Sen. Russell Feingold (D)

Russ Feingold, Wisconsin’s junior senator, is a Democrat first elected to the Senate in 1992. He grew up in Janesville, where his father and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s father practiced law in the same building. Politics was in his blood. His father, Leon Feingold, ran for district attorney as a Progressive and practiced law in Janesville for 45 years. He once lost an election to the county board by one vote. His uncle, Louis Binstock, was a prominent Chicago rabbi involved in the civil rights movement. In the second grade, Feingold cast the only vote in his class for Democrat John F. Kennedy and decided he wanted to be president, although he also said he would settle for senator. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where his father had gotten his law degree, and was a Rhodes Scholar. He got his law degree from Harvard, then moved to Middleton, a Madison suburb. In 1982, at age 29, he beat an 83-year-old veteran state senator by 31 votes. Feingold has a flair for publicity, for political-reform issues and for novel arguments. His signature issue in the Legislature was a ban on bovine growth hormones.

In 1992, Feingold decided to run for the Senate seat held by Bob Kasten, a free-market Republican conservative who had won by narrow margins in 1980 and 1986. In the Democratic primary, while Milwaukee businessman Joseph Checota and U.S. Rep. Jim Moody battered each other with negative ads, Feingold ran clever, humorous spots. One showed Elvis Presley alive and endorsing Feingold; another showed Feingold at home, opening up a closet and saying, “No skeletons.” He also had detailed position papers, including an 82-point plan for reducing the deficit. As primary day neared, Checota apologized for his ads and asked voters to vote for Feingold if they didn’t vote for him. Already ahead in the polls, Feingold zoomed to an astonishing 70% win in the three-way race. He also bounced way ahead of Kasten, who ran his own Elvis ads attacking Feingold on issues. Feingold in turn attacked Kasten’s negativity and avoided engaging on specifics. The race narrowed, but Feingold won 53%-46%.

In the Senate, Feingold has had a liberal record on cultural and foreign issues and a somewhat more moderate record on economics. He attacked many spending programs and did not respond in lockstep with other Democrats to the scandals of the Clinton era. For instance, in 1997, he called for an independent counsel to look into the Clinton-Gore fundraising operations. And in 1999, he was the only Democrat to vote against West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd’s motion to dismiss impeachment charges against Clinton.

Calling the campaign-finance system “legalized bribery,” Feingold took on the issue, joining with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Out of this collaboration came the various versions of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bills, which were filibustered multiple times in 1996 and 1998. In October 1999 McCain-Feingold was again beaten, but in June 2000, the two senators pushed through a bill requiring disclosure by Section 527 fundraising committees. McCain’s presidential campaign and his threat to bring up the issue at every turn forced then-Republican Senate Majority Trent Lott, R-Miss., to schedule two weeks of debate in March 2001. This time McCain and Feingold prevailed. They beat by 60-40 an amendment from Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel calling for lesser changes, and the bill passed 59-41 in April. In July, it was about to come up for a vote when the Republican leadership pulled it from the calendar. After energy giant Enron went bankrupt, pressure mounted. The House version’s advocates got 218 signatures on a discharge petition, and the bill was brought to the floor and passed. The Senate passed a final version in March 2002. President George W. Bush expressed doubts about the constitutionality of some provisions but signed it anyway, without ceremony and without inviting McCain or Feingold to the White House. The argument switched to the courts. In May 2003, a deeply divided three-judge federal court issued 1,700 pages of opinions, upholding some of the provisions of McCain-Feingold but not others. That December, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most sections of the law.

The campaign-finance act had an impact, though not the expected one, on the 2004 elections. The parties were able to raise large sums anyway, much of it over the Internet and from 527 organizations not covered by the act. Feingold and McCain asked the Federal Election Commission to rule that the act covered 527s, but it declined to do so. In January 2005, they and their House co-sponsors, Republican Chris Shays of Connecticut and Democrat Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, introduced a bill to require 527s to register as political committees and to use only regulated campaign donations for advertisements that mentioned federal candidates. That produced some interesting responses: Left-leaning organizations like the Sierra Club and the League for Conservation Voters opposed it, while other liberal organizations questioned whether 501(c) charitable organizations would be covered. Senate Rules Committee Chairman Lott announced that he was all for it and would shepherd it through his committee, but prominent members of both parties objected to the bill, and it was never brought to a vote. Next, Feingold crusaded against the Senate’s unique practice of requiring the filing of campaign-finance reports on paper, rather than electronically as the House does, making them more accessible to the public. In March 2007, the Rules Committee approved an electronic-filing bill sponsored by Feingold and Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, but even though the bill had 47 co-sponsors, Majority Leader Harry Reid never brought it up for a vote.

Feingold and McCain have maintained a close relationship. McCain once referred to Feingold as his “philosophical soul mate” on reform issues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Feingold endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama of Illinois because of his policy positions, but he regularly complimented McCain for his personal integrity. He called McCain “very original” and a “maverick by nature,” although that October, he criticized McCain for “seeming to look the other way as his campaign employs certain tactics … intended to appeal to the fears of some Americans,” a reference to McCain’s failure to rebuke supporters at rallies when they shouted “treason,” “terrorist,” and “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. After the election, Feingold and McCain renewed their partnership, working together on a bill to give the president power to cut spending earmarks from appropriations bills.

Feingold has pursued other ethics issues. He was one of the crusaders against lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers and against members using for personal travel the frequent-flier miles they earned on business trips. In 2007, he worked with Obama on successful legislation and rules changes that limited gifts, meals and travel paid for by lobbyists and required senators to disclose the spending earmarks they slip into appropriations bills.

Feingold also has tried to ban cost-of-living adjustments to congressional pay and refuses to accept his own pay raises. In November 2002, he lost one such amendment 58-36. He took another shot in 2009. After Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana attempted to amend an unrelated bill to include repeal of the COLA, Reid allowed Feingold to have a vote on a stand-alone repeal bill. It passed the Senate unanimously (no senator was likely to vote publicly in favor of a cost-of-living increase), but as Reid anticipated, the House declined to take up the bill, and it died. Members of Congress got their pay increases.

In 2001, Feingold offered amendments to limit the greatly expanded law-enforcement powers created by the USA PATRIOT Act. He wanted to limit secret searches, computer surveillance and roving wiretaps. But then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle had all the amendments tabled, and Feingold cast the sole vote against the larger bill. In December 2005, he filibustered the renewal of the PATRIOT Act, but Republican leaders were ultimately able to pass the bill.

Casting sole votes is not unusual for Feingold. In 2002, he was the only Democrat on the Budget Committee to join Republicans in voting for five-year caps on spending. He fought to apply pay-as-you-go rules to the budget, requiring that all spending increases or tax cuts be compensated for by corresponding spending cuts or tax increases. The Senate agreed to the rules in 2003 and 2004, which resulted in deadlock on the budget resolution, since the Republican House wouldn’t accept the pay-go rules for taxes. He was also one of three senators to vote against the annual defense bill for 2008 because it did not include a timetable for the drawdown of troops in Iraq.

Feingold has staked out some original positions on the Judiciary Committee. He has called for repeal of all federal death-penalty statutes. He was one of eight Democrats who voted to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general in Bush’s first term, arguing that a president should be given great deference in Executive Branch appointments. But he hasn’t been consistent on that score, voting against the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general in Bush’s second term. And in February 2009, after indicted Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois appointed Roland Burris to the Senate despite an ongoing pay-to-play scandal, Feingold called for a constitutional amendment barring the appointment of senators by governors. The amendment had cosponsors from both parties but didn’t go anywhere.

On foreign policy, Feingold was one of three Democratic senators to vote in March 1999 against air strikes in Serbia and Kosovo, and in October 2002, he voted against the Iraq war resolution. In August 2005, he was the first senator to propose a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. In 2006 and 2007, he pushed a resolution to censure Bush for the secret surveillance of communications between Al Qaeda suspects abroad and people in the United States, although his effort got very little support. When Democrats won a Senate majority in 2007, he held a hearing on exercising Congress’s constitutional power to end a war. Throughout 2007 and 2008, he pushed to cut off funding for the war and to set specific timetables for troop withdrawals. One of them would have barred federal funds from being spent on the Iraq War after June 2008, but it was defeated 28-68. Reid agreed to hold a vote on another of Feingold’s bills restricting war funding, but security improvements in the region made Republicans confident they could win the debate, and Reid pulled the bill from the floor, infuriating Feingold.

In 1998, Feingold faced a strong Republican opponent in U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, a conservative elected in 1994. They agreed to limit their campaign spending—Feingold to $3.8 million, Neumann to $4.7 million (he actually spent $4.4 million)—and to limit contributions from political action committees. By fall, Feingold’s lead of 10% had melted away, and the race was about even. Neumann ran humorous ads attacking Feingold for sending dollars to Russia to study monkeys in space and for voting for a study of cow flatulence; the ad showed smock-clad scientists out in a field trying to isolate samples of cow gas. In one of the nation’s closest Senate races, Feingold won 51%-48%.

In 2001, Feingold talked occasionally about running for president, and that fall, he made a campus speaking tour. He ultimately decided against a run. He was next up for re-election to the Senate in 2004, when his Republican challenger was Tim Michels, a Waukesha County businessman who had served 12 years as an Army Airborne Ranger. This time, Feingold decided not to be outspent. By August, he had raised $9 million, and he started running his characteristically humorous ads nonstop in June, knowing that Wisconsin would be inundated with presidential advertising in the summer and fall. Michels argued that Feingold had spent too much time on campaign-finance legislation and not enough on health care and job creation, and he attacked Feingold for his vote against the PATRIOT Act. But Michels did not make much headway. Feingold’s message that he was an independent vote and a candid voice seemed to resonate. That fall, national Republicans dropped plans to spend $1.2 million on ads against Feingold. He won by a solid 55%-44%.

After the election, Feingold once again showed interest in running for president, making appearances in Florida and New Hampshire and raising $2 million. He had a clear political profile to present: an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning and the only vote against the PATRIOT Act. But he received only a tepid response and decided against making the race in 2008.