Barbara Mikulski, Maryland’s senior senator, was first elected to the House in 1976 and to the Senate in 1986. At the start of the 112th Congress in 2011, she surpassed Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith to become the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and she is in line to become longest-serving woman in Congress in March 2012. Read More
Barbara Mikulski, Maryland’s senior senator, was first elected to the House in 1976 and to the Senate in 1986. At the start of the 112th Congress in 2011, she surpassed Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith to become the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and she is in line to become longest-serving woman in Congress in March 2012.
She has deep roots in immigrant, urban America and a fascination for the new technology and jobs growing in edge cities and beyond. She doesn’t look or sound like a traditional politician—just shy of 5 feet and stocky, she has a gruff and unpolished manner. In Washingtonian magazine’s survey of Capitol Hill staffers, she is frequently voted “meanest senator.” But she is a savvy Senate insider; the same magazine named her one of its “Washingtonians of the Year” in 2010. Her roots are in East Baltimore, where her Polish immigrant grandparents ran a bakery, and her father had a grocery store. She attended the Institute of Notre Dame—the same high school that produced House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi—graduated from Mount St. Agnes College and earned a social work degree at the University of Maryland. She got a job as a social worker, helping at-risk children and educating seniors about Medicare.
She entered politics by organizing a grassroots effort to stop a highway from going through the Highlandtown neighborhood where she grew up. She won, saving the now thriving Inner Harbor, and went on to win a seat on the Baltimore City Council in 1971. She ran for the Senate in 1974, and got a respectable 43% against Republican incumbent Charles Mathias. When Democratic Rep. Paul Sarbanes ran for the other Senate seat in 1976, Mikulski made a bid for his 3rd District House seat and won. Ten years later, when Mathias retired, she gave up her safe seat for what seemed like a chancy Senate race. She won handily, with 50% in the primary to 31% for Democratic Rep. Michael Barnes, and 14% for Gov. Harry Hughes. In the general election, she beat Republican Linda Chavez, a Reagan-era Civil Rights Commission official, 61%-39%. Mikulski still lives in Baltimore and commutes to Washington. Her Baltimore office is in Fells Point, the city’s original port area. She has a sideline writing mystery novels. She coauthored Capitol Offense and Capitol Venture, stories featuring the character Eleanor “Norie” Gorzack, a freshman senator from Pennsylvania.
Mikulski was the first woman elected to the Senate whose husband or father did not serve in high office. She is fond of calling herself “a social worker … with power.” In her early years, the only other woman in the Senate was Republican Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas. Every two years since 1992, Mikulski has held workshops for new women senators to help them quickly learn the ropes in what is still a male-dominated realm. Mikulski is one of just 17 women in the Senate, and she takes seriously her role as dean of the women. “When I came … we were a bit of a novelty in the Senate,” she said. “I think what we see now is that we’re not viewed as a novelty. We’re not viewed as celebrities. We’re viewed as senators.” Mikulski’s policy agenda includes many initiatives aimed at women, such as establishing mammography clinic standards and homemaker Individual Retirement Accounts. She got an amendment added to the health care overhaul in 2010 requiring mammograms and other preventative services for women with no copayment—a swipe at a Republican argument that restricting mammograms would be the first step in the Democrats’ plan to ration health care. “For many insurance companies, simply being a woman is a pre-existing condition,” she said during debate on the measure.
In her first term, Mikulski won a seat on the Appropriations Committee, and within two years, she was chairman of a subcommittee handling housing, space, and veterans’ programs. Now she chairs the revamped Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee, which also includes NASA. Mikulski has been one of the Senate’s chief advocates of the space program and an enthusiast for space exploration. She has paid close attention to funding for the Goddard Space Center, the Wallops Flight Facility, and Johns Hopkins’ Applied Science Lab in Maryland. In 2004, she and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison moved to add $800 million to NASA’s appropriation to repair the space shuttle fleet and service the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2006, she won a big victory when the new NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin, announced that the agency could repair and upgrade Hubble safely and within budget. Since then, she has pressed NASA to move more quickly and cheaply in proceeding with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s more powerful but over-budget successor.
Her other work on the commerce subcommittee has been directed at funding for Maryland highways, homeland security at the Port of Baltimore, cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, and research on oyster-bed reseeding in the bay. As a member of the Select Intelligence Committee, she keeps a sharp eye out for the National Security Agency, the eavesdropping arm of the spy community headquartered at Fort Meade north of Washington. She also led the effort to get the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects program established at the University of Maryland in 2009. On another local issue, she fought to extend a visa program to permit more seasonal foreign workers to assist Maryland’s seafood processors.
On domestic policy, Mikulski is a strong advocate of abortion rights and a solid liberal, although she sometimes votes for Republican initiatives, such as the bipartisan Welfare Reform Act of 1996. On the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, she has taken a special interest in elder abuse and neglect and long-term care. She considers one of her proudest achievements the Spousal Anti-Impoverishment Act, a 1988 law helping seniors stay afloat financially while coping with the costs of nursing home care for spouses. She has also been a leader in opposing Republican efforts to contract out government work to private firms.
After voting for many years against higher fuel-efficiency standards—Maryland is home to auto assembly plants—Mikulski concluded in 2007, “It is time for a change.” She supported the first major increase in fuel-efficiency standards in three decades. Two years later, she got a provision into the stimulus law making car sales and excise taxes deductible from federal income taxes. A national co-chair of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, she has been lukewarm toward President Obama. She disagreed with his administration’s proposal to allow offshore oil drilling in Maryland and in May 2010 expressed dissatisfaction with the federal government’s protection of its computer networks. “We don’t know who the hell is in charge,” she groused at a budget hearing.
Mikulski’s toughest Senate election was her first, which she won against strong competition. Since then, she has not had a serious contest. In 2004, she faced Republican state Sen. E.J. Pipkin, a Dundalk native who made millions as a Wall Street bond trader and returned to live on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He put $1 million of his own money into the race and argued that Mikulski’s voting record was too far to the left, and that she had not done enough to preserve the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Mikulski managed to outspend him 2-1 and won 65%-34%.
In 1995, Mikulski was mugged near her Fells Point townhouse, and subsequently moved to a more secure condominium building in Baltimore. In 2005, she was briefly hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat. Some Maryland Democrats speculated that she might retire in 2010, at age 74, setting off a wide-open Democratic primary similar to 2006 when Sarbanes retired. Former GOP Gov. Robert Ehrlich indicated that he was mulling a possible challenge. But he backed off, deciding instead to run against Gov. Martin O’Malley, and Mikulski easily won a fifth term with 62% of the vote.
