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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Pat Roberts is from a fine Kansas Republican background. His abolitionist great-grandfather "arrived in Kansas with a flat-bed press, a six-gun and a Bible" and founded Kansas' second-oldest newspaper, the Oskaloosa Independent, 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 in November 1995 Nancy Landon Kassebaum announced her retirement. 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%. 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 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 normal trade relations with China and met with Fidel Castro in Cuba in 2000. In November 2003 he was promoting conservation tillage, or no-till farming, which leaves more carbon in the ground and could qualify farmers for credits if carbon trading were used. "The Kansas prairie is a great big carbon sponge. If you pay farmers to maintain these conservation projects, you'd be able to clean up the environment." In September 2004 he said that Brazil's cotton complaint to the WTO was "the most serious, full-frontal assault on the U.S. farm program in our history." In January 2005 he let the less senior Saxby Chambliss became chairman of Agriculture so he could keep the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee; the farm bill does not come up for reauthorization until 2007. 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. He gave strong support to the Bush administration on Iraq. In January 2003 Roberts became chairman of the Intelligence Committee. There were signs of increasing partisanship there; in October 2002 ranking Democrat Jay Rockefeller had said that if Democrats were to regain their majority he would diminish the entire traditionally bipartisan staff and replace them with partisan appointees. Roberts started off favorably disposed toward CIA Director George Tenet and in summer 2003 resisted Democratic calls for investigation of how administration officials used intelligence on Iraq and for declassification of the 28 pages of the White House report which were classified. In November Fox News's Sean Hannity obtained a memo prepared by Democratic committee staffers saying that in the hearings on pre-March 2003 Iraq intelligence they should "pull the majority along" on getting information out and then in early 2004 should "pull the trigger" and use it to attack the Bush administration. Majority Leader Bill Frist demanded an apology on behalf of Roberts and the committee's weekly meeting was cancelled. Rockefeller tried to mend relations, but refused to apologize; the next day he said he was "profoundly surprised" by a November 13 opinion article in The Washington Post written by Roberts. "The Democrats planned to undermine the integrity of the committee by conducting a partisan attack, which threatens to destroy the credibility of an institution that has served the U.S. Senate and the nation well for nearly 30 years. I oppose them, and for this I make no apologies," Roberts wrote. Roberts said that there would be a meeting on the intelligence authorization and that hearings would go on in 2004. In January 2004 the Senate and House Intelligence Committee reported that the CIA did not seriously consider the possibility that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Roberts said, "It was like a runaway train. Once it left the station, it kept going faster and faster. Some analysts may have been trying to slow it down, but it just kept going." In April 2004 Roberts proposed that the Intelligence Committee take over from Armed Services oversight of Defense Department intelligence operations. "You're rolling a pin-free grenade down the halls of the Pentagon," he conceded; the proposal was resisted. After the 9/11 Commission recommended changes in intelligence organizations, including a new national intelligence director, Roberts and committee Republicans came up with their own proposal, to abolish the CIA and arrange its functions in three component organizations under a new national intelligence director. The CIA opposed this; the White House had not been informed, and was frosty to the idea; John Kerry mentioned the proposal favorably; the 9/11 Commission was neutral. But soon thereafter there was bipartisan agreement in the Senate on the proposal made by the Governmental Affairs Committee's Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman; it was not entirely accepted in conference committee with the House. Roberts's verdict: "It is no secret that I believe we should have gone farther. What it fails to do is to create a leader of the intelligence community who is clearly in charge and as a result is fully accountable." Roberts supported the nomination in summer 2004 of his House counterpart, Porter Goss, to be the new CIA Director; he turned down the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee in January 2005 to remain chairman of Intelligence. In 2004, for the fourth time, Roberts was voted the funniest senator in Washingtonian's biennial 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. No Democrat filed to run against Roberts and against Libertarian and Reform party candidates he won 83% of the vote.
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