Patrick Leahy, Vermont’s longest-serving senator, was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and is now the chamber’s second most-senior member, behind Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Leahy is as much of an influential ally of President Barack Obama as he was a stubborn antagonist of President George W. Bush.
Leahy grew up in Burlington, went to law school at Georgetown University, and then returned home to practice law. He was elected Chittenden County state’s attorney in 1966, at age 26, and still often invokes his years in that job during hearings and in interviews. After eight years as state’s attorney, he ran for the U.S. Senate at age 34. It was 1974, and Leahy had made a name for himself in the tiny state as the Burlington-area prosecutor who tried all major felony cases personally and who attacked the big oil companies during the 1970s energy crisis. He had a solid base in Democratic Burlington, together with the kind of quiet, thoughtful temperament that Vermonters like in their public officials. He outpolled Republican U.S. Rep. Richard Mallary by a narrow margin to win the Senate seat.
Leahy is a stalwart progressive—in 2010, he and his Vermont colleague, Independent Bernie Sanders, were among those tied for the Senate’s most liberal member, according to National Journal’s rankings. Over the years, Leahy has made his mark as Judiciary’s chairman. He was formerly chairman of the Agriculture Committee, and he has a chance to chair the powerful Appropriations panel in the next few years, given his seniority. Judiciary handles many of the cultural issues—such as abortion and gun control—that have polarized the two parties and their constituencies, and the committee has been sharply divided at least since the hearings on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987. Leahy was an early supporter of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, and has largely been in sync with his administration. He helped guide Obama’s first two Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, to swift confirmation, even while working with a new Judiciary ranking Republican, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, who was considerably more partisan than his predecessor in that role, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter. Leahy accused Republicans of seeking to play the race card against Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina justice, and of gender bias toward Kagan. He mused to reporters in May 2010 that if Obama nominated Moses to the panel, Republicans would find a way to oppose him.
Leahy had mixed results on other issues before Judiciary during Obama’s first two years in office. He was unable to get a long-delayed overhaul of the patent system into law, and he promised in January 2011 to redouble efforts on the issue with his House Judiciary counterpart, Texas Republican Lamar Smith. That measure was finally signed into law in September of that year, ending a seven-year stalemate. Leahy also pledged to revive failed legislation from 2010 aimed at cracking down on online piracy and counterfeiting as well as a measure to speed up the processing of Freedom of Information Act requests. He said he would look for ways to reduce government fraud with Judiciary’s new ranking Republican, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley.
In the 1990s, when Republicans were in the majority, Leahy criticized them for holding up President Bill Clinton’s judicial appointments, and he stoutly defended Clinton during the impeachment proceedings in 1998 and 1999. When Leahy became chairman during the Democrats’ 19 months in the majority in 2001 and 2003, he, in turn, held up the Republicans’ judicial nominations. As ranking minority member of the committee from 2003 to 2007, Leahy led filibusters against 10 appeals court nominees, tactics that the Republicans bitterly attacked. Leahy noted that the committee had approved the vast majority of appellate nominees and almost every trial court nominee, and argued that he had been fairer to Bush’s appointees than Republicans had been to Clinton’s. Leahy’s brass-knuckle tactics irked some Republicans, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who infamously cursed at the Democrat on the Senate floor during a 2004 photo shoot.
In 2005, Leahy led the minority’s questioning of Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both of whom were ultimately confirmed by the Senate. The liberal senator surprised many when he voted to approve the conservative Roberts. “I know this will not be popular with many of my constituency, and I understand that,” Leahy said. “I came here to do what I thought was right, and as a Vermonter I can do nothing different.” He also asked tough questions of Alito, and that time he voted no. He said, “This president is in the midst of a radical realignment of the powers of government and its intrusiveness into the private lives of Americans. This nomination is part of that plan.” When Alito appeared to mouth the words “not true” at the 2010 State of the Union address as Obama blasted the Supreme Court’s decision allowing corporations to buy political attack ads, Leahy stood behind the president. He called the Citizens United ruling “the most partisan decision since Bush v. Gore” in 2000.
Another major chapter in Leahy’s tenure as chairman was handling legislation that grew out of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He and his staff worked with the Bush administration to hammer out the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping law that sparked a national debate over whether government investigators should be given broader powers at the expense of individual liberties. It was essentially the Senate version, not the House bill, that was enacted in October 2001. But Leahy fought the administration when it sought to expand police powers in the wake of the attacks. He opposed a proposal to allow the government to detain and deport immigrants suspected of terrorism without presenting evidence in court. In 2002, he said that the Justice Department should be required to disclose the number of U.S. citizens being spied on, the number of secret foreign intelligence wiretaps that had become part of criminal proceedings, and the total number of persons targeted by foreign-intelligence surveillance warrants. In February 2010, he pushed for passage of an extension of the Patriot Act with additional civil liberty protections, but agreed to a one-year extension of several expiring provisions.
After the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke in 2004, Leahy sharply criticized the administration, and he strongly disagreed with Bush’s declaration that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to unlawful combatants in Afghanistan. In 2005, Leahy objected to the government’s surveillance of communications between suspected Al Qaeda terrorists abroad and people in the United States. As chairman in 2007, he made life difficult for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by requesting an internal investigation of whether Gonzales had told the truth about the warrantless wiretapping program. Leahy subsequently placed Gonzales’s successor, Michael Mukasey, on the spot with demands that he denounce the use of water boarding, an interrogation tactic that simulates drowning and that has been used on terrorism suspects.
Around the Capitol, Leahy is known for his geniality. In 2010, he was named “nicest senator” in Washingtonian magazine’s anonymous annual survey of Capitol Hil staff. He is a gadgeteer and an amateur photographer, whose work has been published in The New York Times and elsewhere. He is also an avid student of popular culture, and a huge fan of the Batman movies. (He appeared briefly in two of the films, with a speaking part in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Leahy tells the Joker, “We’re not intimidated by you thugs.”) He can recite verses from Shakespeare and lyrics from the Grateful Dead rock band, and is friends with the Vermont band Phish. In 1995, he became the second senator, after Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, to set up a personal website, and in 2003, he was the first member of Congress with a blog. Leahy’s fascination with technology helps to explain his interest in patent issues.
Another Leahy cause is the elimination of land mines. Since 1989, he has been crusading against the export and use of land mines, which are easy and cheap to implant yet difficult and expensive to remove. In many places, land mines continue to injure and kill civilians long after hostilities have ended. In 1994, Leahy persuaded the United Nations to unanimously call for the eventual elimination of land mines. On a similar issue, he co-sponsored in 2006 an amendment to ban the use of cluster bombs near civilian sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was defeated 70-30. He pushed Obama in 2010 to join an international treaty banning the mines. On other foreign policy and defense issues, Leahy tends to the left as well. He has been an outspoken critic of the Iraq war and expressed disappointment with Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision in 2011 not to try suspected terrorists in federal court.
Leahy is one of the few members of the Agriculture Committee who is not from a state with heavily subsidized crops such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and cotton. As the ranking Democrat on the committee, he worked with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar in the 1990s to phase out the subsidy system. But after their success in passing the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, crop prices fell, and lawmakers’ resolve dissipated. Congress took to voting large annual subsidies in the form of emergency relief to farmers. The 2002 farm bill largely rolled back the 1996 act.
That is not to say that Leahy is not at times as parochial as the next senator. On Agriculture, he is a staunch defender of the interests of the 1,150 dairy farms in Vermont. In April 2011, he introduced a measure allowing dairy farmers in Vermont and elsewhere to issue H-2A visas long used by other sectors of agriculture to hire foreign workers. In 2010, he secured more than $57 million in solo spending earmarks for his state—the 10th highest total among senators, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Leahy has had relatively easy re-election contests. His closest call was in 1980, when he narrowly survived that year’s Republican sweep. He defeated Republican Stewart Ledbetter just 50%-49%. Six years later, he was completely rehabilitated politically. He defeated popular Gov. Richard Snelling, 63%-35%.
