CONGRESSMAN BRIAN HIGGINS (D-NY) MPA 1996 sits quietly in a corner of a small, third-floor room off committee chambers in Capitol Hill’s Rayburn building. Two men sit on either side of him wearing badges that read “Northern Enterprise, Inc.” pinned to their lapels. Leaning forward in their seats, they make their case. The situation between union and nonunion workers in Buffalo, they explain, has reached gridlock. Nothing is moving, and if something doesn’t change soon, workers will move elsewhere.

Higgins listens, then finally responds. “You know you are not going to get me to agree that unions are the problem,” he tells the businessmen. The issue is not unions versus nonunions, but the lack of work for everyone. Several minutes of conversation later, the meeting ends.

Higgins knows all too well about the lack of opportunity in Buffalo. Revitalizing the waterfront and creating jobs are what brought Higgins to Washington in January. They were also among his major concerns as a New York assembly member, a job he held for six years before winning New York’s 27th District seat last November against Republican Nancy Naples in one of last year’s most closely watched and heavily financed congressional races.

The seat had been held for six terms by popular Republican Jack Quinn, who last year surprised everyone in the district when he announced his retirement. After a five-way race for his party’s nomination, Higgins went on to win by only 3,774 votes, a win that helped increase the number of Democrats in New York’s congressional delegation. It is in Washington where Higgins, son of a bricklayer and lifelong resident of South Buffalo, plans to turn around the fortunes of his district.

Back at his fourth-floor office in the Canon building, Higgins puts through a call to Buffalo businessman and George Pataki ally Bob Rich, urging him to prod the New York governor to answer Higgins’s recent phone calls. Higgins has proposed that the governor turn over state control of Buffalo’s inner and outer harbor to a local corporation, and he is more than a little annoyed that the governor has not responded.

He’s already succeeded in securing almost $60 million to get the Buffalo harbor projects going, Higgins tells Rich, yet nothing is moving in western New York. The region could lose the money. “Construction trades are at each other’s throats because no one is working,” he says, assuring Rich that he will do what it takes to get the work done.

Higgins learned firsthand the opportunities politics offers for making a difference in people’s lives. He learned from a couple of pros — his father and uncle. First-generation Irish, both men were bricklayers in a city dominated by row after row of brick houses. Bricklaying was one of Buffalo’s most important trades, and the bricklayer’s union was one of the city’s most powerful. His Uncle Jack, now deceased, was a popular union boss. His Uncle Jim also served as president of Buffalo’s local union, and his father, Dan, an active union leader, rose to elected office inBuffalo City Hall.

IT'S EARLY SUMMER and Washington has already endured several 90-plus-degree days. Higgins has been in Washington only five months, and he is still finding his way around. The sounds of tourists and workers echo through the Capitol buildings’ cavernous hallways. Attentive adults steer flocks of children through corridors filled with streams of lobbyists, aides, and House members hurrying to meetings.

Washington is where he advances his agenda for his district, but it’s not where the 46-year-old most enjoys being. He is in Washington each week that Congress is in session, arriving early Tuesday morning and returning to Buffalo Thursday evening. He’s thinking about returning home, he says, the minute he arrives in Washington.

He may not wish to linger in the Capitol, but he’s grateful for the opportunities Washington offers for realizing his district’s goals. One of his major objectives is to bring greater economic prosperity to the region, an 88-mile stretch of land from its northern to southern borders, and which includes most of the land in New York’s Erie and Chautauqua counties. Bordered by Lake Erie on the west and Pennsylvania on the south, the district spreads eastward across a large rural area. Buffalo, which sits at the northern end, is the district’s largest city, housing almost half of the district’s population of 650,000. Higgins is committed to revitalizing Buffalo’s waterfront, a project that has been stalled for decades, but that would bring sorely needed economic prosperity to the region.

Higgins has already received praise from local press for stating upon taking office that responsibility for the waterfront project stops with him. “Higgins separated himself from the docile political herd and stepped into the leadership vacuum that sucks life out of this community,” a Buffalo News editorial noted in April. “Higgins staking a claim is a landmark. Politicians knock each other over to grab the scissors at a ribbon-cutting. But hardly any stake a claim to a project and use the power of their office to drive it home.”

He also has been praised by local press for remaining independent in a town where party allegiance often trumps thoughtful independence. Like many of his Democratic colleagues, Higgins believes Bush’s Social Security reform campaign is diverting attention away from far more pressing issues, like education and health care. Unlike some of his fellow Democrats, however, he voted last spring to pass a bill allowing federal courts the right to review the Terri Schiavo case and in January he voted along with Republicans to allow U.S. military recruiters on campuses receiving federal funds.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF POLITICAL MOMENTS in Higgins’s career adorn the walls of his new office. Over-sized layouts of Buffalo’s proposed waterfront rest at an angle against one wall. Higgins sits behind an imposing mahogany desk. His Blackberry rests on the desk in front of him, periodically vibrating, signaling the receipt of new e-mails. Higgins expresses quiet confidence about why he’s in Washington. His primary reason, he says simply, is to make things happen for his district.

He is proud that’s he’s already secured appropriations for Buffalo’s harbor project. It is one of the largest appropriations attained by a member of the 29-member New York delegation — money he helped procure by capturing a seat on the covet- ed Transportation Committee, one of two committees he was assigned in January. He also sits on the Government Reform Committee. In July he will submit a bill authorizing that New York Power Authority pay Buffalo and Erie Counties an estimated $1 billion over the next 50 years to operate the Niagara Power Project — money that would recharge the waterfront project.

“No one will accuse Representative Brian Higgins of being bashful,” wrote the Buffalo News in July.

The lessons he learned as a boy, he says, have given him an enormous advantage in his political career. “I come from bricklayers. We produce things,” he says. On weekends, Higgins helped his father and uncle mix mortar, haul up the bricks, and make sure the bricks were aligned. They worked 12-hour days, sometimes working by the light from their car’s headlights. Higgins remains loyal to his large family, which includes four siblings and many cousins, grateful he is in a position to help out when he can.

Along with the lessons he learned from his large, hard-working family, Higgins also credits the Kennedy School for a lot of his political know-how. The Kennedy School, he says, taught him to keep things simple.

Higgins arrived in Cambridge in 1995, just a year after a disappointing loss for Erie County comptroller against Nancy Naples, the same opponent he would go on to defeat for Congress in 2004. Married with young children at the time, Higgins couldn’t afford the cost of a year at the Kennedy School without a Western New York Harvard Graduate Fellowship. To save on living expenses, his wife, Mary Jane, then a medical professional and now a special education teacher, and children, John and Maeve, moved back with Higgins’s mother-in-law in West Seneca, a Buffalo suburb. Higgins himself moved into Cronkhite House, a residence hall on Brattle Street.

The financial sacrifices he and his family made, he believes, were worth it, offering him opportunities he continues to appreciate. He remembers four-hour classes on Friday afternoons with former head of GOPAC and Newt Gingrich friend Jeffrey Eisenach and disagreeing in class with Kennedy School Professor Shirley Williams, a member of the British House of Lords, after Williams expressed objection to President Clinton’s invitation to the White House to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. “I said that Clinton wasn’t embracing any one person,” he recalls, “but he was using the symbolic force of the American presidency to promote peace in Northern Ireland.”

He applies the lessons he’s learned at the school to stay focused and keep things simple every day. A common problem in Washington, he says, is the temptation to spread yourself too thin, of wanting to appear knowledgeable on issues you may know nothing about. “Everyone weighs in with his or her opinion on the issue of the day,” he says.

Instead, he says, on the things on which he has no expertise, he’s there to learn. He recalls a few weeks back at a national security meeting when a panel of Middle Eastern scholars appeared before members to encourage the United States to be bolder in its support of Iraq’s secular Democratic Party. The committee chair kept asking if the gentleman from New York wished to speak, and each time Higgins replied no, that he wanted to hear what the panelists had to say.

One of the panelists, Mithal Al-Alusi, a member of the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation, described how he’d been exiled to Germany for 27 years after being sentenced to death for speaking out against Saddam Hussein. After January’s election, Al-Alusi returned to Iraq and with his two sons helped found the Democratic Party. Several days after the election, his sons, along with their bodyguards, as they drove to party headquarters, were ambushed and murdered by insurgents. The father told the committee that through his sons’ sacrifice he hoped their children would see a democratic Iraq.

“Most of the members of Congress who sit on that committee had already left and missed hearing his account,” Higgins says. “If Americans heard this story, I think they would have been interested in the tremendous hope and vision of ordinary Iraqi citizens.”

Higgins sees an insecurity in Washington that forces individuals to show they’re smart. “My approach to this experience is as a student. Take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that are here.”

Then an aide knocks at the door. It’s time to go. Another roll call is about to begin.