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Former state Sen. Ida G. Ruben (D), a feisty and pathbreaking lawmaker who was a force behind many of Montgomery County’s top legislative achievements of the past several decades, died Friday in Bethesda at the age of 95.
Torchinsky Hebrew Funeral Home of Washington, D.C., which announced Ruben’s passing Sunday, did not list a cause of death.
Ruben grew up in D.C. and did not attend college, but she had drive and moxie and became one of Montgomery County’s most powerful lawmakers in Annapolis, representing Silver Spring, White Oak and Takoma Park in the legislature from 1974 to 2007. While she was associated with an array of causes in the State House, she used her longtime perch on the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee to bring funding to several key projects in her district and in the county.
After being active in community groups and Jewish organizations, Ruben was first appointed to a seat in the House of Delegates 1974 to replace her husband, L. Leonard Ruben, who became a judge that year in the Montgomery County District Court after serving less than one term in the legislature. They quickly became a local power couple, and Leonard Ruben, who went on to serve a decade on the District Court bench and another decade on the Montgomery County Circuit Court, was his wife’s closest political confidant throughout her career.
Stanton Gildenhorn, a former Montgomery County Democratic chair who had been Leonard Ruben’s law partner, once described them as “the Bill and Hillary Clinton of Montgomery County.” Well into their golden years, the Rubens could be seen cutting the rug at large social and charitable events in the region.
Ida Ruben spent a dozen years in the House, serving first on the Economic Matters Committee and then on the Ways and Means Committee. In a 2007 interview with The Washington Post, she recalled arriving in Annapolis and finding “a good old boys network” there.
Ruben won an open state Senate seat in 1986, defeating a fellow delegate, Diane Kirchenbauer, by just 64 votes in the Democratic primary. In the Senate, she was assigned to the Budget and Taxation Committee and served there for the next 20 years, playing an integral role in the county’s funding victories, spending two years as the committee vice chair and seven years as Senate president pro tem, presiding over the chamber in the Senate president’s absence.
The Washington, D.C., suburbs had for decades been overshadowed by the Baltimore region in the Annapolis power structure, but Ruben was one of a small number of Montgomery County politicians who regularly insisted that the county get its due when it came to parceling out state largesse, using a combination of charm and persistence to get her way.
“She was a relentless champion for Montgomery County, children and families, highway safety, public health and much more,” former state Del. Bill Bronrott (D-Montgomery) recalled in a Facebook post Sunday.
Former state Attorney General Brian Frosh (D), who spent eight years in the Senate with Ruben, described her legislating style this way to the Post:
“If she was for something, she was dogged and relentless,” he said. “And I used to say there were two ways of arguing with Ida, and neither one of them worked.”
Under Ruben’s watchful eye, Montgomery County in the 1990s and early 2000s received what was then record funding for school construction, as well as robust state funding for a number of other capital projects. They included the revival of downtown Silver Spring, which was in her district, a state-of-the-art performing arts venue at the Strathmore Hall cultural complex on Rockville Pike, a large conference center on Rockville Pike attached to a Marriott hotel, and a new courthouse in downtown Silver Spring.
Years later, after Leonard Ruben’s death outside the courthouse in 2007 at the age of 82, that building was named in his honor.
In addition to her budget work, Ruben in Annapolis also fought to strengthen drunken driving laws and reduce tobacco use, especially among minors. She is credited with helping to craft the law to ban smoking in Maryland bars and restaurants.
Ruben authored one of the state’s first domestic violence bills in the state and sponsored other legislation to help women.
“When you did a bill with her it was like working with your favorite aunt,” lobbyist Eric Gally said in a Facebook post Sunday. “She was a tough taskmaster but she also cared how you were doing and was so fun to celebrate with after.”
Ruben was part of a rising generation of Democratic women lawmakers from Montgomery County in Annapolis who arrived in the 1970s and began to make their mark, including Jennie M. Forehand , who, like Ruben, started in the House before being elected to the Senate, and Sheila Ellis Hixson, who entered the House two years after Ruben representing the same district and eventually became the powerful chair of the Ways and Means Committee.
In 1986, the same year Ruben was elected to the Senate, District 20 voters reelected Hixson and also elected two lawyers, Dana Lee Dembrow (D) and Peter Franchot (D) to the House. That quartet served uneasily together for 16 years, and a longstanding feud between Ruben and Dembrow stemming back to campaigns in the 1980s became legendary in Annapolis and throughout Montgomery County, occasionally stranding Hixson and Franchot in the middle, though they usually sided with Ruben.
When you did a bill with her it was like working with your favorite aunt. She was a tough taskmaster but she also cared how you were doing and was so fun to celebrate with after.
– Eric Gally, lobbyist
During the 2002 redistricting process, Ruben, Hixson and Franchot worked with then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) to cut Dembrow out of the district, and he vowed to run for state Senate in his new district instead. But the state’s highest court threw out Glendening’s proposed map, and Dembrow chose to seek reelection to his old House seat. He wound up losing the Democratic primary after being accused of assaulting his wife in the spring of 2002, though he was acquitted after his wife refused to testify against him.
There was still more turnover in the district in 2006, when Franchot gave up his House seat to run for state comptroller, a race he won in an upset. That same year, Ruben faced her first significant Democratic primary challenge since 1990 from Jamie Raskin, a law professor and progressive activist who described Ruben disparagingly as a machine politician.
The race between them exposed fissures in the local Democratic coalition, with Ruben relying on older, more traditional suburban voters while Raskin took advantage of some of the demographic changes in what was then Montgomery County’s most polyglot district. Powered by an array of young staffers and volunteers, Raskin ousted the veteran lawmaker by a 2-1 margin.
“I’ll miss it,” Ruben told the Post during her final week in office. “It was a big part of my life. . . . Believe me when I tell you I had four more good years in me.”
A year later, Ruben suffered another setback when Leonard Ruben, her husband of 58 years who continued to hear cases as a senior judge, died in front of the courthouse that would eventually be named for him.
Ruben largely retired from politics then, though she did occasionally show up at political and civic events and enjoyed keeping in touch with many of her former colleagues and other political and community leaders.
She is survived by her sons, Garry Ruben, Scott Ruben and Stephen Ruben, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. A fourth son, Michael Ruben, died in 2005.
Funeral services will be held Monday at 1 p.m. at the Judean Memorial Gardens Chapel in Olney, with burial to follow. Arrangements for a shiva will be announced.
