Michigan’s junior senator is Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat first elected in 2000. She is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.
Stabenow grew up in the small outstate Michigan town of Clare, where her father was an Oldsmobile dealer and her mother was a nurse. She went to Michigan State University, where she got a master’s degree in social work. She counseled kids in public schools and made extra money singing folk songs in coffeehouses. Young Stabenow also marched in antiwar rallies during the Vietnam War era and volunteered for antiwar presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. Angered when the Ingham County Commission closed a nursing home, she ran for the commission in 1974 and, at age 24, beat an incumbent who referred to her as “that young broad.” She was elected to the state House in 1978 at age 28 and was elected to the state Senate in 1990. Four years later, while running for governor, she was at the center of a storm in state politics. In response to Republican Gov. John Engler’s call for changes in financing education, she proposed to zero out the property tax and start over, apparently calculating that he would reject such a drastic tax cut. Instead, he accepted her proposal and passed a plan reducing property taxes vastly and increasing the sales tax, which was approved by voters 70%-30% in March 1994. In the August primary, the state Democratic establishment opposed Stabenow: the Michigan Education Association, the UAW and the AFL-CIO. She won 30% of the vote, behind former Rep. Howard Wolpe’s 35%. She was chosen as Wolpe’s running mate, but the ticket lost to Engler, 61%-38%.
Undaunted, Stabenow almost immediately began running for Congress. The 8th Congressional District seat, which included Lansing’s Democratic Ingham County and heavily Republican Livingston County to the east, was held by freshman Republican Dick Chrysler. For the 1996 race, Stabenow raised more than $1 million in individual contributions, a tribute to her industriousness and fundraising prowess; overall each spent $1.5 million. She won impressively, 54%-44%. In the House, Stabenow had a fairly liberal voting record. She opposed increasing the president’s power to negotiate trade agreements and the partial-birth abortion ban.
In 2000, she challenged first-term Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham, and the contest turned out to be one of the critical Senate races that year. The first barrage of ads in the race came not from either candidate, but from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which in early 2000 spent $700,000 attacking Abraham for his opposition to immigration restrictions. In the summer, Abraham used his money advantage—he ultimately spent $13 million to Stabenow’s nearly $8 million—to run ads spotlighting his own program for prescription drugs for senior citizens and attacking Stabenow as a free-spending liberal favoring increased bureaucracy and higher taxes, opposing welfare reform and supporting lenient sentences for criminals. Stabenow resisted pressure and hoarded her money for an October ad buy. This proved to be a good strategy. Stabenow was down by 17% in mid-October, but she answered charges that she was a liberal by citing her votes for a balanced budget and ending the marriage penalty in the tax code. She kept herself in the good graces of labor by voting against normalizing trade relations with China. Stabenow said Abraham was beholden to corporations and special interests. This race was heavy on ads by outside groups—the Sierra Club, Peace Action, and EMILY’s List for Stabenow, and the Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, the National Rifle Association, and Michigan Right to Life for Abraham. It was the most expensive Senate race in Michigan history and the first since 1942 in which neither candidate won a majority of the vote. Stabenow won 49%-48%, though she carried only 13 of the state’s 83 counties.
To help her strengthen her grip on the seat, Senate Democrats made Stabenow head of a task force on prescription drugs, then among the hottest issues in the country. She organized bus trips of seniors to Canada and pressed for measures allowing the importation of U.S. drugs from that country. In 2004, Stabenow won passage of an amendment for $2 billion in corporate tax cuts for manufacturers who create jobs in the United States.
She also focused on Michigan’s environment issues. In 2003, after Toronto began shipping all its trash to a landfill southwest of Detroit—over 1 million tons a year—Stabenow argued that the practice violated a 1992 treaty and demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency enforce a provision of the treaty allowing the United States to decline such shipments. Then-EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt maintained that only hazardous waste shipments violated the treaty. Stabenow argued that all waste was covered. The shipments continued, as did the fight. In August 2006, Stabenow and fellow Michigan Sen. Carl Levin announced an agreement with Ontario’s Environment Minister to end the shipment of municipal garbage by 2010.
Late in her first term, Stabenow decided to try to get a toehold in leadership. In November 2004, when Barbara Mikulski stepped down as secretary of the Democratic caucus, Stabenow called Mikulski to ask for her support, and the two worked the phones. Stabenow got the job, the No. 3 position in the Senate Democratic leadership. It gave her a voice at leadership meetings, though her performance was limited. Other senior Senate Democrats quietly discussed replacing her after the 2006 election. Ultimately, they reached an agreement: Stabenow got a seat on the Finance Committee and became chair of the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, a liaison to grassroots groups across the nation, while Washington state Sen. Patty Murray became conference secretary. In the 112th Congress (2011-12), she returned to the leadership as vice chair of the Democratic Policy Committee.
She also became chairman of the Agriculture Committee in early 2011, after Iowa’s Tom Harkin left the post to chair the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (On the HELP Committee, Harkin replaced Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who died in office in August 2009.) The post has national importance because the $289 billion farm bill, passed in 2008, expires in 2012. Traditionally, farm bills have favored crops such as corn and wheat that receive big subsidies of various kinds. But Michigan mostly produces so-called specialty crops like cherries, blueberries and apples. Stabenow can be expected to tilt farm legislation in the direction of specialty crops, which may put her at odds with her House counterpart, Frank Lucas, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma. In addition, Stabenow has been interested in nutrition issues since her service in the Michigan Legislature. Federal nutrition programs fall under the Agriculture committees.
During the Bush era, Stabenow was a leading foe of the Republican president’s international trade agenda, insisting on protections for American workers who lose their jobs to foreign competition. With Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning she sponsored a proposal to make it easier for U.S. manufacturers to show currency manipulation by other nations, a measure directed at China. With other rust-belt Democrats, she successfully fought Senate action on climate change legislation in recent years, and she opposed tougher fuel economy standards for the auto industry, which ultimately passed the Senate.
In 2009, with Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches and enjoying a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, Stabenow had more leeway to legislate. She strongly supported loan guarantees for the Detroit Three automakers and the government acquisition of General Motors and Chrysler. In November 2010, after GM’s successful initial public offering, she told Bloomberg News, “This is an example of America partnering with our industry just as every other country around the world partners with their industry.”
When the Senate passed the “Cash for Clunkers” program providing government reimbursements for trading in old cars for more fuel-efficient models in 2009, Stabenow successfully fended off a proposal by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California for higher mileage standards. She also pushed the move to transfer $2 billion of economic stimulus funds into the clunkers program, and criticized Japan and Korea for rules that excluded American-made cars from their similar programs. In October 2010, the Senate passed Stabenow’s small-business bill with a $30 billion lending fund that she said could generate a $300 billion pool of capital. With Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, Stabenow in January 2010 sponsored a bill to close the Chicago area locks and dams to prevent the invasive Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes. Later that year, she called for poisoning the carp in Chicago’s Lake Calumet, where they were breeding in great numbers.
In 2006, when Stabenow came up for re-election, Republicans were unable to recruit House members Candice Miller and Mike Rogers to run, and her opponent was Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard. Stabenow won easily, 57%-41%.
