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Alaska: Senior Senator Sen. Ted Stevens (R) Last Updated July 8, 2003
No other senator fills so central a place in his state's public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska; quite possibly no other senator ever has. "They sent me here," Stevens said in one impassioned debate, "to stand up for the state of Alaska." Stevens is now President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and thus third in line for the presidency. He is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and of its Defense subcommittee; he has also been for two decades the leading public policymaker for and about Alaska. He is a major economic asset for Alaska, because the capitalized value of the money he brings into the state every year would range into the billions. "We ask for special consideration," Stevens is not too shy to say, "because no one else is that far away, no one else has the problems that we have or the potential that we have, and no one else deals with the federal government day in and day out the way we do." Probably more than any other senator, Stevens has shaped the public institutions and private economy of his state. He has had plenty of training. Stevens grew up in Indiana and California in very modest surroundings, served in World War II flying C-46s and C-47s, graduated from UCLA and Harvard Law, then moved to Alaska in 1950, driving up the Alaska Highway with his new bride. He was U.S. attorney in Fairbanks and worked in the Interior Department in Washington. In 1962, he ran for the Senate and lost to Democrat Ernest Gruening by a 58-42% margin. He then served in the legislature in Juneau and was appointed to the Senate by Governor Walter Hickel in December 1968, at 45. He quickly gained a seat on Appropriations and worked on Alaska issues of all description. He has not been entirely successful. He could not stop the Alaska Lands Act in 1980 and could not win approval of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling in 1991 or 1995 or 2002. But he played a major role on the Native Claims Act in 1971 and got the oil pipeline through by one vote in 1973. In 1995, he and Frank Murkowski finally secured the repeal of the 1977 law forbidding exports of Alaskan oil, thus opening up the obvious East Asian markets. When he succeeded Mark Hatfield as chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 1997, Stevens told colleagues, "Senator Hatfield had the patience of Job and the disposition of a saint. I don't. The watch has changed. I'm a mean, miserable SOB." But if he is terrible-tempered (or wants others to think so), he is also hard-working. And while he chafed under the spending limits set by Senate budget resolutions and by Bush OMB director Mitch Daniels, he has generally, if grudgingly, observed them--though in October 2001, he did get Daniels's $679 billion spending limit for FY2002 stretched to $686 billion. Stevens works closely with his fellow appropriators--West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, House Republican Bill Young and House Democrat David Obey--to reach consensus decisions on overall spending limits and specific bills. Amid these negotiations there was a flash of the Stevens temper: He threatened to hold up the defense appropriation after George W. Bush limited classified military and investigative briefings to the eight members in the leadership and the head of the Intelligence committees. In late 2002, he complained about the $749 billion spending limit imposed by Daniels; since 11 of the 13 appropriations were not passed in the 107th Congress, the struggle carried over to the 108th. As chairman of the Defense subcommittee, Stevens has generally supported robust defense spending and has been an advocate of missile defense. He works in tandem with Hawaii's Daniel Inouye; these two senators from America's two offshore states, both decorated World War II veterans, have held the chairmanship or ranking minority positions on this subcommittee since 1989. He works hard to fund the National Guard, to raise military salaries and to keep troops in readiness. When House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Lewis moved to cut off the F-22 jet fighter, Stevens was its great champion and produced a compromise that allowed development to proceed if the jet could pass flight tests. Since he became Appropriations chairman, Alaskans have started referring matter-of-factly to "Stevens money" for projects he has been able to fund. Stevens sees his work in a broader context: "Congress has not awakened to the fact that we've got a state with one-fifth the land in this country. My mission is to try to make Congress understand that the promise of statehood is that we should have the ability to establish a workable private-enterprise economy in the areas of Alaska that want it. And that's basically 90% of the state." His prowess is legendary. In 1998, Stevens sought a land trade for a seven-mile road through the Izembeck National Wildlife Refuge--which the Clinton Interior Department wanted to declare off-limits--so that the tiny Aleutian village of King Cove would have access to medical facilities. The administration offered three alternatives; Stevens took all three: $37.7 million for an airport road, medical clinic and doctor and nurse. In 1998, he also succeeded in setting up the Denali Commission (Denali is the Native name of Mount McKinley), which funds infrastructure projects--water and sewer, electricity--in central Alaska, to the tune of $38 million in 2001, $45 million in 2002 and $48 million in 2003. In 2002, Stevens put into appropriations bills what his staff termed a small amount of $115 million for Alaska projects that saw their way to passage in early 2003. They included $11 million to build an Indian health service clinic in St. Paul, $6 million to prevent wildfires in Anchorage and Matanuska-Susitna, $4 million for Alaska's telemedicine program (a longtime Stevens project), $2 million to develop steel technologies for an Alaska natural gas pipeline, $1 million to study coal-bed methane in Alaska, $1 million for North Slope eider duck recovery and the Alaska Sealife Center, $2 million for a land transfer for the Kake tribal council, $3 million for a Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge visitor center, $5 million for volcano monitoring, $1 million for foam-containing devices that can be dragged behind four-wheelers or snowmobiles to fight fires in rural Alaska, $575,000 for seabird bycatch reduction, $500,000 for sonar fish counters, $100,000 to study the feasibility of a causeway to Fire Island, $1 million for dredging in Cook Inlet, $3.3 million to buy land for the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, $4 million for a Coast Guard dock in Cordova. When a Stevens aide read an Anchorage Daily News article about a volunteer group that had raised $6,000 to promote a string of public-use huts linked by hiking trails, she showed it to Stevens. He thought it was a good idea and, without consulting the group, put in $500,000 for a backcountry hut network at Snow River near Seward. "That's crazy!" exulted the group's vice president. "There's, like, tears in my eyes." It could be argued that Stevens is less a legislator than he is a philanthropist in the mode of John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, although of course he is not spending his own money. Citizens Against Government Waste has constantly attacked Stevens and says that Alaska is the number one state in "pork per capita." They singled out for criticism grants of $1 million for a dust abatement study in Kotzebue, $2.25 million for winter recreation opportunities at a recreation area in Fairbanks, $990,000 for an adult day care center in Anchorage, $1 million each to Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow. Stevens, however, is unapologetic. When asked by an Anchorage Daily News reporter how Alaska had made out in the 2001 defense appropriation, Stevens replied, "Like a bandit." Even his critics must concede that he does not shovel money into projects willy-nilly; his knowledge of detail is astonishing, and he is prepared to defend every single project on the merits. Issues involving tiny villages or just a few fishermen get his attention. Stevens has worked tirelessly to help Alaska Natives, who vote heavily Democratic in most elections. They have voted overwhelmingly for Stevens in recent elections, but he could win without their support easily. He skillfully elicits consensus with Native leaders when opinion is divided, getting more health and sanitation aid to bush villages and funding for health research on fetal alcohol syndrome and cancers common among Natives, and to allow the CIRI Native corporation to raise capital by reselling its wireless licenses earlier than allowed under FCC small business rules. He steers something like $500 million a year to Native organizations and passed a bill to allow Native contractors to win lucrative sole-source federal contracts. At the same time, Stevens is not uncritical of Native leaders. In October 2002, he urged the Alaska Federation of Natives not to funnel their requests for federal money through the 229 individual village-based tribes granted official status by the Clinton administration, but to consolidate federal requests so that "the very, very poor communities that don't have that ability to hire consultants, to hire grantsmen, people to write applications," get assistance. After surgery for prostate cancer in 1991, Stevens pushed for more funding for breast, cervical and prostate cancer research, plus telemedicine projects to connect rural Alaskans to hospitals and specialists. He is a big booster of exercise and physical education programs; he says he saw value of exercise as he looked over his classmates at his 50th reunion at Harvard Law School. He supports the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Alaska's public TV and radio stations have the nation's largest audience shares. And, with the large government work force in high-cost Alaska, he supports increased salaries and benefits for federal workers and argues volubly for higher salaries for senators and Senate staffers. Stevens's work has not gone unappreciated. In January 2000, he was named Alaskan of the Century. In July 2000, Anchorage Airport was named the Ted Stevens International Airport and the Challenger Center in Kenai became the Ted and Catherine Stevens Center for Space Science Technology. Stevens has been re-elected easily. His toughest competition recently came in the August 1996 primary when a banker and former legislator spent $1.3 million of his own money and charged that Stevens was insufficiently conservative. Stevens won 59%-27%. The Democratic nominee that fall, former Anchorage school board member Theresa Obermeyer, blamed Stevens for her husband's failure to pass the Alaska bar on 22 separate tries; she sometimes wore black-and-white prisoner stripes and a ball-and-chain to his public events. Democratic Governor Tony Knowles announced he was voting for Stevens, who won 77%. In 2002, Stevens raised $2.4 million and said, "I'm going to run like there is someone there." There wasn't. Obermeyer lost the Democratic primary to Frank Vondersaar, a denizen of the hip town of Homer, who said that Stevens is part of a government conspiracy to keep him under constant surveillance. He was reelected by a 78%-11% margin, carrying all but three precincts. He campaigned actively for his 22-year colleague Frank Murkowski's successful candidacy for governor. In the 108th Congress, he will have to shoulder the work Murkowski did in the 107th, when he unsuccessfully sought permission for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In April 2002, when Murkowski was able to get only 46 votes against cloture on the issue, Stevens called it "a severe defeat," and declined to offer compromises aimed at making oil drilling more acceptable to opponents. On this issue he will have the support of the Bush administration, but will face filibuster threats from Democrats who are thinking of running for president and who seek support from environmental restriction groups-- for whom opposition to ANWR is a great asset in the direct-mail fundraising. Stevens has said that his own number one goal is approval of a natural gas pipeline in Alaska--a provision that Murkowski got into the energy bill, which did not pass--and that his number two goal is funding projects in Alaska. For that he will still have the Appropriations chairmanship. Senate Republicans decided not to count the five months Stevens served as chairman from January to May 2001 under their six-year term limit on chairmanships, and so Stevens will have another two years in which to shower Stevens money on the people of Alaska.
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