Rick Santorum
Richard John Santorum Sr. is an American politician, attorney, author, and former CNN political commentator, who represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate from 1995 to 2007. He was the Senate's third-ranking Republican during the final six years of his tenure. He also ran unsuccessfully for president of the United States in the 2012 Republican primaries, finishing second to Mitt Romney.
Santorum was elected to the United States Senate from Pennsylvania in 1994. He served two terms until losing his 2006 reelection bid to his opponent, Bob Casey. A Catholic, Santorum is a social conservative who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and embraced a cultural warrior image during his Senate tenure. While serving as a senator, Santorum authored the Santorum Amendment, which would have promoted the teaching of intelligent design. He was a leading sponsor of the 2003 federal law known as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
In the years following his departure from the Senate, Santorum has worked as a consultant, private practice lawyer, and news contributor. He ran for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Before suspending his campaign on April 10, 2012, Santorum exceeded expectations by winning 11 primaries and caucuses and receiving nearly four million votes, making him the runner-up to eventual nominee Mitt Romney. Santorum ran for president again in 2016, but ended his campaign in February 2016 after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses. In January 2017, he became a CNN senior political commentator. However, he was terminated from his contract with CNN in May 2021 due to comments he made about Native Americans a few weeks prior which were deemed "dismissive".
Early life and education
Richard John Santorum was born in Winchester, Virginia. He is the second of the three children of Aldo Santorum, a clinical psychologist who immigrated to the United States at age seven from Riva, Trentino, Italy, and Catherine Santorum, an administrative nurse who was of Italian and Irish ancestry.Santorum grew up in Berkeley County, West Virginia, and Butler County, Pennsylvania. In West Virginia, his family lived in an apartment provided by the Veterans Administration. Santorum attended elementary school at Butler Catholic School and then went on to Butler Senior High School. He was nicknamed "Rooster", supposedly for both a cowlick strand of hair and an assertive nature, particularly on important political issues. After his parents transferred to the Naval Station Great Lakes in northern Illinois, Santorum attended Carmel High School in Mundelein, Illinois, for one year, graduating in 1976.
Santorum attended Pennsylvania State University for his undergraduate studies, serving as chairman of the university's College Republicans chapter and graduating with a B.A. degree with honors in political science in 1980. While at Penn State, Santorum joined the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity. He then completed a one-year M.B.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, graduating in 1981. In 1986, Santorum received a J.D. degree with honors from Dickinson School of Law.
Early career
Santorum first became actively involved in politics in the 1970s through volunteering for Senator John Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Additionally, while in law school, Santorum was an administrative assistant to Republican state senator Doyle Corman, serving as executive director of the Pennsylvania Senate Local Government Committee from 1981 to 1984, then executive director of the Senate Transportation Committee.After graduating, Santorum was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar and practiced law for four years at the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, a firm known for raising political candidates and lobbyists. As an associate, he successfully lobbied on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation to deregulate professional wrestling, arguing that it should be exempt from federal anabolic steroid regulations because it was entertainment, not a sport. Santorum left his private law practice in 1990 after his election to the House of Representatives.
U.S. House of Representatives (1991–1995)
Having been groomed by Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Santorum decided Democratic congressman Doug Walgren was vulnerable, and took up residence in Walgren's district. Needing money and political support, he courted GOP activist and major donor Elsie Hillman, the chair of the state Republican Party.In 1990, at age 32, Santorum was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district, located in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. He scored a significant upset in the heavily Democratic district, defeating seven-term Democratic incumbent Doug Walgren by a 51% to 49% margin. During his campaign Santorum repeatedly criticized Walgren for living outside the district for most of the year. Although the 18th District was redrawn for the 1992 elections, and the new district had a 3:1 ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans, Santorum still won reelection with 61% of the vote.
In 1993, Santorum was one of 17 House Republicans who sided with most Democrats to support legislation that prohibited employers from permanently replacing striking employees. He also joined a minority of Republicans to vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement that year. As a member of the Gang of Seven, Santorum was involved in exposing members of Congress involved in the House banking scandal.
U.S. Senate (1995–2007)
Elections
Santorum served in the United States Senate representing Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007. From 2001 until 2007, he was the Senate's third-ranking Republican. He was first elected to the Senate during the 1994 Republican takeover, narrowly defeating incumbent Democrat Harris Wofford, 49% to 47%. The theme of Santorum's 1994 campaign signs was "Join the Fight!" During the race, he was considered an underdog, as his opponent was 32 years his senior. He was reelected in 2000, defeating U.S. congressman Ron Klink by a 52% to 46% margin. In his reelection bid of 2006, he lost to Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. by a 59% to 41% margin.Tenure
After his election to the Senate in 1994, Santorum sought to "practice what preached" and hired five people for his staff who were on welfare, food stamps, or other government aid.In 1996, Santorum served as Chairman of the Republican Party Task Force on Welfare Reform, and contributed to legislation that became the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Santorum was an author and the floor manager of the bill. In 1996, Santorum endorsed moderate Republican Arlen Specter in his short-lived campaign for president. Reporters have observed that though Santorum and Specter differed on social policy, Specter provided him with key political staff for his successful run in 1994.
The National Taxpayers Union, a fiscal conservative organization, gave Santorum an "A−" score for his votes on fiscal issues, meaning that he was one of "the strongest supporters of responsible tax and spending policies" during his tenure, and ranked fifth in the group's rankings out of 50 senators who served at the same time.
Legislative proposals
Religious freedom initiatives
In 2002, Santorum was a co-sponsor of that year's attempt to pass the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. The bill had first been introduced in the Senate by Senator John Kerry in 1996, having been introduced in the House by Rep. Jerrold Nadler in 1994. Although Santorum was in the Senate at the time, he was not a sponsor of the bill when it was introduced in 1996, or when it was reintroduced in 1997 and 1999. Once signed on as a co-sponsor, Santorum remained so throughout his tenure in the Senate.Santorum founded the Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom in 2003. The group included members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and met monthly to address issues such as the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, tax-exempt status for churches, the CARE act, international religious freedom, and antisemitism.
Teaching of evolution and intelligent design
Santorum added to the 2001 No Child Left Behind bill a provision that would have provided more freedom to schools in teaching about the origins of life, including the teaching of the pseudoscience of intelligent design alongside evolution. The bill, with the Santorum Amendment included, passed the Senate 91–8 and was hailed as a victory by intelligent design promoters, but before it became law, scientific and educational groups successfully urged its conference committee to strike the Santorum Amendment from the final version. Intelligent design supporters in Congress then preserved the language of the Santorum Amendment in the conference committee report of the bill's legislative history. The Discovery Institute and other intelligent design proponents point to this report as "a clear endorsement by Congress of the importance of teaching a variety of scientific views about the theory of evolution."In 2002, Santorum called intelligent design "a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes", but by 2005 he had adopted the Teach the Controversy approach. He told National Public Radio, "I'm not comfortable with intelligent design being taught in the science classroom. What we should be teaching are the problems and holes... in the theory of evolution." Later that year, Santorum resigned from the advisory board of the Christian-rights Thomas More Law Center after the Center's lawyers lost a case representing a school board that had required the teaching of intelligent design. Santorum, who had previously supported the school board's policy, indicated he had not realized that certain members of the board had been motivated by religious beliefs. Santorum critics said he was backtracking from his earlier position because he was facing a tough reelection fight in 2006. When asked in November 2011 about his views on evolution, Santorum stated that he believes that evolution occurred on a tiny, micro level.