Republican Pat Roberts is the state’s senior senator, first elected in 1996. His abolitionist great-grandfather “arrived in Kansas with a flat-bed press, a six-gun and a Bible” and founded Kansas’ second-oldest newspaper, the Oskaloosa Independent. His father, Wes Roberts, was briefly Republican National Committee chairman during the Eisenhower years. Pat Roberts graduated from Kansas State University with a journalism degree. He served four years in the Marine Corps, then spent five years running a weekly newspaper in the suburbs of Phoenix. Starting in 1967, he worked for two years as an aide to Sen. Frank Carlson, R-Kan. and then 12 years as chief aide to 1st District Rep. Keith Sebelius, R-Kan., the father-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary and former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. When Keith Sebelius retired in 1980, Roberts won the make-or-break GOP primary with 56% of the vote in a three-way contest, and then went on to easily win the general election. For 14 years, he was in the minority party in the House. He concentrated on farm issues, learning their intricacies and minutiae, and traveling in a van to keep in touch with constituents in a district so large it took two weeks to visit every county seat. His voting record was moderate, and he looked after Kansas’ interests.
In 1995, after Republicans won majority control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, Roberts became chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. He had long believed that the huge subsidies of the early 1980s would never return. Faced with tight Republican budget parameters, Roberts drafted the so-called Freedom to Farm bill designed to phase out subsidies over seven years. In September 1995, his bill failed in committee when Southern Republicans, eager to protect cotton, rice and peanut subsidies, voted against it. Two months later, Roberts persuaded Agriculture conferees to include most of his bill in the 1996 budget reconciliation bill, which President Bill Clinton vetoed. To attract more support, Roberts agreed to maintain cotton and rice marketing loans and managed to preserve the popular Conservation Reserve Program. But overall, his legislation was the biggest change in agriculture policy since the New Deal of 1933. Roberts’ revised bill passed the Agriculture Committee 29-17 in January 1996, the full House in February, and became law in April.
A Senate seat came open when in November 1995 Republican Nancy Landon Kassebaum announced her retirement. Although Roberts enjoyed considerable power as a committee chairman, the Republicans had imposed term limits on chairmen, and the Freedom to Farm law diminished the Agriculture Committee’s portfolio. In early 1996, Roberts announced his candidacy and went on to win the August primary with an overwhelming 78% of the vote in a four-way race. In the general election, he faced Democratic state Treasurer Sally Thompson and won easily, 62%-34%. Thus Roberts became the first House member to give up a committee chairmanship to run for the Senate since Lister Hill in 1938 (and Hill got appointed to his Senate seat).
In the Senate, Roberts got on the Agriculture Committee and continued his focus on farm issues. The Freedom to Farm Act worked well in 1997, and farmers seemed to do fine with a much diminished government role in their businesses. But in 1998, crop prices plunged—in line with a long trend of falling prices for basic commodities—and some farmers demanded a return to the old system. Roberts resisted, and bills were passed to accelerate $4.5 billion in payments and to give farmers an extra $4 billion in disaster assistance. In 2000, the pattern continued. Roberts argued that increased subsidies for crop insurance would mean less need for yearly assistance and that limiting production would not raise prices because the U.S. accounts for less than one-fifth of world production. The problem seemed intractable. The number of family farmers continued to fall in places like western Kansas, where farm communities were disappearing, yet prices were not sufficient to maintain many operations.
Freedom to Farm came up for reauthorization in 2002, and this time, Democrats were in control of the Senate. Roberts was not chairman but the fifth-ranking member of the minority on the committee. He admitted that the Freedom to Farm Act “didn’t work out as anybody would have hoped” and, with Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran, he pushed for farm savings accounts. But their proposal was rejected in favor of Chairman Tom Harkin’s approach: Revival of countercyclical subsidies when crop prices are low, plus a larger Conservation Reserve Program, which paid farmers not to farm their land in order to protect environmentally sensitive areas. Harkin prevailed on the Senate floor 58-40 in February 2002. Roberts wasn’t even on the conference committee. “This policy fails farmers,” he said. He argued that it would provide no aid when production was low and crop prices rose, which is exactly what happened when drought struck the Great Plains in the summer of 2002.
Roberts has tried to encourage farm exports in many ways, opposing cargo preferences and urging expanded powers for the president to negotiate trade deals and replenishment of International Monetary Fund funds. He was a lead sponsor of the 2000 law to end the embargo on food to Cuba, and he and fellow Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback sponsored the 1999 law allowing the president to lift the embargo on India and Pakistan. Roberts supported normalizing trade relations with China. When the farm bill came up for reauthorization in 2007, Roberts pressed for maintaining protections against losses from weather and market fluctuations for producers of major commodities—wheat, corn and soybeans. “Somebody has to press the case for production agriculture. They are the people who are really responsible for our food supply,” he told the Topeka Capital-Journal, not those in “Walden Pond agriculture,” a reference to competing bids for government subsidies from fruit- and vegetable-growing states. Roberts moved successfully in committee to amend one farm program in a way that prevented corn growers from getting reductions in crop insurance at the expense of wheat growers in Kansas and other states.
In the early 2000s, Roberts gave up the ranking minority position on Agriculture to be the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. But he remained active in farm policy. He once quipped, “When you’re from Kansas, you’re not appointed to (the Agriculture Committee). You’re sentenced to it.” In the 112th Congress (2011-12), he is again the ranking Republican on the committee.
During the 2012 farm bill reauthorization, Roberts ironed out details with Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. The new bill would cut almost $25 billion over 10 years. It cut direct payments to farmers, and did not include target prices and countercyclical payments that serve as a safety net when market prices drop. However, it did strengthen crop insurance. The bill passed committee in April, but four southern Republicans opposed it. Southern members opposed the crop-insurance program because they believed it would not help peanut and rice growers prevalent in the South. Roberts’ opposition to target prices also put him at odds with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla. In June 2012, the Senate bill still passed with bipartisan support, 64-35. With House negotiators insisting on government target prices for crops, Roberts appeared to leave the door open for a compromise in the final bill. “It’s difficult to have the two,” he told National Journal, referring to crop insurance and target prices. “I won’t say it’s impossible, but we’d have to change the premise of the [Senate] bill.”
Roberts’ other major sphere of influence is national security. In 1999, as the new chairman of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on Armed Services, he held hearings probing the nation’s vulnerability to terrorists and he presciently asserted that targets would be “selected for their symbolic value, like the World Trade Center in the heart of Manhattan.” He was particularly immersed in the issue of intelligence gathering as the Intelligence chairman when Republicans controlled the Senate. But the panel grew increasingly partisan and therefore less productive. In 2003, Roberts resisted Democratic calls for an investigation of how Bush administration officials used intelligence on Iraq, prompting Democrats to try to circumvent him in the release of pre-war intelligence data
But over time, both sides on the committee arrived at the conclusion that pre-war intelligence was deeply flawed. In the summer of 2004, committee members led by Roberts unanimously criticized intelligence-gathering on Iraq and concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency had not seriously considered the possibility that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Roberts proposed that the Intelligence panel take over from the Armed Services Committee oversight of Defense Department intelligence operations, but the proposal was predictably resisted. Later, a bipartisan reorganization of intelligence operations was undertaken by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
The New York Times touched off another partisan battle in the committee when it reported in December 2005 that the National Security Agency was secretly monitoring contacts between al Qaeda suspects abroad and people in the United States. Democrats led by Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia sought a committee investigation, while Roberts insisted that the program was not only within the president’s constitutional powers but “legal, necessary and reasonable.” In March 2006, the committee voted along party lines not to conduct an investigation into the domestic surveillance program but to establish a seven-member panel charged with that responsibility. Roberts complained that some Democrats “believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States.” Roberts rotated off the committee in early 2007.
After President Obama took office, Roberts staunchly opposed sending detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. “Not in our backyard. Not in Kansas. Not on my watch,” he said in May 2009. He and Brownback placed holds on executive branch appointees to the Defense and Justice departments to pressure the Pentagon to block the proposed transfers, and the idea eventually died.
Roberts has worked with Democrats on some issues. In recent years, he worked with Harkin and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to limit consumer advertising on risky prescription drugs. He opposed Republican-inspired cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, and told Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in February 2008 that Medicare cuts were “just not gonna happen.” He also co-sponsored a bill with Harkin in 2009 to increase special education funding.
The Democrats’ health care bill in 2009 and 2010 was another story. In the Finance Committee, Roberts said, “All indications are that this bill will be pulled increasingly toward more cost, more regulations and more rationing as it continues through this process.” When HHS Secretary Sebelius said she would have “zero tolerance” for insurers claiming costs were increased by the bill, Roberts was livid. “She is threatening to shut down private companies for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech,” he said. “And she is keeping a list. Some have called this ‘gangster government.’ As a former newspaperman, I am shocked.” In the 111th Congress (2009-10), he also opposed Democrat Christopher Dodd’s financial regulation bill because he considered it a bailout of failing Wall Street firms.
Roberts’ famously edgy rhetoric was aimed at President Obama in May 2010 after a meeting with GOP senators. “The more he talked, the more he got upset. He needs to take a valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans, and just calm down, and don’t take anything so seriously,” the senator said. “If you disagree with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re attacking their motives.”
Immersion in the issues of the day gets you only so far at home, and Roberts is too savvy and seasoned to neglect the home front. He frequently promotes science and technology projects in Kansas, including a $450 million national biological defense facility at Kansas State University. After visiting Greensburg just after the town was destroyed by a tornado in 2007, Roberts phoned President George W. Bush and got him to declare Kansas eligible for federal disaster aid. In 2005, he helped make sure that Fort Riley came out of the base-closing process not only still operating, but with additional forces, including the 1st Infantry Division, which moved from Germany to Kansas. He and Brownback got the Senate to agree in October 2009 to $3.5 million for the town of Treece, which was severely contaminated by a lead and zinc mine.
After Boeing made the decision to close its Wichita defense plant by the end of 2013, Roberts voiced his displeasure. Roberts also vociferously opposed a President Obama budget proposal to impose user fees for corporate jets. “Why should you take a beating, (be a) piñata, if you will?” he asked aviation industry officials, according to The Wichita Eagle. In July 2011, Roberts joined with fellow Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan. to successfully block the nomination of former Kansas Attorney General Steve Six to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Roberts complained about the nominee’s failure to challenge President Obama’s health care law in court. Six’s view of the health care law “runs counter to the overwhelming belief of many Kansans,” Roberts told the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Roberts has also tried to trim spending in federal agencies. During deliberations over a surface transportation bill in March 2012, Roberts sought to extend a pay freeze on federal employees in exchange for funding energy projects, an adoption tax credit, and tax deductions for college tuition. The amendment failed, 47-51.
Around Washington, Roberts is known for his caustic but also dead-on sense of humor. He often makes the list of “funniest senators” in Washingtonian’s biennial poll of congressional staffers. He once complained that he wasn’t satisfied with the distinction. “I was lobbying for the ‘hottie of the year,’ but I can’t even get to lukewarm,” said the 70-something, utterly bald Roberts. He has compiled a “bucket list” of things to do before he dies. So far, he has succeeded in conducting the Kansas symphony orchestra, and riding, very briefly, a rodeo bull. But he has not yet been able to meet actress Sophia Loren, despite trips to Italy. “She just doesn’t answer my calls,” he complained.
Roberts had no Democratic opponent in 2002. The next time around, former Rep. Jim Slattery, who had been working as a Washington lawyer and lobbyist since losing a race for governor in 1994, returned to the state to challenge Roberts in 2008. Slattery ran a vigorous campaign, but Roberts, who routinely visits all 105 Kansas counties, spent nearly $7 million and called Slattery a lobbyist, “Gucci loafers and all.” He won 60%-36%, running ahead of GOP presidential nominee John McCain in the state. Slattery carried just three counties: Wyandotte (industrial Kansas City), Douglas (the University of Kansas) and Atchison.
