Sen. Pat Roberts (R) Elected 1996, 2d term up 2008
Born:	Apr. 20, 1936, Topeka
Home:	Dodge City
Education:	KS St. U., B.A. 1958
Religion:	United Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Franki)
Elected  Office:	U.S. House of Reps., 1980-96.
Military Career:	Marine Corps, 1958-62.
Professional Career:	Co-owner, editor, The Westsider (AZ newspaper) 1962-67; A.A., U.S. Sen. Frank Carlson, 1967-68; A.A., U.S. Rep. Keith Sebelius, 1968-80.
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Pat Roberts is from a fine Kansas Republican background: His abolitionist great-grandfather founded Kansas' second-oldest newspaper, and his father, Wes Roberts, was briefly Republican National Committee chairman during the Eisenhower years. Pat Roberts has spent most of his adult life preparing for the place he is in now. After four years in the Marine Corps and five years running an Arizona newspaper, he worked for two years as an aide to Senator Frank Carlson and 12 years as chief aide to 1st District Congressman Keith Sebelius, Bob Dole's successor in the House and the father-in-law of Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius. When Sebelius retired in 1980, Roberts won the seat with 56% in a three-candidate Republican primary. For 14 years, in the minority in the House, he concentrated on farm issues, learning their intricacies and minutiae, traveling in a van to keep in touch with constituents in a district so large that it took two weeks to visit every county seat. His voting record was moderate, and he looked after Kansas interests.

In January 1995 Roberts became chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. He had long believed that the huge subsidies of the early 1980s would never return. Faced with Republican budget parameters, Roberts fashioned a Freedom to Farm bill designed to phase out subsidies over seven years. In September 1995 his bill failed in committee when Southern Republicans eager to protect cotton, rice and peanut subsidies voted against it. But in November 1995, Roberts persuaded Agriculture conferees to include most of his bill in the 1996 budget reconciliation bill, which Bill Clinton vetoed. He agreed to maintain cotton and rice marketing loans and managed to preserve the Conservation Reserve Program, which is popular in Kansas. But overall this was the biggest change in agriculture policy since the New Deal act of 1933. Roberts' new bill passed the Agriculture Committee 29-17 in January 1996, the full House in February, and became law in April. But after the Asian financial collapse in 1997, world crop prices fell and Congress started voting disaster relief to farmers every year--the subsidies in another form.

Amid this furious legislative activity, one of Kansas' Senate seats came open when Nancy Landon Kassebaum announced her retirement in November 1995. At first Roberts said he was too busy working on the farm bill and declined to run. When the bill's fortunes improved, he announced his candidacy in January 1996; the law seemed likely to remove much of the power of the committee, and under new Republican rules he was limited to three terms as chairman. He won the August primary with an overwhelming 78% in a four-way race. In the general election he faced state Treasurer Sally Thompson and won easily, 62%-34%, carrying 104 counties and losing just one (Wyandotte County, which contains Kansas City). Thus Roberts became the first House member to give up a committee chairmanship to run for the Senate since Lister Hill in 1938 (and Hill got appointed to his Senate seat).

Roberts is on the Senate Agriculture Committee and has spent much time on farm issues. The Freedom to Farm Act worked well in 1997, and farmers seemed pleased to be able to decide what crops to plant without getting government approval. But in 1998 crop prices plunged--in line with the long-run trend of falling prices for basic commodities--and some demanded a return to the old system. Roberts resisted that, and bills were passed to give temporary aid and accelerate $4.5 billion in payments and give farmers an extra $4 billion in disaster assistance. In 1999, with prices still low, federal aid to farmers totaled $23 billion including subsidies to crop insurance, CRP payments, drought relief and direct payments to make up for low world prices and world demand. In 2000 the pattern continued: Roberts argued that increased subsidies for crop insurance would mean less need for yearly assistance and argued that limiting production would not raise prices because the U.S. accounts for less than one-fifth of world production. The problem seems intractable. The number of family farmers continues to fall in places like western Kansas, where farm communities are tending to disappear, yet prices are not sufficient to maintain many operations.

The Freedom to Farm Act came up for reauthorization in 2002, and this time Roberts was not chairman of an Agriculture Committee but the fifth-ranking member of the minority. He admitted the Freedom to Farm Act "didn't work out as anybody would have hoped," and with Thad Cochran pushed for farm savings accounts: The federal government would match farmers up to $10,000 a year in their accounts, which could be drawn on when, for any reason, farm income was below average. But in committee that was rejected in favor of Chairman Tom Harkin's approach: Revival of countercyclical subsidies when crop prices are low, plus a larger conservation reserve program and inclusion of previously uncovered crops. Harkin prevailed on the Senate floor 58-40 in February 2002; Roberts wasn't even on the conference committee. "I've never seen such partisanship in a farm bill," Roberts said. "This policy fails farmers." He argued that it would provide no aid when production was low and crop prices rose, which is exactly what happened when drought struck the Great Plains in summer 2002. Roberts has tried to encourage farm exports in many ways, opposing cargo preferences, urging passage of trade promotion authority and replenishment of IMF funds. He was a lead sponsor of the 2000 law to end the embargo on food to Cuba, and he and Kansas colleague Sam Brownback sponsored the 1999 law allowing the president to lift the embargo on India and Pakistan and in 2000 sought to end food sanctions altogether. He supported PNTR with China and met with Fidel Castro in Cuba in 2000. In October 2002 he got all 100 senators to sign a letter urging the Bush administration to keep the new McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program--school lunches for the world--in the Agriculture Department, not AID.

In 1999 Roberts was named chairman of the new Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of Armed Services. He began his first hearing by saying, "I want to know what keeps you awake at night." In hearings that attracted little attention, he probed the nation's vulnerability to terrorists and predicted that targets would be "selected for their symbolic value, like the World Trade Center in the heart of Manhattan." He warned of the dangers of information and biological warfare. When he heard the news on September 11 while driving to work, he thought. "Oh, my God. It's just exactly what we predicted." He was driving in front of the Capitol when United flight 93 would have hit it if that was its intended target. In October 2001 he called for using $3.5 billion of money set aside for farm programs modernizing Agriculture Department research laboratories, to study animal diseases and plants and develop antidotes and vaccines for bioterrorism weapons and to develop rapid response procedures. He gave strong support to the Bush administration on Iraq, although after his annual listening tour of all 105 Kansas counties, he said in early September 2002 that the administration had "to be much more focused and clear" about the reasons for regime change in Iraq. He was focused and clear himself, describing Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the likelihood that he would get missiles to deliver them. In spring 2002 he asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to change the classification of Navy pilot Michael Speicher, shot down in Iraq in 1991, from Missing In Action to MIA, Captured; the Navy made the change that fall.

In January 2003 Roberts became chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and brought an approach quite different from that of his predecessors: he is an admirer of CIA Director George Tenet, while the previous Republican Chairman, Richard Shelby, was a harsh critic. Some of that difference was apparent in the hearings of the joint Senate-House Intelligence Committee hearings on intelligence failure before September 11. When former CIA counterterrorism head Cofer Black was testifying, Roberts angrily read a note from the committee staff briefing book that said, "Mr. Black will probably dissemble." He apologized to Black, and said that the joint committee was conducting "gotcha" hearings and was "a runaway train." He said committee members were not given enough access to information.

On local issues, Roberts saw to it that when B-1Bs were transferred out of McConnell Air Force Base, KC-135Rs were brought in. In 2002, for the third year in a row, Roberts was voted the funniest member in Washingtonian's annual poll of congressional staffers. "I think Kansas is where the humor comes from. Something in the chlorine."

Roberts came up for re-election in 2002. In summer 2001 former Congressman Dan Glickman, who was Bill Clinton's second Secretary of Agriculture, made the political rounds, and the DSCC said it had a poll that showed Roberts and Glickman running about even. But Glickman had had friendly relations with Roberts in their 14 years together on the House Agriculture Committee; a few days after September 11 he announced he would not run. No Democrat filed to run against Roberts and against Libertarian and Reform party candidates he got 83% of the vote.

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DC Office
109 HSOB 20510, 202-224-4774; Fax: 202-224-3514; Web site: roberts.senate.gov

State Offices
Dodge City, 620-227-2244; Overland Park,913-451-9343; Topeka,785-235-3665; Wichita,316-263-0273.

Committees

• Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry: Forestry, Conservation & Rural Revitalization; Marketing, Inspection & Product Promotion; Production & Price Competitiveness.
• Armed Services: Airland; Emerging Threats & Capabilities (Chmn.); Readiness & Management Support.
• Ethics (Select).
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions: Aging; Children & Families; Employment, Safety & Training.
• Intelligence (Select) (Chmn.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	0	20	0	0	69	88	64	100	100	85	--
2001	0	--	0	0	--	--	81	93	100	--	100

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	7%	--	86%		6%	--	90%
Social	29%	--	70%		0%	--	62%
Foreign	7%	--	72%		0%	--	76%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Expand Patients' Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform N 4. Permit ANWR Development Y 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution N  8. Overseas Military Abortions N  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court Y 10. Trade Promotion Authority Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Pat Roberts (R)	641,075	83%	$1,038,984
	Steven Rosile (Lib)	70,725	9%
	George Cook (Ref)	65,050	8%	$3,473
2002 primary	Pat Roberts (R)	233,642	84%
	Tom Oyler (R)	45,491	16%
1996 general	Pat Roberts (R)	652,677	62%	$2,305,898
	Sally Thompson (D)	362,380	34%	$659,066
	Other	37,243	4%
Prior winning percentages: 1994 House (77%); 1992 House (68%); 1990 House (63%); 1988 House (100%); 1986 House (75%); 1984 House (76%); 1982 House (68%); 1980 House (62%)