This is another of occasional profiles of members of Congress who are former local prosecutors.
This is another of occasional profiles of members of Congress who are former local prosecutors.
After the hijack-terrorists’ September attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, a major focal point on Capitol Hill was the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, through which all anti-terrorism legislation must pass, and its chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT).
Taking the Senate floor the day after the attacks, Senator Leahy spoke for a shocked but aroused nation when he said, “We will be supportive of our President, our institutions and of each other because a challenge to our freedom is going go be answered by the strength of our democracy.” And in the sturdy tradition of his state’s Green Mountain Boys of the Revolution, he declared, “Trial by fire can refine us or it can coarsen us. If we hold to our ideals, then it strengthens us.” Ten days later he introduced a detailed eight-point anti-terrorism bill.
Senator Leahy, who moved up from ranking minority member to chairman of Judiciary, one of Congress’s most powerful committees, when the Democrats gained the majority and control of the Senate last June 6, presides over the committee with the skill, authority and finesse of a seasoned prosecutor presenting evidence and questioning witnesses in a courtroom.
Leahy comes by these qualities naturally and from experience. He is a former prosecutor. During his eight years as state’s attorney in Vermont’s Chittenden County (Burlington) he won national attention for some of his innovative crime-fighting programs. In the early 1970s he was an NDAA state director for Vermont, as well as a member of the association’s board of directors, and served as an NDAA vice president from 1972 until 1974, when he resigned to run for the U.S. Senate. When he was elected, he was 34, becoming the youngest elected senator in Vermont’s history and the first Democratic senator since the Republican Party was founded in 1854.
During his 27 years in the Senate, he has become one of the most influential voices in that chamber, admired by his fellow Democrats and respected by his Republican colleagues for his plain-spoken Yankee candor and his passionate opposition to any threat to the Bill of Rights.
The 61-year-old Leahy is a man of many sides. Among other things, he’s a constitutional scholar, an admitted computer enthusiast—he was one of the first senators to have his own Web site—and an admirer of the music side of pop culture.
In an interview with The New York Times, he admitted that his fascination with computers has become so obsessive that “when he stumbles out of bed each morning his first destination is not the kitchen for a cup of coffee or the doorstep for the morning paper. It’s to turn on his computer” to check the torrent of e-mail awaiting him from constituents, staff members and colleagues, and to surf the Internet for breaking news. His interest in computers and high tech is so intense that has referred to himself as the “cybersenator.”
In the interview, he also admitted that he’s a devoted fan of the Grateful Dead rock band and takes pride in having introduced the late Jerry Garcia, founder of the group, to nonagenarian Strom Thurmond, the Senate’s oldest member and the senator probably least likely to have heard of Garcia.
Although he can be a partisan Democrat when he believes such a stance is warranted, he is generally regarded as tough but fair in his handling of the Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings, where the undercurrent of politics is always present.
On issues, Leahy is probably best known for championing a worldwide ban on land mines. His work on this issue began in 1989, when he started a fund—the Leahy War Victims Fund—to supply medical aid to land mine victims. His vigorous pursuit of this cause eventually brought him into conflict with the Clinton administration, which opposed an all-out ban on land mines. But he didn’t back down.
He has also focused on the death penalty, pressing for legislation that would make it easier for prisoners to obtain DNA testing; and to improve the quality of defense counsel in death penalty cases. He has sought to update copyright laws to reflect the advent of the Internet and has supported efforts to ease export restrictions on encryption software, which allows digital information to be scrambled during computer transmission to prevent data from being intercepted.
None of his activity on national and even international issues has deflected him from addressing the more parochial concerns of his rural and agricultural state. He has displayed no hesitancy to deal with Republicans to protect Vermont’s interests, whether that means helping the agricultural economy, trying to combat a growing drug epidemic among the state’s teenagers, or fighting for Northeastern dairy farmers.
As the authoritative Politics in America describes Leahy’s balancing of national and local issues, “He sees his parochial focus as an obligation handed to him by those who wrote the Constitution.”
Leahy himself has said, “We are such a small state (now the least populated state after Wyoming). The only place where we have an equal voice with the rest of the country is in the U. S. Senate.”
