Republican Roy Blunt is the junior senator from Missouri. He was elected in 2010 to replace retiring Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond, also a Republican. Blunt grew up on a dairy farm near Springfield, Mo. His father was a state representative, who won election in 1978 by defeating the mother of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. In 1970, Blunt graduated from Southwest Baptist University, 25 miles north of Springfield. He later taught history and government at the high school and college levels. He got his start in politics in 1972, when he volunteered for Republican John Ashcroft’s unsuccessful campaign for Congress. In 1973, then GOP Gov. Bond named the 23-year-old Blunt to be Greene County clerk.
In 1980, Republican Sen. John Danforth asked him to run for lieutenant governor, but Blunt lost. In 1984, he was elected Missouri secretary of state, the first Republican to win that office in half a century; he was re-elected in 1988. In 1992, he ran for governor and lost the Republican primary to William Webster, 44%-39%. Blunt then became president of Southwest Baptist University, his alma mater. In 1996, when Rep. Mel Hancock, R-Mo., retired, Blunt ran for the open House seat and won with 65% of the vote, carrying every county in the district. He was re-elected easily every two years after that, and then ran for the Senate in 2010.
In the House, Blunt had a solidly conservative voting record, with intermittent moves toward the center on social issues. In 2006, he won passage of his Combat Meth Act, the first comprehensive approach to fighting the supply of methamphetamine. With then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Blunt sponsored a measure creating an Internet database of federal spending. His greater impact was in his leadership roles in the House, which gave him a say in shaping the major legislation produced in the period that Republicans were in the majority, from 1995 to 2006. For much of that time, Blunt had senior jobs in the whip operation, and from 2003 to 2008, he was the Republican whip. In 1999, Blunt was one of the 10 original members of then Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential exploratory committee. Bush called him “a leader who knows how to raise his sights and lower his voice.”
At the suggestion of Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, Blunt ran for and won the freshman spot on the Republican Steering Committee, a leadership-driven panel that makes recommendations for committee assignments. Then, in January 1999, DeLay plucked him from the ranks of 48 deputy whips and appointed him his chief deputy whip, an important leadership stepping stone. On a number of issues, Blunt’s job was to make certain that bills the leadership hoped to pass were palatable to conservatives, who often objected to compromises aimed at giving legislation broader appeal.
Blunt spent a good deal of time meeting with lobbyists and organizing groups around issues such as trade, taxes and energy. He had a reputation as a good listener with a light touch, and he paid attention to party moderates, who were a larger share of the GOP Conference then. Blunt mediated disputes between Republicans and went after votes on critical issues. He also raised substantial sums for GOP candidates. When Majority Leader Dick Armey announced that he would retire in 2002, DeLay moved up to replace him, which left the post of whip available for Blunt. Ray LaHood of Illinois (now Transportation secretary), a moderate Republican, announced that he, too, was running for whip. Within weeks, however, he bowed out after concluding that Blunt had locked up support not only from most conservatives but from many moderates as well.
For the most part, Blunt was successful as whip. He met his toughest challenge in passing the 2003 bill to create a prescription drug benefit as part of the Medicare program. He assembled a solid Republican bloc of support for the bill and brought along a few Democrats, as well. Still, in November, when GOP leaders took the final version to the floor, they were still short of the necessary 218 votes. The roll call started at 3 a.m. and lasted a record two hours and 53 minutes. Finally, two conservative Republicans who had opposed the legislation because of its cost were persuaded to switch their votes, and the bill passed, 220-215, just before dawn. It was a big victory for Blunt and his vote-whipping operation. He ran into a couple of low points in this tenure as well. In 2002, the leadership was embarrassed by disclosures that Blunt had quietly inserted into a homeland security bill a provision benefiting Philip Morris, a tobacco giant with strong political ties to the whip. Still, Blunt’s name often surfaced on lists of potential speakers of the House.
His star dimmed over time, in part because of his overweening ambition and in part because of events outside his control, mainly the political immolation of his old mentor, DeLay. In September 2005, a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay and he was forced to step down as majority leader. Blunt persuaded Speaker Hastert to let him keep his post as whip while also assuming the majority leader’s job temporarily. It was too heavy a burden, especially because the House was dealing with the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina in the South. During the next three months, Republicans struggled to pass bills in the House. In January 2006, after DeLay announced that he would permanently give up his post as leader, Blunt positioned himself to take over and, after a week of lobbying his colleagues, claimed that he had the votes to win. His assertion proved to be a bluff. John Boehner of Ohio was aggressively campaigning against him, and the multiple DeLay controversies involving well-heeled lobbyists had indirectly hurt Blunt, who was viewed as being too cozy with Washington’s vaunted K Street. In a dramatic showdown, Boehner prevailed, 122-109, over Blunt, who suffered the double indignity of losing his bid and looking like a whip who couldn’t count his votes.
However, Blunt remained in the leadership as whip and developed a smooth working relationship with Boehner. When House Republicans lost their majority in November 2006, he faced a new test. Republican Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona challenged him for the downsized post of minority whip. Blunt prevailed by an unexpectedly wide margin, winning 137-57. In the minority, he became more outspoken when criticizing the Democrats’ management of the House and, with Boehner, fought the new majority on most issues. One exception was extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; for months, Blunt worked closely with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., on a compromise bill. In September 2008, Boehner gave him the thankless job of negotiating the $700 billion financial bailout bill, which proved to be wildly unpopular with his fellow Republicans.
After Republicans suffered big electoral losses in 2008, Blunt stepped down from his whip position in favor of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. The following year, he began to focus on a Senate campaign in earnest after Bond announced in February he would not seek re-election to a fifth term. In the spring, he won the primary without breaking a sweat after potentially competitive opponents Sarah Steelman, the former state treasurer, and Thomas Schweich, a Washington University law professor who had Danforth’s backing, decided against getting into the race. State Sen. Chuck Purgason did run, and tried to create momentum with an appeal to tea party activists. But Blunt easily prevailed in the August primary with 71% of the vote. Danforth and Schweich both endorsed Blunt, unifying Missouri Republicans for the battle ahead.
The fall campaign was the real contest. Blunt faced Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, the daughter of a former senator and a governor who had instant name recognition. Blunt did his best to tie Carnahan to President Barack Obama and the Democratic policies unpopular with conservative voters. “I thought the Democrats would overreach,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in August. “But I never thought they’d overreach so far that the fight would be among Democrats against their own agenda.” His opposition to the Obama-backed health care overhaul played well for him on the campaign trail, and his ads featured images of Carnahan with Obama at a Kansas City fundraiser. Carnahan tried to paint Blunt as the insider in the race, but her family ties—her grandfather was in Congress, her father was governor, and her brother, Russ, currently serves in the House—made it difficult for her to be seen as an outsider.
Blunt has had his own family and lobbying connections to defend. Carnahan ran an ad with a Fox News clip in which anchor Chris Wallace mentioned Blunt inserting a favorable provision into a bill that favored tobacco companies while dating tobacco lobbyist Abigail Perlman, whom he later married. It appeared to have mattered little to Missouri voters in a year in which Obama’s popularity sharply dropped. The race began as a close contest, but Carnahan fell further and further behind. On Election Night, Blunt won 54% to 41%.
Upon entering the Senate in 2011, Blunt moved into his new Russell building office that was formerly occupied by a famous Missourian: Harry Truman, then a Democratic senator and later president. Despite the ideological differences between the two, Blunt took a tour of the Truman Presidential Library in April to look at the populist’s World War I memorabilia and other artifacts. After a tornado in May devastated the town of Joplin, Mo. and killed 159 people, Blunt pushed for a strong federal relief effort to help the battered community. Blunt represented Joplin when he served in the House. When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. suggested that payment for recovery should be offset with other budget cuts, Blunt notably told Politico in a statement, “We need to prioritize spending, and this needs to be a priority.”
In the Senate, Blunt has supported a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance the budget. In October 2011, he co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. that would exempt poultry litter and manure from Superfund regulatory laws, and remove certain reporting requirements for livestock and poultry producers. In June 2011, Blunt reached across the aisle to co-sponsor a bill with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis. that would restore tax credits for hybrid trucks and electric vehicles.
In December 2011, Blunt announced that he would run for vice chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, setting up a battle against Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Though they are both freshman senators, Blunt has had much more experience based on his time in the House. Johnson, conversely, never held public office before being elected to the Senate in 2010. However, Johnson’s outside status and ties to the tea party might help him in the prospective showdown.
