Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) Elected 1974, 5th term up 2004
Born:	Mar. 31, 1940, Montpelier
Home:	Burlington
Education:	St. Michael's Col., B.A. 1961, Georgetown U., J.D. 1964
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Marcelle)
Elected  Office:	VT St. Atty., Chittenden Cnty., 1966-74.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1964-74.
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Patrick Leahy, the only Democrat ever elected to the Senate in Vermont, has held public office for most of his adult life. He grew up in Burlington, went to Georgetown law school, then returned home to Burlington to practice law. He was elected Chittenden County state's attorney in 1966, at 26, and, after eight years in that post--and few public officials are scrutinized as closely as a local prosecutor--he was elected to the U.S. Senate at 34. If he is reelected in 2004, he will be set to become the longest-serving senator in Vermont history; his predecessor George Aiken served 33 years.

Leahy is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and served as Chairman from June 2001 to January 2003. He was also formerly chairman of the Agriculture Committee. Judiciary handles many of the cultural issues which polarize the two parties and their constituencies--issues like gun control and abortion--and the committee has been sharply polarized at least since the hearings on the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. This was certainly true in the 1990s when Republicans were in the majority. Then, Leahy criticized Republicans for holding up Bill Clinton's judicial appointments and stoutly defended Clinton on impeachment. When Leahy became chairman, he began to hold up judicial nominations himself, as Republicans had done in the past. Most appointments to district court judgeships were approved, but very many nominated in May 2001 and later to the federal courts of appeals did not even get hearings until the end of the 2002 session. By April 2002, Leahy drew criticism as a "champion nomination squelcher," for confirming only 9 of 30 Bush nominees to that point. But at the conclusion of the 107th Congress, Leahy reported that 100 White House judicial nominees had been confirmed since the change in majority; he announced that this record compared favorably to the 38 judicial confirmations averaged per year during the six-and-a-half years of a Republican Senate majority. The committee, however, rejected on party-line votes two appointees to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Charles Pickering and Priscilla Owen. Leahy even demanded from one nominee the memos he had written while working in the office of the solicitor general during the Clinton administration--something never before sought, and a demand denounced by all former solicitors general in administrations of both parties and by The Washington Post. Republicans complained that Leahy and the other Democrats were following the lead and, in some cases, the script of lobbyists Ralph Neas and Nan Aron. With Republicans in the majority again, Leahy and his allies will have much less leverage, but they will probably try to make cases against some appointees that they hope will win a few Republican votes. They will surely scrutinize very closely and very hostilely any appointments to the United States Supreme Court.

Judiciary had jurisdiction over much of the antiterrorism legislation brought forward after September 11. Leahy approached the task with some concern lest federal powers override individual rights. He and his staff worked with the Bush administration to hammer out the planks in the USA Patriot Act; it was essentially the Senate version, not the House version, which was passed in October 2001. It authorized roving wiretaps (to cover the target's cell phones and wireless communications devices as well as his home phone), imposed tougher penalties for terrorism, provided for tighter security on the U.S.-Canada border and toughened the laws against money laundering. But Leahy also criticized some of the Bush administration's actions and proposals. He opposed the administration's first proposal for broader powers to detain and deport immigrants suspected of terrorism without presenting evidence in court. Leahy was angry when the committee was not consulted on the administration's proposal to establish military tribunals (they would be administered by the Defense Department, not Justice) and in December 2001, demanded that Ashcroft explain and defend the administration's assertion of police, detention and prosecutorial powers. In August 2002, he disclosed the May 2002 decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act trial court that declared that FBI agents had lied to the court in applying for 75 warrants (almost all of this was during the Clinton administration). In September 2002, he said Justice should be required to disclose the number of U.S. citizens being spied on, the number of secret foreign intelligence wiretaps that had become part of criminal proceedings and the total number of persons targeted by foreign intelligence surveillance warrants; and he pointed out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has a sunset date--an implicit threat to hold up its reauthorization.

Amid the publicity about corporate wrongdoing by Enron and others, Leahy in July 2002 fashioned criminal penalties for violations of the disclosure provisions of what became the Sarbanes-Oxley financial disclosure act. Appearing with former Death Row inmates who were exonerated, he sought to provide DNA testing for death row inmates who challenge their convictions. He has sought to legalize the presence in the U.S. of Haitian and Central American refugees living here for many years.

Leahy is a gadgeteer and fine amateur photographer, and he was one of the first senators to go online; he has worked on various bills that affect high-tech and telecommunications. He co-sponsored with Orrin Hatch the Digital Millennium Copyright law, passed to comply with the WIPO treaty, and with Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the law making the theft of personal identification information a crime. After considerable negotiation, he worked out an e-signature bill which passed the Senate unanimously, setting a national framework for giving on-line signatures legal status; it allowed consumers to agree to electronically signed contracts and consent to receiving records, while businesses had to verify electronic addresses.

Another Leahy cause has been the elimination of land mines. Since 1989, he has been crusading against the export and use of landmines, which are easy and cheap to implant yet difficult and expensive to remove, and which injure thousands of civilians long after hostilities have ended. In 1994, he got the United Nations to approve unanimously their eventual elimination. In 1997, he and Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel moved to support the treaty ban worked out in Ottawa, but the Clinton administration, worried especially about U.S. forces in Korea, refused to support a total ban. Leahy continues to work to aid land mine victims and to deactivate the thousands of land mines still active in many parts of the world and to find alternatives for them. On foreign and defense issues, he tends to stand to the left of the Senate: He was one of three senators to vote against authorization of missile defense in March 1999 and has called for an end to the ban on travel to Cuba.

Leahy is the only member on the Agriculture Committee not from a state with heavily subsidized crops like wheat, corn, soybeans or cotton; from his lead position, he worked with Richard Lugar in the 1990s to phase out the old subsidy system. Their great success was the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, but soon crop prices fell and Congress took to voting huge annual subsidies in the form of emergency relief; the 2002 farm bill largely rolled back the 1996 act. In that act, Leahy shaped the bill's conservation provisions to establish the Northeast Dairy Compact, to set milk prices in the six New England states; the Compact, however, expired in September 2001. As Congress moved back to subsidize the long-protected crops, Leahy helped to establish an Eggplant Caucus to represent the interests of Eastern farmers who produce specialty crops; he worked to get money for conservation grants, environmental initiatives and transition to organic farming for such farmers.

Leahy serves on Appropriations and has procured funding for Vermont projects--$3 million for the Lake Champlain Basin Science Center, $4 million for Waterbury dam repairs, $3.7 million for Missisquoi Bay Bridge repairs, $1.5 million for downtown Winooski revitalization (Winooski is the most densely populated city in the state). After the education act was signed into law in January 2002, Leahy and Jeffords co-sponsored a bill to undercut one of its main features by allowing states and school districts to opt out of national student testing requirements.

Leahy is a strong partisan who usually expresses himself in a quiet, thoughtful way and sometimes with a puckish sense of humor, part of the Yankee heritage of Vermont, though his Irish and Italian ethnic origin is not standard Yankee. He is a Batman buff who had a bit part in the movie Batman and Robin. His standing in Vermont has been strong over the years: He narrowly survived the Republican sweep in 1980 and beat popular Governor Richard Snelling 63%-35% in 1986. In anti-incumbent 1992, his opponent was Jim Douglas, then state treasurer and now governor. He attacked Leahy for voting for the congressional pay raise and for the loss of dairy jobs; Leahy won 54%-43%--a decisive margin, but no landslide. In 1998, he had an easier time. The favorite for the Republican nomination, a Massachusetts businessman who had moved to Bennington to run, was upset 55%-45% by 77-year-old dairy farmer Fred Tuttle, the star of a 1996 documentary A Man with a Plan in which he is shown running for Congress. In October 1998, when the film aired on PBS, Leahy had dinner at the Tuttles' home and contrasted this contest with the negative campaigns being waged elsewhere. Leahy won 72%-22%.

Leahy comes up for reelection in 2004, and in a Vermont that has been increasingly Democratic in national politics, he is considered a strong favorite to win. In summer 2002, there were reports that former Governor Thomas Salmon might challenge him in the Democratic primary. Salmon had declined to run for the seat in 1974 because he was in only his second year as governor, and evidently the thought has struck him that if he had pushed aside Leahy, then only a state's attorney, he and not Leahy would have been elected to serve 30 years in the Senate. But that musing seems unlikely to persuade many Vermont Democrats to oust one of the national leaders of their party. Nor does it seem likely that Douglas, after two years as governor, will choose to run against Leahy again.

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DC Office
433 RSOB 20510, 202-224-4242; Web site: leahy.senate.gov

State Offices
Burlington, 802-863-2525; Montpelier,802-229-0569.

Committees

• Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry: Forestry, Conservation & Rural Revitalization; Research, Nutrition & General Legislation (RMM).
• Appropriations: Commerce, Justice, State & Judiciary; Defense; Foreign Operations (RMM); Homeland Security; Interior; VA, HUD & Independent Agencies.
• Judiciary (RMM): Administrative Oversight & the Courts; Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights; Immigration, Border Security & Citizenship.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	95	60	100	94	16	50	14	55	0	3	--
2001	100	--	100	100	--	--	8	38	8	--	0

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	92%	--	8%		80%	--	15%
Social	70%	--	20%		82%	--	0%
Foreign	87%	--	3%		96%	--	0%
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 N 2. Expand Patients' Rights Y 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Permit ANWR Development N 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG N 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts N		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution Y  8. Overseas Military Abortions Y  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court N 10. Trade Promotion Authority N 11. Authorize Force in Iraq N 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
1998 general	Patrick Leahy (D)	154,567	72%	$1,014,751
	Fred H. Tuttle (R)	48,051	22%
	Other	11,418	5%
1998 primary	Patrick Leahy (D)	18,643	97%
	Other	647	3%
1992 general	Patrick Leahy (D)	154,762	54%	$1,202,445
	Jim Douglas (R)	123,854	43%	$195,737
	Other	7,123	2%
Prior winning percentages: 1986 (63%); 1980 (50%); 1974 (50%)