Pat Roberts
Charles Patrick Roberts is a retired American politician and journalist who served as a United States senator from Kansas from 1997 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Roberts served 8 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1981 to 1997, before his election to the Senate.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Roberts is a graduate of Kansas State University. He served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a newspaper reporter before entering politics in the late 1960s. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 to succeed 1st District Congressman Keith Sebelius, for whom he had worked. He served eight terms in the House, including one as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
Roberts was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996. On the Intelligence Committee, he was responsible for an investigation into the intelligence failures prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was the dean of Kansas's congressional delegation and Chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. He is the first person to chair both the House and the Senate agriculture committees.
On January 4, 2019, Roberts announced that he would not seek reelection in 2020. He was succeeded by Representative Roger Marshall of Great Bend on January 3, 2021.
Early life, education, and early political career
Roberts was born on April 20, 1936, in Topeka, Kansas, the son of Ruth B. and C. Wesley Roberts. His father served for four months as Chairman of the Republican National Committee under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roberts's great-grandfather, J.W. Roberts, was the founder of the Oskaloosa Independent, which is the second-oldest newspaper in Kansas.Roberts graduated in 1954 from Holton High School in Holton, Kansas. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Kansas State University in 1958, where he became a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. From 1958 to 1962, he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, achieving the rank of First Lieutenant. Roberts was a reporter and editor for several Arizona newspapers between 1962 and 1967, when he joined the staff of Republican Kansas Senator Frank Carlson. In 1969, he became administrative assistant to Kansas's 1st District Congressman Keith Sebelius.
U.S. House of Representatives (1981–1997)
Elections
After Keith Sebelius announced his retirement, Roberts easily won the Republican primary, which was tantamount to election in the heavily Republican 1st District. He was re-elected seven times without serious difficulty, never receiving less than 60 percent of the vote; in 1988, he ran unopposed.Committee assignments
Roberts served as the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee from 1995 to 1997.Sponsored Legislation that became Law
- : Dwight David Eisenhower Centennial Commission Act
- : To designate the Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, animal health research building in Clay Center, Nebraska, as the "Virginia D. Smith Animal Health Research Laboratory"
- : Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996
U.S. Senate (1997–2021)
Elections
1996
After Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum declined to seek a fourth term, Roberts ran to succeed her. He easily won the Republican primary, defeating three minor candidates with 78% of the vote. In the general election, he faced Democratic State Treasurer Sally Thompson. Term limits were an issue during the campaign; while Roberts said he was not totally opposed to term limits, he was wary of limits that did not apply to current members of Congress, saying the proposed limits should apply to everyone. While Thompson signed the national term limits pledge from the group Americans for Limited Terms, Roberts declined to do so, becoming the only major party candidate for the U.S. Senate in the 1996 elections to not sign the pledge. However, he did say that "I plan only to serve two terms in the U.S. Senate." Despite that stated intention, he eventually served four terms.In the general election, Roberts defeated Thompson by 652,677 votes to 362,380, almost certainly helped by the presence of former Kansas Senator Bob Dole atop the ticket as the Republican presidential nominee.
2002
Roberts was opposed in the Republican primary by Tom Oyler, who had run against him in 1996. Roberts defeated him 84% to 16%. No Democratic candidate opposed him in the general election; he faced only Libertarian nominee Steven Rosile and Reform nominee George H. Cook, defeating them by 641,075 votes to 70,725 and 65,050, respectively.2008
Roberts was unopposed in the Republican primary and defeated the Democratic nominee, former Congressman Jim Slattery, in the general election by 727,121 votes to 441,399.2014
In the 2014 election, Roberts faced a hard-fought primary challenge from physician Milton R. Wolf. Wolf received several endorsements from national organizations associated with the Tea Party movement. Roberts defeated Wolf in the Republican primary by 125,406 votes to 106,202. In the general election, for the second time in his tenure, Roberts did not face a Democratic opponent; Democratic nominee Chad Taylor withdrew from the race. Roberts won the general election, obtaining 53.15% of the vote; Independent Greg Orman received 42.53%, while Libertarian nominee Randall Batson received 4.32%.Tenure
Despite being the longest-serving member of the Kansas delegation, Roberts spent the first 14 years of his Senate career as Kansas's junior senator, since Sam Brownback had taken office on election day 1996 to finish out Dole's term. However, after Brownback gave up his seat to make a successful run for governor, Roberts became Kansas's senior senator.Roberts was a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, chairing the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. This subcommittee oversaw the military's work in the area of homeland security and the efforts to prevent proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
After winning the 2008 Presidential election, Barack Obama nominated Tom Daschle for United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In February, after Daschle offered a public apology for his failure to pay income taxes on use of a luxury car and driver, Roberts declined to state his opinion of Daschle's explanation and stated that sentiment for the nomination in Kansas was "not especially good". Daschle subsequently withdrew.
In March 2009, Roberts was one of fourteen senators to vote against a procedural move that essentially guaranteed a major expansion of a national service corps. The bill was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost at least an outlay for the fiscal year 2010 of $418million toward around $5.7billion from 2010 through 2014.
In May 2009, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Associate Justice. Roberts had previously voted against Sotomayor with twenty-eight other Republicans when she was nominated for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In an interview shortly after the nomination, Roberts was asked if he would vote for Sotomayor to avoid being called a "bigot" and answered, "I’m a Marine and nothing much scares me. That's not going to be a consideration in my vote." Roberts stated his reasons for voting against Sotomayor in 1998 in a separate interview, and that he did "not plan to vote for her". Roberts's comments were significant for his being the first Republican to announce how he would vote on the Sotomayor nomination. Sotomayor was confirmed in August in a vote of 68 to 31 with Roberts voting against the nomination.
President Obama's top domestic agenda at the start of his presidency was to ensure health insurance for all Americans, which entailed Democrats in Congress scaling back their proposals in attempts to trim tens of billions of dollars a year from existing health programs. Roberts pushed back against a proposal by the Obama administration to use $600billion of Medicare and Medicaid savings to pay for health care legislation, saying, "More cuts to Medicare? Let’s not do that right now, please."
Roberts rose to the Chair of the Committee on ANF in the 2014-2016 114th Congress. He continued to chair the Committee for the duration of his tenure in the 115th Congress and the 116th Congress.
In June 2016, the "Roberts GMO bill" which had come out of the Committee on ANF was proposed as an amendment to Public Law 114-214 by Mitch McConnell. Public Law 114-214 was also known to opponents as the DARK Act, for "Deny Americans the Right to Know" about GMO foods.
In February 2019, when asked about comments by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson regarding the passage of the reauthorization of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Pesticide Registration Enhancement Act, Roberts stated his support for both, and in passing child nutrition reauthorization legislation.
Roberts served as chairman of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission, dedicating the memorial on September 17, 2020, after many years of planning.
In September 2020, with less than two months to the next presidential election, Roberts supported an immediate vote on President Trump's nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Roberts argued that it was the "Senate’s constitutional duty to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court". Previously in March 2016, around seven months before the next presidential election, Roberts argued that President Obama's Supreme Court nominee should not be considered by the Senate, as the process would be "rushed", and that this was "about giving the American people and the next president a role in selecting the next Supreme Court justice" via the upcoming presidential election.