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Last Updated June 22, 2005
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. Reelected in 2004, he is set to become the longest-serving senator in Vermont history in December 2008, when he will exceed his predecessor George Aiken's 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 have polarized the two parties and their constituencies--issues like abortion and gun control--and the committee has been sharply polarized at least since the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork 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. As chairman, he led the rejection by party line votes of two nominees for the Fifth Circuit and demanded from another 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. As ranking minority member since January 2003, Leahy has also filibusters against 10 appeals court nominees--the first in history--which have been bitterly attacked by Republicans. Leahy points out that the large majority of nominees have been approved and cites statistics to argue that Democrats have been fairer to Bush appointees than Republicans were to Bill Clinton's. The key question heading into the 109th Congress was whether and to what extent Leahy and other Democrats will oppose any Bush nominees to the 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. In early 2004 he called for "a vigorous, bipartisan examination" of the Patriot Act when it comes up for reauthorization in 2005. 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. After the story broke on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in April 2004 he sharply criticized the administration. He disagreed with Bush's declaration that the Geneva convention did not apply to unlawful combatants in Afghanistan and argued that methods authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for Afghanistan prisoners in December 2002, though rescinded a month later, nonetheless migrated and were applied to prisoner in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. "Somewhere in the upper reaches of the executive branch a process was set in motion that rolled forward until it produced this scandal." Leahy was also harshly critical of the administration on DNA testing. In 2004 the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed by large bipartisan majorities a DNA testing bill sponsored by Leahy and Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch. But it was pulled from the calendar by the House Republican leadership with, he charged, the approval of the administration. By the end of October the bill was passed and became law. Leahy is a gadgeteer and fine amateur photographer, and he was one of the first senators to go online in the 1990s; he has worked on various bills that affect high-tech and telecommunications. He co-sponsored with 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. More controversially, in 2004 he co-sponsored with Hatch and several others a bill to punish those who intentionally induce others to infringe copyrighted material. This was obviously aimed at the peer-to-peer software, like Grokster and Kazaa, which enables users to copy movies and recordings, and was strongly supported by Hollywood studios and the recording industry. But it was opposed by the high-tech industry and venture capitalists, as well as libertarians of the left and right. Over the summer and fall there were intense negotiations and numerous redraftings, but no bill was passed; this is an issue that will undoubtedly be revisited in the 109th Congress. Another Leahy cause has been the elimination of land mines. Since 1989, he has been crusading against the export and use of land mines, 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. 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. He has been a staunch and outspoken critic of the Iraq war. Leahy has long been one of the few members of the Senate Agriculture Committee not from a state with heavily subsidized crops like wheat, corn, soybeans or cotton. As ranking Democrat, 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 and tried to save the Northeast Dairy Compact, to set milk prices in the six New England states; the Compact, however, expired in September 2001. Working with his adversary on the Northeast Dairy Compact, Wisconsin's Herb Kohl, he did obtain MILC provisions (Milk Income Loss Compensation Program), which have brought $45 million to Vermont dairy farmers. But his and Kohl's efforts to reauthorize MILC in October 2004, 11 months before its expiration, fell short. Leahy serves on Appropriations and has procured funding for Vermont projects--$2.7 million for micromachine research at the Microtechnology Center at Burlington, an $800,000 Army research contract for Vermont Phototonics, $11.25 million for Vermont first responder agencies under the all-state minimum formula he wrote into the homeland security act (under that formula, Vermont ranked second among the states in fiscal 2004 per capita funding for first responders). 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. But his partisanship has rubbed some the wrong way. In a photo session in the Senate in June 2004, Leahy asked Vice President Dick Cheney whether he wasn't talking to Democrats; Cheney, nettled by what he considered criticism of his integrity in Leahy's frequent attacks on Halliburton, told the Vermonter to commit an impossible act. The one close call Leahy has had with Vermont voters came in 1980, when he narrowly survived the Republican sweep. He beat popular Governor Richard Snelling 63%-35% in 1986, and in 1992, against Jim Douglas, then state treasurer and now governor, Leahy won 54%-43%. In 1998, he had an easier time against 77-year-old dairy farmer Fred Tuttle, winning 72%-22%. In 2004, against the man Tuttle upset in the Republican primary six years before, Leahy won by a nearly identical 71%-25%.
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