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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania's junior senator, was first elected to the House in 1990 and to the Senate in 1994. Santorum is the son of an Italian immigrant who was a clinical psychologist for the Veterans' Administration; he was born in Virginia and moved to Butler, Pennsylvania, at age 7. He started in politics working for John Heinz's first Senate campaign in 1976; he graduated from Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh business school and worked his way through Dickinson law school as a staffer for state Senate Republicans in Harrisburg; he worked for a blue chip law firm in Pittsburgh for four years. In 1990, at 32, he challenged seven-term incumbent Congressman Doug Walgren, who outspent him $717,000 to $251,000. Santorum knocked on 25,000 doors, amassed an army of volunteers including many right-to-lifers, attacked Walgren for voting for a pay raise seven times and for living in the Washington suburbs. Santorum opposed the congressional pay raise, backed the line-item veto and came out for limits on PAC contributions. He won 51%-49%. In the House he had a solid conservative voting record and was one of the ''Gang of Seven'' freshman Republicans who helped expose the House bank scandal. Redistricting gave him a seat shorn of many Republican suburbs and centered on the industrial Monongahela Valley, historically very Democratic. Santorum beat a state senator 61%-38%--an astonishing victory. Brash and confident, Santorum immediately started running for the Senate. His opponent was Harris Wofford, appointed in May 1991 to replace John Heinz after his death in a plane crash, and subsequently elected in a November 1991 special election upset win over former Governor Dick Thornburgh 55%-45%. Wofford won the special election by emphasizing health care; he was politically hurt when the Clinton health care bill failed to pass. This was a race of sharp contrasts in issues and style: Santorum, brashly eager to chop government, backing medical savings accounts and opposing gun control; Wofford, a former civil rights activist, earnestly working for government health care financing, backing the 1994 crime bill and gun control. Wofford appealed to a long liberal tradition; Santorum scoffed at him for championing 1960s ideas in the 1990s. Santorum won 49%-47%. Santorum was not cowed by the traditions of the Senate. In his first full month there he argued about the balanced budget amendment with Robert Byrd, who was first elected to the Senate the year Santorum was born. Then, when senior Republican Mark Hatfield cast a decisive vote against the amendment, Santorum called on Hatfield to be removed as Appropriations chairman. Senior senators and Washington insiders tut-tutted. Hatfield wasn't removed, but Senate Republicans changed the rules, limiting chairmen to six years and calling for secret ballot elections of chairmen starting in 1997. Later in 1995 Santorum took to the floor a dozen times with a ''Where's Bill?'' sign, asking where the Bill Clinton's balanced budget was; Democrats were furious. Santorum's voting record remains one of the most conservative in the Senate, but he is not quite so brash anymore. After the 2000 election he was elected chairman of the Republican Conference, the number three position in the leadership, in charge of communicating Senate Republicans' message. He has taken the lead on important legislation, and on occasion at some political risk. Santorum floor-managed the welfare bill to passage three times in 1995 and 1996; the first two times it was vetoed by Clinton, but in August 1996, 13 weeks before the election, Clinton signed it. Santorum has also taken the lead on the partial birth abortion ban. It was vetoed twice by Clinton; in March 2003, Santorum introduced the measure one again and it passed the Senate 64-33; it passed the House and was signed into law. This was not just a theoretical issue for him: In 1996 he and his wife had to decide what to do when their unborn child had a fatal defect; the baby was born in October 1996 and died two hours later. The 1996 welfare bill contained a provision allowing more leeway for faith-based organizations to get government money to provide social services. Some use of this was made by the Clinton administration, and George W. Bush mentioned faith-based services frequently in his 2000 campaign. As president, Bush issued an executive order allowing more grants to faith-based organizations and called for Congress to pass legislation providing tax deductions and credits to strengthen such groups. This proved to be a rocky process, in which Santorum and Joe Lieberman took the lead role in the Senate. The House passed a bill in July 2001 with expanded block grants, tax breaks and a provision exempting faith-based organizations from state anti-discrimination laws, similar to that in the 1996 welfare act; some organizations want to hire members of their own faith and some refuse to hire homosexuals. In February 2002 Santorum and Lieberman introduced their bill, expanded block grants to states for child care and family welfare, providing a charitable deduction of $800 to couples who take the standard deduction, tax breaks for corporations who give money to charities, and tax deductions to banks which match individual development accounts set by low-income people for their education or starting a business. The Finance Committee passed a pared-down version in June 2002, without the corporate tax breaks. But Santorum was unable to get the measure to the floor, and in 2003 objections to the anti-discrimination clause prevented the legislation from going forward in the form he wanted. As Republican Conference chairman, Santorum has worked aggressively to develop a unified voice for the party and to get Republican senators in touch with constituencies they have previously not had much to do with. One project has been to increase the number of Republicans hired to run business lobbies. Since the days of the New Deal, most Washington lobbyists have been Democrats, a natural development given that the Democrats held the White House from 1932 to 1952 and for most of the years from 1960 to 1980 and had majorities in the House and, except for six years, in the Senate from 1954 to 1994. In December 2002 Santorum was one of the staunchest defenders, in public and in private, of Majority Leader Trent Lott after his comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party December 5. But support for Lott crumbled and it was clear that the required five senators would call for a meeting of the Republican Conference when Congress convened on January 6; on December 20, Lott bowed out. Santorum began calling senators seeking support for the position himself and got a public endorsement from Arlen Specter. But by the end of the afternoon it was clear that Bill Frist had the votes. Santorum convened a Conference meeting by phone call on December 23, and Frist was chosen without opposition. Before the Lott affair, Santorum was in line to become chairman of the Rules Committee and was making plans for the job. But in January he stepped aside to allow Lott to become chairman. Santorum has taken some stands with a view to local interests and out of personal beliefs. He backed minimum wage increases in the House and Senate, and supported the steel import quota bill that died in June 1999. He backed George W. Bush's steel import quotas in March 2002 and worked to try to link oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the proposal for the government legacy payments--payments of health insurance costs for steelworkers whose companies have gone bankrupt. He opposed George W. Bush's proposal for a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases, objecting to the amount of the cap; in 1999 his wife sued a chiropractor for $500,000 for back injuries and was awarded $175,000. In 2004 he and Specter called for lifting the import duties for electron guns used in cathode ray tubes, LCD panels and flat screen TVs; this was to prevent Sony from moving jobs from its Westmoreland County plant to Mexico. Santorum's strong religious views have influenced his views on public policy. "What I'm concerned about is we have some in our society today who say you can come to the public square influenced by anything other than faith. If you are influenced by faith, somehow that is illegitimate and your faith can only be private. I think that is a very dangerous thing because it leaves the public square with sort of a secular world." His five children are home-schooled; there was some controversy in 2004 when the Penn Hills school district reversed its approval of his school-age children's enrollment in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. He has said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case that first recognized a "right of privacy" was a "massive usurpation of power by the judiciary." After the Supreme Court ruled in April 2003 that laws against sodomy were unconstitutional, Santorum aroused controversy by saying, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [homosexual] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." To critics he said, "I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts." When a school district in York County sought to teach the theory of intelligent design as a possible alternative to evolution, Santorum stopped short of calling for the teaching of creationism, but cited scientists skeptical of evolution theory and said he encouraged "careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory." Santorum is the first Republican generally classified as conservative to have been elected senator in Pennsylvania since 1952, and some thought he would be in trouble in 2000. But he ended up winning convincingly. His Democratic opponent was Congressman Ron Klink, a former Pittsburgh TV anchor, who in the primary advertised heavily on Pittsburgh TV and won with 41% of the vote over two candidates from eastern Pennsylvania, state Senator (now Congresswoman) Allyson Schwartz and former state Labor Secretary Tom Foley. Klink, like Santorum, opposed abortion and gun control; he attacked Santorum for proposing personal retirement accounts as part of Social Security. On paper, Klink's candidacy seemed well suited to Pennsylvania. But after the April primary he was far behind in money--Santorum had $3.7 million cash on hand while Klink had $119,000 plus debts of $446,000--and Klink had difficulty raising more, because his views on abortion and gun control were out of line with the Democratic contributor base. Santorum ran positive ads about his record, campaigning as a "compassionate conservative," emphasizing his ability to work with Democrats like Joe Lieberman and then-Philadelphia (now Governor) Mayor Ed Rendell. The first Klink ads did not go up until September; he went negative against Santorum, and voters never really heard a positive case for Klink. Santorum won 52%-46%. He ran behind in metro Philadelphia 53%-45%, but this 8% margin was far less than Al Gore's 25% margin over George W. Bush there. Santorum ran slightly behind his 1994 showing in metro Pittsburgh, which Klink carried 52%-46%. But in the rest of the state, which cast 46% of the votes, Santorum won a whopping 60%-37% margin, a big improvement over 1994. After 2000 Santorum began taking a role in other elections. He played a key role in Pennsylvania redistricting: Republicans went into the 2002 election with an 11-10 edge in the delegation and emerged ahead 12-7. In the 2004 Senate race Santorum staunchly backed his colleague Arlen Specter against the challenge from Congressman Pat Toomey, whose voting record was much closer to Santorum's than Specter's was. Specter won 51%-49%; as Specter admitted, if he had not had Santorum's support he probably would have been defeated. Some religious conservatives criticized Santorum sharply, and a few even promised to work against him when his term came up in 2006. When Specter's election to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee was in doubt after the November 2004 election, Santorum declined to endorse him and said it was a matter for Judiciary Committee Republicans to decide. He also said that Toomey would be a good OMB director. Meanwhile, Santorum prepared to take a lead role on Social Security personal retirement accounts, as chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee and as head of Senate Republicans' Social Security Communications Working Group. Santorum comes up for reelection in 2006, and this could be one of the most seriously contested races in the nation. His high-profile cultural conservatism makes him an attractive target for Democratic contributors not only in Pennsylvania but nationally. Immediately after the 2004 election, Governor Ed Rendell seemed to be leaning toward backing outgoing state Treasurer Barbara Hafer, who had been elected to that post twice and as state auditor twice as a Republican and became a Democrat in 2003; as a pro-choice Republican she had lost to pro-life Democratic Governor Bob Casey in 1990 by a 68%-32% margin. But Rendell changed his mind and backed incoming state Treasurer and former two-term state Auditor Bob Casey, Jr., son of the late governor who lost the Democratic primary to Rendell 57%-43% in April 2002. In November 2004 Casey, an opponent of abortion and gun control, was elected treasurer by a 61%-37% margin, winning 3.3 million votes, more than anyone else had ever won for any office in Pennsylvania. DSCC Chairman Charles Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid encouraged Casey to run for the Senate and in March he announced his candidacy. Rendell persuaded Hafer to withdraw two days later. One public poll showed Casey leading Santorum 49%-42%; another showed him ahead just 44%-43%. Casey's issue profile was similar to Klink's, but he entered the race with much greater name identification, a proven record of winning votes statewide and, presumably, access to funding, whatever the views of Democratic contributors on abortion and guns, through Rendell and Schumer. Santorum also had strengths: he has won two Senate elections and his race looked like the number one priority for the Bush White House in 2006; presumably he will be able to call on Specter for help as well.
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