Elected 1982, seat up 2006 Born: Oct. 3, 1943, El Paso, TX Home: Santa Fe Education: Harvard U., B.A. 1965, Stanford U., LL.B. 1968 Religion: United Methodist Marital Status: married (Anne)

Career:

• Political: NM Atty. Gen., 1979-82.
• Professional: NM Asst. Atty. Gen., 1969; Practicing atty., 1970-78.
• Military: Army Reserves, 1968-74.

DC Office: 703 HSOB 20510, 202-224-5521; Fax: 202-224-2852; Web site: www.senate.gov/~bingaman

State Offices: Albuquerque, 505-346-6601; Las Cruces,505-523-6561; Las Vegas,505-454-8824; Roswell,505-622-7113; Santa Fe,505-988-6647.

Committees:

• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Readiness & Management Support; Strategic Forces.
• Energy & Natural Resources (Chmn.): Energy; National Parks; Public Lands & Forests; Water & Power.
• Finance: Health Care; Social Security & Family Policy; Taxation & IRS Oversight.
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions: Children & Families; Public Health.
• Joint Economic Committee (4th of 11 Sens.).

Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat first elected in 1982, is New Mexico's junior senator. He has a good political lineage: His father was a professor at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, and his uncle was campaign manager for longtime Senator Clinton Anderson. He graduated from Harvard and Stanford Law School, then returned to New Mexico; a year out of law school, Bingaman was counsel to the state constitutional convention; later he went into law practice in Santa Fe with former Governor Jack Campbell. Bingaman's wife, Anne, started a highly successful law practice of her own that helped finance his first campaigns; she was assistant attorney general for antitrust in the first Clinton term. In a small state, bright young people like Jeff Bingaman can rise fast. He ran for attorney general in 1978 and won; in 1982, he ran against Senator Harrison Schmitt, the former astronaut, also from Silver City, and won with 54%, partly because it was a recession year, but also because of Schmitt's misleading and negative ads.

Bingaman has followed a course in the Senate much like that of Clinton Anderson, who used his influence behind the scenes to great effect but shunned national publicity--so much so that one New Mexico magazine called him ''the invisible senator.'' He is not well known in most of Washington, but has a close relationship with Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and stays on good terms with many senators of both parties. He got seats on two committees of great importance to the state, Armed Services and Energy. On Armed Services he became a protege of Sam Nunn, who created a subcommittee tailored to his interests; in 1997, Bingaman traded his ranking position there for one on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee. From these seats Bingaman has had lots of say over New Mexico's Los Alamos and Sandia labs, which he has encouraged to enter into partnership with private firms. He sponsored a $1.6 billion defense conversion package that passed in 1992 and $100 million in seed money for regional partnerships of small technology firms. Behind the scenes he helped to get Kirtland Air Force Base off the 1995 base-closing list.

On the Energy Committee, he became the top-ranking Democrat in 1999. He supported the CARA bill in 2000 to expand spending on state environmental projects, while Domenici opposed it because it bypassed the appropriations process; it was passed in fall 2000, but scaled back from $45 billion to $12 billion and from 15 years to six years. In July 1998 he proposed spending $420 million to restock the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; he argued that the government had been selling oil to raise cash, and it made more sense to buy oil when the price was low. He sponsored the Radiation Exposure Act of 1990, to compensate uranium miners and workers; he has continued to work to see that workers with radiation-caused illnesses are compensated. In May 1999, just after the Columbine murders, he got the Senate to pass a bill to provide $10 million for a Safe School Technology Center at the Sandia Lab; in 2000 he and Domenici sponsored an amendment creating a single Joint Technology Office under terms that made it clear it would be located at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

Bingaman voted for reorganization of the Energy Department in September 1999, to take direct control of nuclear security programs from New Mexico's Bill Richardson, then Energy secretary, but said he didn't see how the new agency would improve security. On electricity deregulation, Energy Chairman Frank Murkowski in May 2000 wanted to reduce FERC jurisdiction, while Bingaman wanted to give the agency vast new powers; they could not agree on that and so combined to produce an electricity reliability bill in June 2000. In 2000 Bingaman introduced an underground pipeline safety bill, part of which was included in a bill that was one of the first to pass the new Senate in February 2001. In early 2001 Bingaman opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and sponsored an energy bill concentrating on energy conservation and more federal R&D money for solar and wind energy.

In 1997 Bingaman set out to get the government to purchase the Baca Ranch, which occupies 95,000 acres in Sandoval County in the giant bowl of the Valles Caldera, the remains of an exploded volcano that was once higher than Mount Everest. At first Domenici opposed this, but switched after Bingaman agreed that the ranch would be managed not by the Interior Department but by a board of trustees and would be maintained (and financed) as a working ranch. In 1999 and 2000 the two worked together, and the $101 million purchase was completed in July 2000. Bingaman and Domenici also worked together and, after the disastrous planned burn fire in Los Alamos in May 2000, got approval of $240 million to thin dense national forests near settled communities; they worked in early 2001 to exempt fire compensation payments from the income tax.

Bingaman's voting record is moderate to liberal, with efforts at bipartisanship. He has been creative in coming up with projects to improve education--grants for technology in schools, grants to encourage education schools to train teachers in the subjects they will teach, grants to enable low-income students to take the SAT for free, a 1997 law to discourage dropouts (the dropout rate is high in New Mexico). In early 2001 he supported the Bush education program except for vouchers, and got several of his amendments added to it--promoting anti-dropout programs, requiring poor schools to inform parents about teachers' qualifications. He sponsored a bill to pay up to $125,000 of doctors' loans, to attract specialists to states like New Mexico. His bill providing grants for fluoridation and dental sealant services to low-income area became law in October 2000. He passed a law providing $75 million for electricity for the Navajo, and sponsored the granting of Congressional Gold Medals to the 29 Navajo Code Talkers, who in World War II used their native language to send en clair messages which the Germans and Japanese could not understand.

Bingaman faced his most serious challenge in the Republican year of 1994, when Republican Colin McMillan, a rancher and former assistant Defense secretary, spent over $1 million of his own money and attacked Bingaman's vote for Clinton's 1993 tax increase and for what McMillan said was a vote to increase grazing fees. Bingaman ads boasted of his work on defense conversion, national education standards and education technology. The race tightened up in October, and Bingaman won 54%-46%, decisive but not overwhelming. In 2000 he faced former Congressman Bill Redmond, who won the heavily Democratic 3rd District in a special election in 1997 and then lost to Tom Udall in 1998. Redmond, a former minister with working class roots, called for tax cuts and charged that Bingaman should have worked for forest-thinning earlier. Bingaman talked about bringing high-wage jobs to the state, improving education and expanding access to health care. And people heard more of what Bingaman was saying: he spent $2.56 million, Redmond only $639,000. Bingaman had wide leads in the polls, and won 62%-38% on election day; he lost only six counties and ran 14% ahead of Al Gore, who after all managed, barely, to carry the state.

In January 2001 Bingaman gave up his long-held seat on Armed Services for one on Finance.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	85	71	85	71	46	97	15	64	16	6	15
1999	100	--	100	67	18	--	9	59	4	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	63%	--	36%		66%	--	33%
Social	75%	--	20%		66%	--	21%
Foreign	62%	--	29%		72%	--	15%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. N 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit Y 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards N 4. Phase Out Estate Tax N 5. Review Movie Violence N 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks Y		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion	N
8. Broaden Hate Crimes List	Y
9. NATO War in Serbia	N
10. Table Cuba Travel Ban	N
11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty	Y
12. Perm. Trade with China	Y

Election Results
2000 general	Jeff Bingaman (D)	363,744	(62%)
	Bill Redmond (R)	225,517	(38%)
2000 primary	Jeff Bingaman (D)	unopposed
1994 general	Jeff Bingaman (D)	249,989	(54%)
	Colin R. McMillan (R)	213,025	(46%)

Campaign Finance
2000	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
Jeff Bingaman (D)	$2,730,680	$1,192,335	$2,568,649
Bill Redmond (R)	$645,772	$75,409	$639,424