After graduating from Malden Catholic High School, Ed attended Boston College as a commuter student. He paid his way through Boston College by driving an ice cream truck, before enrolling in Boston College Law School four years later.

The first lawyer that Ed met was the first professor that walked into his BC Law School class. It was during the course of his legal education that Ed began to recognize the systemic barriers to success that working-class families faced. This inspired him to raise his voice, and in his third year of law school, Ed decided to run for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Ed wasted no time in standing up for his values, much to the frustration of House leadership. When Ed refused to compromise in his fight for critical judicial reform, the Speaker of the House promptly removed Ed from the Judiciary Committee and had Ed’s desk thrown into the hallway.

Instead of rolling over and giving in to leadership, Ed owned his role as a disrupter and created a TV advertisement with a new campaign slogan, “The bosses can tell me where to sit, but no one tells me where to stand.”

Ed’s principled conviction earned him the trust of his constituents, who then elected him to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976. The first time Ed visited Washington, D.C. was to attend his swearing-in ceremony.

While serving in the House of Representatives, Ed’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. His father vowed to never let her step foot in a nursing home and cared for her in the living room of their home until she passed away in 1998. A year later, Ed founded the Congressional Alzheimer’s Task Force and authored the National Alzheimer’s Project Act, mandating that the federal government put in place a plan to address Alzheimer’s disease by 2025. Ed has made it his mission to ensure that other families do not have to experience the pain that his family did.

In 2013, Ed was elected in a special election to the United States Senate.

With the same courage he showed standing up to the State House leadership, Ed has continued to stand for our shared progressive values. His blue-collar upbringing has shaped the values he fights for every day on the floor of the Senate. He has been a national leader in protecting and advancing the rights of workers, women, immigrants, communities of color, and our LGBTQ+ community.

Ed knows that our climate crisis is the national security, economic, health, and moral challenge of our time, and has been a passionate advocate for clean energy and bold climate solutions. In February of 2019, Ed introduced the Green New Deal alongside Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which sets in place a 10-year mobilization to achieve a green economy, taking into account every community and prioritizing environmental justice for all.

Throughout his career, Ed has worked to pass legislation that helped lay the foundation for the digital revolution. He continues to fight for the restoration of net neutrality laws, and recently passed legislation to ban robocalls and increase penalties for scammers.

Ed and his wife, Rear Admiral Susan Blumenthal, MD, MPA have been married for 31 years. Dr. Blumenthal served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health, US Assistant Surgeon General and a Research Branch Chief at NIH in the US Department of Health and Human Services. They reside in Malden in the same house that Ed grew up in.