assembly, Barbara Comstock won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from a seat held by her former boss, Representative Frank Rudolph Wolf of Virginia. “In my three state delegate races I knocked on over 10,000 doors each election … because when you’re actually talking to everybody, door-to-door, you honestly know what their top priorities are,” Comstock said. “As a representative and a candidate, I think that’s my best role, the best way of doing things, because you get good ideas from people. You kind of cut through the clutter.”</p>

<p>Barbara Comstock was born Barbara Jean Burns on June 30, 1959, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her father, John Ferguson Burns, worked for the Shell Chemical Company, and her mother, Sally Ann Burns, was employed by the local public school system. Burns’s 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.”</p>

<p>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. They have three children: Dan, Peter, and Caity. Comstock put her law degree on hold after the birth of her two sons. After she completed law school in 1986, she entered private practice as an attorney.</p>

<p>Barbara Jean Comstock (née Burns; born June 30, 1959) is an American attorney and politician. As a Republican, she was elected to two terms in Congress representing Virginia's 10th congressional district.</p>

<p>From 2010 to 2014, Comstock was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. She first won election to her seat in 2009. She has worked in numerous positions for various government agencies, including as chief counsel of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, director of public affairs at the Department of Justice, and as a Congressional staffer. In 2019, Comstock joined the lobbying firm Baker Donelson as a senior advisor.</p>

<p>Comstock was born Barbara Jean Burns in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 30, 1959. She is the daughter of Sally Ann Burns, a teacher, and John Ferguson Burns, national manager of polymer sales for Shell Chemicals. Comstock graduated from Westchester High School in Houston, Texas in 1977. She graduated cum laude from Middlebury College in 1981. In college, Comstock spent a semester interning for Senator Ted Kennedy. While interning for Kennedy, Comstock, who was raised a Democrat, became a Republican. Years later, she recalled that she had long reckoned herself as a Reagan Democrat, and during her internship she found herself agreeing more with Orrin Hatch of Utah than with Kennedy. She then attended law school at Georgetown University, graduating with a Juris Doctor degree in 1986.</p>