Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, was elected to the Senate in January 1996 after serving in the House. Both of Wyden’s parents were Jewish and fled Nazi Germany. He grew up in California, graduated from Stanford University and moved to Oregon to attend the University of Oregon law school. After graduating in 1974, he founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers, an advocacy group for the elderly. His first foray into electoral politics was sponsoring a successful referendum reducing the price of dentures. In 1980, at age 31, he boldly launched a primary challenge to Robert Duncan in the 3rd Congressional District, which covers most of Portland, and won 60%-40%. He went on to easily capture the seat in the heavily Democratic district. Read More

Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, was elected to the Senate in January 1996 after serving in the House. Both of Wyden’s parents were Jewish and fled Nazi Germany. He grew up in California, graduated from Stanford University and moved to Oregon to attend the University of Oregon law school. After graduating in 1974, he founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers, an advocacy group for the elderly. His first foray into electoral politics was sponsoring a successful referendum reducing the price of dentures. In 1980, at age 31, he boldly launched a primary challenge to Robert Duncan in the 3rd Congressional District, which covers most of Portland, and won 60%-40%. He went on to easily capture the seat in the heavily Democratic district.

Wyden’s way to the Senate was opened by the Senate Ethics Committee’s decision in September 1995 to expel Republican Sen. Bob Packwood for sexual harassment of former aides and lobbyists. Wyden, who had long been eyeing the seat, decided to run in the special election to replace Packwood—the first election Oregon conducted by mail-in ballot. With his home base in Portland, where the local television broadcasts reach most of the state, Wyden had greater name identification than his competitors. But he had spirited opposition in the Democratic primary from Eugene-based Rep. Peter DeFazio, who carried his own district overwhelmingly, holding Wyden to a 50%-44% win. The Republican nomination went to state Senate President Gordon Smith, a frozen vegetable tycoon from eastern Oregon who spent $2 million of his own money. Most polls had the race in a dead heat, and negative ads flooded the airwaves. Wyden picked up strength the week before the Jan. 30 mail deadline, and won 48%-47%.

Ten months later, Smith won the state’s other Senate seat, marking the first time two senators were elected who had run against each other in the same year. With the departure of Packwood and Republican Mark Hatfield, Oregon lost 56 years of Senate seniority and gained two senators who everyone expected would be bitter enemies. Instead they became friends and collaborators, holding dozens of joint town meetings across Oregon and having lunch every Thursday with their chiefs of staff. The bipartisan working alliance between the two ended in 2008, when Smith lost his re-election bid to Democrat Jeff Merkley.

In his years in Washington, Wyden has displayed a genius for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and for making the counterintuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. He says, “My record is based on the proposition that if you want to get anything done, it’s got to be bipartisan. But sometimes you have to stand alone.” An illustration was Wyden’s work with Maine Republican Olympia Snowe in early 2009. Wyden and Snowe astutely predicted that high-dollar bonuses and “golden parachutes” for executives of financial companies being bailed out by American taxpayers would be unpopular with the public. They won passage of a provision in that year’s economic stimulus bill to prevent such bonus payments. But the stipulation was left out of the final bill at the insistence of the Obama administration, which said employees might sue to keep their bonuses. In March 2009, there was an outpouring of public anger over bonuses paid to employees of troubled insurance giant AIG, which embarrassed the administration and which would have been prevented by the Wyden-Snowe measure.

Wyden’s portfolio of interests is wide, ranging from Senate procedure to new technology. In 1997, he and Iowa Republican Charles Grassley called for disclosure of the names of senators who place holds on legislation, blocking it from consideration. Wyden and Grassley were rebuffed in their efforts for years, but made slow progress. Finally, in January 2011, the Senate voted 92-4 to require public disclosure of holds after two days, ending the ability of a single senator to secretly stop legislation from advancing.

Another Wyden cause has been the Internet. He and former California Republican Rep. Christopher Cox sponsored the three-year ban on Internet taxation that passed in 1998. In 2001, they sought to extend the ban permanently, but also set up a procedure to allow states to tax Internet sales if they adopt uniform sales tax rules and provide a means to remit sales taxes electronically. In 2004, the Senate passed a four-year extension that grandfathered in pre-1998 taxes and permitted states to apply telephone taxes to voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) services. Wyden has also worked on Internet privacy issues and on anti-spam legislation, which passed in 2003. As spam purveyors evolved, he moved to restrict spam messages over text-messaging systems and cell phones. In November 2010, he worked to block action on a bill passed by the Judiciary Committee that would allow the government to blacklist websites and bar credit card companies and ad networks from dealing with them in cases of copyright infringement. Wyden told Wired that the approach was “like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile. The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs and a secure Internet.”

Health care has long captured Wyden’s interest. He was one of 11 Senate Democrats to vote for the Republican-authored Medicare prescription drug law in 2003 in the face of criticism from fellow Democrats. “It wasn’t a bill I would have written. But I thought it was the right thing to do to get started,” he said. He won amendments creating a national commission on health care and extending a managed care option for rural Oregon. Later, with Snowe, he sponsored a bill to allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. During the debate over health care reform, Wyden joined Republican Robert Bennett of Utah on a bill to replace the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a tax deduction for individuals to buy insurance from private insurers. They lined up six Democratic and four Republican co-sponsors, and argued in 2009 that their approach would produce a bipartisan health care bill, with universal coverage. But the Obama administration and key Senate committee chairmen disagreed that changes in tax incentives alone would achieve the goal of insuring millions of Americans without health insurance. Wyden presciently predicted that the more government-heavy approach President Barack Obama favored would be a hard sell. He told The Wall Street Journal, “People don’t want the government in the driver’s seat.”

Wyden also argued that the Obama administration’s initiative did not inject enough competition into the system to improve the performance of health insurers, and that it failed to give consumers more choices of health plans. He sponsored an amendment requiring employers to offer their employees a choice of at least two insurance plans, and also allowing more Americans access to the insurance exchanges—new insurance marketplaces—created by the legislation.

Wyden surprised much of Washington in December 2011 when he joined forces with Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. to offer a plan to partially privatize and radically transform Medicare. The Democratic Party had already campaigned against—and strongly condemned—Ryan’s budget blueprint to change Medicare, and Wyden’s move seemed to undermine the party’s message. The Obama White House said the plan would “end Medicare as we know it.” Wyden and Ryan’s plan would allow insurers to compete with traditional Medicare and give patients subsidies that they could use for either fee for service Medicare or private insurance.

For some years, Wyden has promoted a restructuring of the tax code akin to the reform bill of 1986, including reductions in tax rates and an expansion of the tax base by eliminating tax preferences and deductions. In February 2010, he and Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire sponsored a measure with three income tax brackets (15%, 25%, 35%), a lower corporate tax rate and immediate expensing of inventory and equipment for businesses with receipts under $1 million. Wyden reintroduced the bill in April 2011, and argued that President Obama’s State of the Union endorsement of tax changes was consistent with his approach. Undaunted by conventional wisdom that Congress is too politically polarized to accomplish major tax reform, Wyden told The Oregonian newspaper, “Tax reform is absolutely, totally completely impossible until 15 minutes before it comes together.”

Wyden voted against the Iraq war resolution in 2002, and also opposed Obama’s plan to add troops in Afghanistan in 2009. He also voted against the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry in 2008, and was one of 13 Democrats who joined with Republicans in trying to end the Troubled Asset Relief Program in January 2010.

Wyden joined Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo. in pushing for the Obama Administration to make public how the counter-terrorist Patriot Act was being interpreted and divulge more information about surveillance. The Washington Post reported in July 2011 that the Obama Administration rebuffed Wyden and claimed that it was not possible to identify the number of Americans currently being monitored. Wyden and Udall offered an amendment that would have forced the Justice Department’s Inspector General to estimate how many people in the United States were having email and phone calls monitored, but the Senate Intelligence Committee shot down the proposal. In early August 2011, Wyden placed a temporary hold on the intelligence authorization bill over lack of transparency about surveillance.

Wyden has also been a staunch defender of the state’s assisted-suicide law, the only one like it in the nation, and has fought various legislative attempts to nullify the law over the years. He has pushed for federal legislation similar to Oregon’s 2006 law making pseudoephedrine, used to make methamphetamines, available only by prescription. He has sponsored the county payments law, in which Oregon counties and rural school districts are paid $250 million a year to compensate for revenues lost due to federal restrictions on logging; it has brought in more than $2 billion to the state. He worked to expand the wilderness area in the Mount Hood National Forest and the Columbia River Gorge, which became law in March 2009.

According to The Oregonian, in August 2011 Wyden held his 600th town hall meeting since 1996. Wyden’s attention to state issues, and to keeping his visibility up at home—he continues to hold open meetings in all 36 counties every year, even in heavily Republican eastern Oregon—has paid off at election time. He won a full term in November 1998 by 61%-34%. In 2004, he won easy re-election against a little known candidate 63%-32%.

In 2010, he was opposed by Lewis and Clark law professor James Huffman. After the May primary, Wyden had $3.7 million and Huffman $224,000. In a heavily Republican year, Wyden won by the reduced margin of 57%-39%. His hard work in eastern Oregon paid off when he lost there by only 51%-46%. Wyden underwent prostate surgery in December 2010, and made a quick recovery, voting on the Senate floor two days later.