National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
|
Last Updated June 22, 2005
Jon Kyl, Arizona's junior senator, was first elected to the House in 1986 and to the Senate in 1994. His father John Kyl was a Republican congressman from Iowa (1959-65, 1967-73), who eventually lost his seat in reapportionment; Jon Kyl moved to a state that, in effect, was gaining the Republican seats that Great Plains states like Iowa were losing. Kyl went to college and law school in Arizona, practiced law in Phoenix, worked on Republican campaigns and headed the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce; he won the heavily Republican 4th District seat in 1986 by beating former (1973-77) Congressman John Conlan, who had support from the religious right, 60%-28%. In the House, Kyl was a leader among Republicans on missile defense, the balanced budget amendment, and for disclosing the names of House members with overdrafts on the House bank--one of the causes that destabilized Democrats' control of the House in the years running up to 1994. By that time, Kyl was running for the Senate seat held for three terms by Democrat Dennis DeConcini, whose reputation was stained by his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. Kyl had no primary opposition and the further good fortune that one-term Congressman Sam Coppersmith won the September 13 Democratic primary by only 59 votes of 255,000 cast after a two-week recount. Kyl, with far more money, ran ads with home movie texture showing him traveling through the desert countryside, dressed in jeans and working on ranches, while talking about how he and his wife first fell in love with the state (he has climbed Camelback Mountain "more than 1,000 times"). Coppersmith stressed his support for abortion rights and said he would welcome a campaign visit from Bill Clinton. Kyl won easily, 54%-40%. Kyl has a solidly conservative voting record. Quietly, he has become a major force on defense policy. He is perhaps the Senate's biggest champion of a missile defense system. A 1996 speech he made in Europe on the future of NATO impressed Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, who accepted his invitation to a conference at the Arizona Biltmore. In 1997 he led, with Jesse Helms, the losing fight against the Chemical Weapons Convention. Learning from that experience, he organized the winning fight to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, submitted by Bill Clinton to the Senate in September 1997. Starting in 1998, Kyl studied the details and worked to persuade Republican colleagues to oppose the treaty. In May 1999 he told Majority Leader Trent Lott that he had 34 solid votes against, enough to prevent ratification, but Helms, the Foreign Relations chairman, insisted that Kyl get more before he would let the treaty come to the floor. All 45 Democrats, unaware in the increasingly partisan Senate of Kyl's efforts, wrote Helms in July demanding the treaty be brought forward by September. Helms replied dismissively that he would not do so until he got action on the Kyoto treaty and amendments to the ABM treaty. In September North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan promised to "plant myself on the floor like a potted plant" until the CTBT was considered. The ranking Foreign Relations Democrat still thought that 25 Republicans could be persuaded to vote for the treaty, and concurred when Lott promised to bring it up in October. Only then did Senate Democrats and the Clinton White House begin to discover that they had conspired to defeat their own treaty. Kyl had done his work well: The CTBT did not even get a majority, much less the required two-thirds, as it was defeated 48-51. "Our success," Kyl said, "depended on being quiet about what we did." Kyl continues to press forward on missile defense. He urged George W. Bush to abrogate the treaty, and when Senate Democrats on the Armed Services Committee tried to cut missile defense funds in May 2002 he was quick to respond, pointing out that Iran had just successfully tested an 800-mile-range missile. Kyl strongly supported the Bush administration on Afghanistan and Iraq. When Edward Kennedy attacked Bush in March 2004 for misusing intelligence on Iraq, Kyl replied, "The reality is, no one was duped. We were all working off the same data. Reasonable people reached different conclusions about what to do based on a commonly understood set of facts. There was nothing devious about that. One need not veer off into conspiracy theories to explain honest differences of opinion about policies." On Judiciary Kyl ranks behind Chairman Arlen Specter, former Chairman Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassley in seniority and is chairman of the Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security Subcommittee. Before September 11 he and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein co-sponsored a bill to prepare defenses for attacks by terrorists with chemical and biological weapons, and in November 2001 they introduced a bill to establish a comprehensive lookout database, which would combine information from the CIA, the FBI and the State Department and make it available to border and consular personnel. In 2003 and 2004 the subcommittee held extensive hearings on border security, narcoterrorism, database security, domestic terrorist recruitment and the influence of Wahhabism. In 2004 Kyl's bill passed the Senate to include terrorists not known to be affiliated with a group in the Patriot Act, and he held hearings on other potential changes in the law. He has pointed out how lax State Department visa policies--notably the Visa Express program in Saudi Arabia, which delegated visa issuance to travel agents--enabled most of the September 11 hijackers to enter the country and how the State Department resisted any tightening of procedures. On other Judiciary issues, Kyl has worked to beef up the Border Patrol and to track legal immigrants who overstay their visas. He also has worked for more federal reimbursement of states and localities for the costs of hospitalizing and incarcerating illegal aliens. He offered amendments to the DNA bill to allow law enforcement access to DNA samples voluntarily submitted by convicts and to allow into the national database DNA samples of those acquitted or arrested but never charged. In November 2004, when cultural conservative groups tried to block Specter from becoming Judiciary chairman, Kyl, who was next in line, avoided public comment. Water is one of the most sensitive issues in Arizona. For years Kyl worked, mostly behind the scenes, on settling Indian claims to Colorado and Gila River water and the dispute between the federal government and the state of Arizona of how much the state must pay the feds for the Central Arizona Project, completed in 1993 at a cost of $3.6 billion. The stakeholders were many and the stakes were huge; some of the litigation had been ongoing for 20 years. With John McCain as co-sponsor and with the support of the entire Arizona House delegation, Kyl succeeded in passing the Arizona Water Settlement Act in 2004. It settled Indian lawsuits against Arizona and New Mexico and set Arizona's reimbursement to the federal government at $1.65 billion. It allocated 47% of the state's Colorado River water to Indian tribes, notably the Gila River Indian Community and the Tohono O'odham Nation, who could lease it to cities in Arizona. This was the most far-reaching Indian water settlement in history. Kyl is not an active seeker of publicity, and is far less well known in Arizona and Washington than his colleague McCain. He is pleasant and unassuming, but can surprise: He is a big fan of race cars and has been seen driving the lead car around the track in a warm-up lap at the Phoenix International Raceway. He became the chairman of the Republican Steering Committee in 2001 and, moving up in the leadership, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee in 2003. In June 2000 Kyl was interviewed as a possible vice presidential nominee by Dick Cheney, whom he had chosen as a kind of model when he came to the House, but he ultimately recommended against his own selection. Kyl had no difficulty winning reelection in 2000: No Democrat filed to run against him and he won 79% of the vote against an Independent, a Green Party candidate and a Libertarian. When he first ran for the Senate in 1994, he said he would probably serve only two terms, and in July 2001 he said, "It was my intention then, and it's probably still my intention, although I'm not going to make any decisions for another three or four years." But he held a fundraiser with Rudy Giuliani in February 2005 and Bill Frist in March. He had $2.5 million in his Senate campaign account and seemed to be as active as ever. One Democrat positioning himself as a candidate was real estate developer and state Democratic Chairman Jim Pederson, who spent $1.8 million of his own money on rebuilding the party in 2003 and 2004; the results were disappointing, as the Democrats failed to make Arizona competitive in the presidential race and made no significant gains in legislative races. If Kyl does not run, possible Republican candidates include Congressmen Jeff Flake, John Shadegg and J. D. Hayworth.
Committees
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NEW FEATURE
[ Site Index | Staff | Privacy Policy | E-Mail Alerts ]
[ Reprints And Back Issues | Content Licensing ]
[ Make NationalJournal.com Your Homepage ]
[ About National Journal Group Inc. ]
[ Employment Opportunities ]
Copyright 2013 by National Journal Group Inc.
The Watergate · 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069
NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
