Sen. Russell Feingold (D) Elected 1992, 3d term up 2010
Born:	Mar. 2, 1953, Janesville
Home:	Middleton
Education:	U. of WI, B.A. 1975, Rhodes Scholar, Oxford U., 1977, Harvard Law Schl., J.D. 1979
Religion:	Jewish
Marital Status:	divorced
Elected  Office:	WI Senate, 1982-92.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1979-83; Prof., Beloit Col., 1985-93.
DC Office	506 HSOB20510, 202-224-5323; Fax: 202-224-2725; Web site: feingold.senate.gov
State Offices	Green Bay, 920-465-7508; LaCrosse, 608-782-5585; Middleton, 608-828-1200; Milwaukee, 414-276-7282; Wausau, 715-848-5660.
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Russ Feingold is a Democrat first elected to the Senate in 1992. He grew up in Janesville, where his father and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's father practiced law in the same building. There was politics in his blood: his father ran for district attorney as a Progressive and once lost an election to the county board by one vote. In the second grade he cast the only vote in his class for John F. Kennedy and decided he wanted to be president and often said he wanted to be senator some day. He nurtured his ambition at the University of Wisconsin, as a Rhodes Scholar, and at Harvard Law School; he moved to Middleton, a not-so-academic suburb of Madison, and in 1982, at 29, beat an 83-year-old veteran state senator by 31 votes. Feingold has a flair for publicity, and for political reform issues and novel arguments. His great goal in the legislature was to ban the use of bovine growth hormones, an attempt to hold down the productivity of dairy cows, who have grown more productive even as Americans drink less milk than they did in the 1950s. Feingold decided to run in 1992 for the Senate seat held by Bob Kasten, a free-market conservative who had won by narrow margins in 1980 and 1986. In the Democratic primary, while Milwaukee businessman Joseph Checota and Congressman Jim Moody battered each other with negative ads, Feingold ran clever, humorous spots: one showing Elvis, alive and endorsing Feingold; another showing Feingold at home, opening up a closet and saying, "No skeletons." He also had detailed position papers, including an 82-point plan for reducing the deficit. Near primary day, Checota apologized for his ads and asked voters to vote for Feingold if they didn't vote for him. Feingold, already ahead in polls, zoomed to an astonishing 70% win in this three-way race. Feingold also bounced way ahead of Kasten, who ran his own Elvis ads attacking Feingold on issues; Feingold attacked Kasten's negativity and avoided engaging on specifics. The race narrowed, but Feingold won 53%-46%.

In the Senate, Feingold has had a liberal record on cultural and foreign issues, somewhat more moderate on economics. He attacked many spending programs and did not respond in lockstep with other Democrats on the Clinton scandals. In February 1997 he called for an independent counsel on the Clinton-Gore fundraising operations. In January 1999 he was the only Democrat to vote against Robert Byrd's motion to dismiss the charges against Clinton. He voted against removal in February.

Feingold has long said that the campaign finance system is "legalized bribery and influence-peddling"; democracy, he once said, "has been almost entirely corrupted in the last few years by soft money." In December 1995 he was surprised when John McCain called and asked if he would work with him against pork barrel spending. Out of this collaboration came the various versions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance bills, which were filibustered to death in July 1996 and in February 1998. The House passed one version in August 1998, but it was filibustered in the Senate in September. In October 1999 McCain-Feingold was again beaten, but McCain and Feingold did push through the bill requiring disclosure by Section 527 committees in June 2000. McCain's presidential campaign and his threats to bring up the issue at every turn forced Trent Lott to schedule two weeks of debate on campaign finance in March 2001. This time McCain and Feingold prevailed. They beat an amendment for lesser changes by Chuck Hagel by 60-40 and beat non-severability by 57-43, important because most senators considered at least some provisions constitutionally dubious. The bill passed 59-41 in April. In July it seemed about to come to the floor of the House, but the Republican leadership's rule was defeated and Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled it off the calendar. Then, after the Enron bankruptcy, pressure mounted. The bill's advocates got 218 signatures on a discharge petition and it was brought to the floor and passed. The Senate passed a final version in March. George W. Bush expressed doubts about the constitutionality of some provisions but signed it anyway, without ceremony and without inviting McCain and Feingold. Behind the scenes not all Democrats were happy; some thought it would hurt their party. The argument switched to the courts. In May 2003 a three-judge federal court, deeply divided, issued 1,700 pages of opinions and upheld some of the provisions but not others. The Supreme Court upheld most sections of the law in December 2003.

The campaign finance act had an impact, though not the expected impact, on the 2004 elections. Democrats, contrary to the expectations of many, were able to raise large sums, much of it over the Internet from voters who loathed Bush. And 527 organizations, not covered by the act, raised hundreds of millions, with most of the money going to anti-Bush efforts; three individuals, George Soros, Peter Lewis and Steve Bing contributed more than $60 million. Feingold and McCain asked the FEC to rule that the act covered 527s; it declined to do so. In September 2004 they called for amendments to cover the 527s; in January 2005 they and their co-sponsors Chris Shays and Marty Meehan in the House sponsored a bill to require 527s to register as political committees and use only hard money for any advertisements that mention federal candidates. It produced some interesting responses: left-leaning organizations like the Sierra Club and the League for Conservation Voters opposed it, other liberal organizations raised the question of whether 501(c) charitable organizations would be covered and Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott announced he was all for it and would shepherd it through his committee.

Feingold has pursued other ethics issues. He was one of the crusaders against lobbyists' gifts to lawmakers. He sought to prohibit members of Congress from using for personal travel frequent flier miles earned on business trips. He has tried to ban cost-of-living adjustments to congressional pay. He tried to attach repeal of the COLA to various measures and failed until he got a vote on it as an amendment to the homeland security bill in November 2002; it lost 58-36.

To the Patriot Act Feingold tried to offer amendments to limit secret searches, computer surveillance and roving wiretaps. Majority Leader Tom Daschle got them all tabled, and Feingold cast the sole vote against the bill. That is not an unusual posture for him: he voted against the 1996 anti-terrorism bill and he was the only Democrat to vote against Robert Byrd's $15 billion homeland security package in 2001. He was the only Democrat on the Budget Committee to join Republicans and vote for five-year caps on spending in 2002. He fought to apply "paygo" rules to the budget, requiring that all spending increases or tax cuts be compensated for by corresponding spending cuts or tax increases, and succeeded in the Senate in 2003 and 2004; this blocked the passage of a budget resolution, since the Republican House wouldn't accept paygo on taxes. When the Portland Press Herald criticized Republican Senator Susan Collins for being soft on paygo, Feingold called the editor and vouched for her support. He sought to block any co-payment on home health care and voted against the Medicare/prescription drug bill in November 2003; he sought to place a floor of $75,000 on homestead exemptions for those 62 and over in the bankruptcy bill.

Feingold has staked out some original positions on the Judiciary Committee. He has called for repeal of all federal death penalty statutes. He was one of eight Democrats who voted to confirm John Ashcroft; he argues that a president should be given great deference in Executive Branch appointments. But he voted against the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales in January 2005. He joined other Judiciary Democrats in opposing several Bush appellate judge appointees and threatening to filibuster them and opposed changing the rules on judicial filibusters.

On foreign policy, he was one of three Democratic senators in March 1999 to vote against air strikes in Serbia and Kosovo and in October 2002 he voted against the Iraq war resolution. He objected when the Bush administration abrogated the ABM Treaty and argued that it could do so only with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate. As chairman of the Africa Subcommittee he traveled to Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique in February 2002; his visa for Zimbabwe was revoked by the Mugabe government. He opposed the Australian Free Trade Agreement because it allowed some dairy exports into the United States and has opposed the Caribbean Area Free Trade Agreement as well. He and Herb Kohl held up a routine trade bill in October 2004 which provided non-discriminatory treatment of Laos, in protest of Laos's treatment of the Hmong.

Feingold has made it a practice to hold listening sessions in all 72 Wisconsin counties every year, speaking for five minutes and then taking all questions. And he has submitted voluntarily to some of the campaign restrictions he sought to place on all candidates. In 1998 he faced a strong opponent in Congressman Mark Neumann, a conservative elected in 1994. They agreed to limit their campaign spending, Feingold to $3.8 million, Neumann to $4.7 million (he actually spent $4.4 million), and to limit PAC money to 10% of donations and out-of-state contributions to 25% and to impose a $2,000 limit on candidate contributions (more of a handicap for Neumann, a self-made home-builder millionaire, who spent $700,000 of his own money on a losing race in 1992). Feingold's leads of 10% or so melted away by the fall and the race became about even. Neumann ran humorous ads attacking Feingold for sending dollars to Russia to study monkeys in space and for voting for a study of cow flatulence (the ad showed smock-clad scientists out in a field trying to isolate samples of cow gas). In one of the nation's closest Senate races, Feingold won 51%-48%.

In 2001 Feingold talked occasionally about running for president; in the fall he made a campus speaking tour. But he said it was unlikely and that he would decide by his 50th birthday in March 2003. He spent that evening at the Harmony Bar in Madison and, as he put it, "I turned to a couple of friends and family members and said, 'By the way, I'm not running for president in 2004.' They said, 'OK. Fine. Now listen to the band.'" All along he had said it was "extremely likely" that he would run for reelection in 2004. No well-known Republican was interested in running. The three serious candidates in their primary were state Senator Robert Welch, who lost 58%-41% to Herb Kohl in 1994, Milwaukee area car dealer Russ Darrow and businessman Tim Michels, a Waukesha County businessmen who served 12 years as an Army Airborne Ranger. Darrow spent $2.7 million and tried to capitalize on his familiarity from his dealership ads; Welch, banking on support from Republican insiders, spent only about $100,000; Michels campaigned as the most moderate of the candidates and spent $1.4 million. Michels got more for his money: he won the primary with 42% of the votes, to 30% for Darrow and 23% for Welch.

This time Feingold decided not to be outspent as he was in 1998. By August 2004 he had raised $9 million, and he started running his characteristically humorous ads nonstop in June, knowing that Wisconsin would be inundated with presidential advertising in the summer and fall. Michels argued that Feingold had spent too much time on campaign finance and not enough on health care and jobs, and he attacked Feingold for his vote against the Patriot Act. He said he had real life experience while Feingold had been a career politician for 22 years. But Michels did not make much headway, and before mid-October the NRSC cancelled plans to spend $1.2 million on ads against Feingold. Feingold's message that he was an independent vote and a candid voice seemed to have resonance. He won by a solid but not overwhelming 55%-45% margin and his 1,632,000 votes set an all-time Wisconsin record.

After the election Feingold once again showed interest in running for president. In November he went to play golf at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail near Greenville, Alabama, in Butler County, the "reddest spot" on the presidential map, he said--not quite, it had voted only 59% for George W. Bush, making it one of his weaker counties in the state. He talked to local voters amid the check cashing stores, trailer parks and "rundown" car lots. He wrote about this in salon.com: "And I can only wonder how many generations of central Alabamians will say 'yes' when the increasingly powerful Republican party asks them to be concerned about homosexuality but not about the security of their own health, about abortion but not about the economic futures of their own children." In January 2005 he told the Tiger Bay Club in Volusia County, Florida, that he would decide whether to run after "going around the country" and that he wanted to be "part of the process" of identifying a candidate; he conceded that Democrats were unlikely to win majorities in the Senate or House in 2006. In March 2005 he was in Alabama again, where he visited with a group of 65 residents in Shelby County (81% for Bush) and told the Montgomery Advertiser, "I think the Republicans are intoxicated with power. … They're against big government when they're out of power, but now that they're in power, deficits don't matter. Getting into the privacy of people's homes, even when it doesn't involve terrorism, doesn't matter."

Committees

• Aging (Special).
• Budget.
• Foreign Relations: African Affairs (RMM); East Asian & Pacific Affairs; European Affairs.
• Judiciary: Administrative Oversight & the Courts; Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights; Constitution, Civil Rights & Property Rights (RMM); Corrections & Rehabilitation; Crime & Drugs; Immigration, Border Security & Citizenship; Terrorism, Technology & Homeland Security.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	100	89	100	100	42	22	35	8	13	0	--
2003	95	--	100	89	--	17	26	25	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	90%	--	7%		90%	--	7%
Social	79%	--	15%		67%	--	31%
Foreign	90%	--	0%		86%	--	8%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Ban Drilling in ANWR Y 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 3. Medicare/Rx Bill N 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. Y 5. Energy Bill N 6. Support Roe v. Wade Y		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion N  8. Assault Weapons Ban N  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage N 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb Y 11. Fund Iraq War Y 12. Restrict Missile Defense Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	Russell Feingold (D)	1,632,697	55%	$9,239,908
	Tim Michels (R)	1,301,183	44%	$5,542,087
	Other	15,863	1%
2004 primary	Russell Feingold (D)	unopposed
1998 general	Russell Feingold (D)	890,059	51%	$3,846,089
	Mark W. Neumann (R)	852,272	48%	$4,373,953
Prior winning percentages: 1992 (53%)