Louisiana’s junior senator is David Vitter, a Republican elected in 2004. He grew up in the New Orleans area, the son of a Chevron petroleum engineer. He graduated from Harvard University and Tulane University’s law school and was a Rhodes Scholar. He was a business attorney and taught law at Tulane and Loyola. In 1991, Vitter was elected to the state House from the district that had been represented by former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke. There he passed a term-limits bill through a reluctant state Legislature and was noted for his ability to irritate other politicians. Many of them held grudges because of his crusade for term limits; others were put off by his crusades for ethics in government. Vitter led the effort to recall Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards, who ultimately went to prison for racketeering. A popular sheriff sued Vitter three times after Vitter criticized his ethics.
Vitter ran for Congress and won in a May 1999 special election to replace Republican Bob Livingston, the Speaker-designate who announced in late 1998 that he would resign after confessing that he had had extramarital affairs. Many Republicans jumped into the race, and many Louisiana and national Republicans feared that Duke would run and embarrass the party by making it into the runoff. The establishment choice was David Treen, 70, who had served four terms in the House starting in 1972 and had been elected governor in 1979. Vitter argued, in effect, that Treen was too old, saying, “We need a younger congressman like me, so we can start building up the seniority we lost when Bob Livingston resigned.” The top two vote-getters in the initial balloting were Treen, with 25%, and Vitter, with 22%. The two advanced to the runoff under the system then in use. Duke, unnervingly close to making the runoff, finished third with 19%. Low turnout was probably a factor in deciding the runoff, as Vitter rallied his troops and won 51%-49%.
Vitter had one of the most conservative voting records in the House and the most conservative in the delegation. He twice won re-election in his heavily Republican, suburban New Orleans district with at least 80% of the vote.
In December 2003, Democratic Sen. John Breaux announced that he would not seek a fourth term, and two days later, Vitter jumped into the contest. Wooden in manner, a self-described loner and highly conservative, Vitter was the stylistic opposite of Breaux, a gregarious dealmaker and respected centrist from Cajun country who had been a major force for reform of entitlements and health care. But the state party and national Republicans worked hard to clear the field for Vitter, viewing him as the strongest possible candidate, thanks to his suburban political base and his habit of traveling the state to announce projects secured from his perch on the Appropriations Committee. He was also familiar in Cajun country after his well-publicized opposition to an Indian casino in southwestern Louisiana.
On the Democratic side, three serious candidates joined the race: U.S. Rep. Chris John, two-term state Treasurer John Kennedy; and state Rep. Arthur Morrell, an African-American from New Orleans. There was little doubt that Vitter would win the state’s unique Election Day primary against a divided Democratic field; the real issue for Democrats was holding him below the 50%-plus-one threshold necessary to avoid a December runoff. Vitter ran as a strong supporter of President George W. Bush and called for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, new job creation and medical malpractice lawsuit restrictions. He opposed abortion rights, same-sex marriage and gun-ownership restrictions. He said he best represented “mainstream Louisiana values” and painted John as an out-of-touch Washington liberal who was close to John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. John, the Democratic front-runner who had Breaux’s endorsement, responded by referring to Vitter as a Republican Party puppet and strove to distance himself from Kerry’s presidential campaign—a wise move in a state that Bush wound up carrying with 57% that November.
Sugar was an important issue. Louisiana is the prime cane sugar-producing state, and producers worry about being undercut by cheap imports. Vitter broke with the Bush administration over the Central American Free Trade Agreement, opposing it because it did not exempt sugar imports from the deal. Vitter ran some of the most creative television ads of the election cycle, making light of his image as a stiff politician with humorous commercials featuring his daughter’s home movies. Meanwhile, John failed to gain momentum and was caught in the crossfire between Vitter on the right and Kennedy and Morrell on the left.
With Vitter leading in the polls going into November, the Democratic candidates began scrambling to keep him below the 50% threshold. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent more than $1.5 million in ads criticizing Vitter’s positions on prescription drug reimportation and Social Security. It wasn’t enough. Vitter won the race outright with 51%, becoming the first Republican in 121 years to represent Louisiana in the Senate. John was the leading Democratic vote-getter, with 29% to 15% for Kennedy and 3% for Morrell. Bush’s strong performance helped Vitter, but he ran well on his own, winning Mississippi River parishes that Bush lost, carrying nearly all of Louisiana north of Baton Rouge, and posting large margins in the New Orleans suburbs. In populous St. Tammany Parish, which he had represented in Congress, Vitter won by more than 5-to-1. His 60,000-vote margin there was more than enough to erase John’s 25,000-vote advantage in New Orleans.
In the Senate, Vitter has compiled a relatively conservative voting record with maverick touches. In January 2007, during the Senate’s debate of the lobbying reform bill, he won passage of his amendments to increase criminal sanctions for willful violations. He sought to prohibit lobbying by spouses of senators. He also advocated for a lost cause in the Senate: a constitutional amendment to limit members of the House and Senate to 12 years of service. But Vitter continued to be a thorn in the side of lawmakers who preferred business as usual. In March 2009, he sponsored an amendment to require a vote on any annual congressional pay raise before it could take effect. Although the amendment was defeated, the move pressured Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put the pay raise to a stand-alone vote. It passed.
After Democrat Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, Vitter was not inspired to try to make friends across the aisle. He cast one of the two votes against confirming New York Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, although her qualifications for the job were not an issue. Vitter has opposed much of the Obama administration agenda. He not only voted against the $787 billion economic stimulus bill in February 2009, he continually pushed a conservative “No Cost Stimulus Act,” focused on domestic oil and gas production and regulatory relief for business. Vitter also attached an amendment to a September 2009 Interior appropriations bill that would have blocked funds for any policy initiated by White House climate change and energy adviser Carol Browner. The amendment was defeated. On the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Vitter opposed Ben Bernanke’s second term as Federal Reserve chairman in early 2010, complaining that the Fed had doled out trillions of dollars and “worsened our economic crisis by making ‘too big to fail’ a permanent government policy.” He formed an unlikely alliance with socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. in placing a hold on Bernanke’s nomination, and Vitter ultimately voted against Bernanke’s confirmation.
Some of his legislative guerrilla tactics for conservative causes have enjoyed more success. In 2007, Vitter’s amendment to bar funding of organizations advocating international gun control policies passed 81-10. In 2008, the Senate passed his amendment giving inspectors general more access to documents on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Vitter is particularly interested in law-and-order issues. In February 2010, he co-sponsored with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a bill giving administrative subpoena authority to the Marshals Service, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Postal Inspection Service in cases of child exploitation. He also sponsored a bill to require the states to collect DNA samples from convicted felons.
Home-state issues have been especially challenging for Vitter and other members of Congress from the disaster-prone Gulf region. At a Senate hearing two months before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Vitter predicted that someday a huge storm would smash the city and leave it under water: “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when,” he said. After the catastrophe, he criticized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for failing to provide flood protection for the city. And he worked with Louisiana’s Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, in pressing for federal recovery funds, though the two famously don’t get along personally. In September 2007, Vitter pushed Majority Leader Reid to call a vote on a water resources bill that authorized nearly $2 billion for Louisiana coastal restoration and $886 million for a 72-mile system of levees and floodwalls for low-lying Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. The next month, Vitter got 22 Republican senators to sign a letter urging President George W. Bush to abandon his threat to veto the bill. Bush refused, but his veto was ultimately overridden by Congress.
The deadly April 2010 explosion of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana sparked outrage from fisherman and residents throughout the Bayou State. BP became the focus of considerable public criticism. Vitter’s campaigns had received more than $450,000 from the oil and gas industry in the preceding five years, putting him in a tough position politically. Along with Landrieu, Vitter called on the Obama administration to support a state proposal to create barrier islands to protect the land from oil spills. After the administration announced a six-month moratorium on all deep-water drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, Vitter wrote to Obama warning that the drilling moratorium would result in the loss of 20,000 jobs in the state within a year. He advocated that drilling operations be shut down only if specific safety problems were identified during rig inspections. As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, he also opposed Democratic efforts to eliminate the cap on liability for oil companies after a spill.
Vitter’s political career was dealt a major blow in July 2007, when it was revealed that between 1999 and 2001 his phone number had appeared on the call list of “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. A week later he appeared with his wife, Wendy, at his side and issued a public apology, saying he had committed “a very serious sin.” The same year, the Senate Ethics Committee debated whether to punish Vitter, but ruled that the conduct in question had occurred before he entered the Senate. Vitter tried to use his campaign funds to pay $160,000 in legal fees in the case, but the Federal Election Commission would not permit it. In another round of negative publicity, in March 2009, the Transportation Security Administration looked into an incident in which Vitter allegedly opened a security gate to try to board a flight at Dulles Airport after the flight had been boarded and the doors locked. The attempt set off alarms. Vitter later claimed he had mistakenly gone through the wrong door at the gate, and the TSA ruled that he had not posed a security threat. Trouble for Vitter continued with an ABC News report in 2010 that a longtime Vitter aide had had repeated brushes with the law, including a knife-wielding incident with an ex-girlfriend. The staff member was kept on board two years after the episode, during which he worked on women’s issues for the senator. The aide resigned in late June.
Considering the well-publicized scandals, Vitter did remarkably well in his bid for a second term in 2010. He won re-election 57% to 38% over Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon. In anticipation of a tough contest and a rehash of the prostitution story, Vitter raised over $12.6 million to Melancon’s $4 million. Indeed, Melancon made an issue of Vitter’s “sin,” but in running a predominately anti-Vitter campaign, he failed to define himself, Louisiana political analysts said. Vitter did that for him by portraying Melancon as an Obama administration yes-man, slamming him for his vote for the president’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill. The message resonated in a year voters were less focused on personal characteristics than on their worries about their household finances and the economy.
Melancon also missed opportunities to separate himself from Obama by highlighting his votes against the health care overhaul and the cap-and-trade energy bill that imposed new regulations on industry, which naturally would find a receptive audience in an energy-dependent state. To counter the attacks about his use of prostitutes, Vitter ran a negative ad critical of overseas trips Melancon took at taxpayers’ expense, including one to Paris with his wife, which Melancon called a fact-finding mission to learn about the energy policies of U.S. NATO allies. But Vitter also came under fire for an ad that depicted illegal Mexican immigrants sneaking through a fence. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce denounced the ad as racist. Vitter accused his critics of “ridiculous political correctness,” saying the ad revealed “a fact and not a stereotype.”
The election seemed to liberate Vitter, who had kept a low profile in the months after the scandal broke. Once back in Washington, he joined newly elected Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of 2010’s tea party Republicans, in a proposal to amend the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. It would provide automatic citizenship to children born in the United States only if one parent is a U.S. citizen, a legal immigrant or an active member of the U.S. military. In February 2011, Vitter put a hold on Obama’s appointment of a Fish and Wildlife Service director to force the Interior Department to approve offshore drilling permits.
