Patrick Leahy
Patrick Joseph Leahy ; born March 31, 1940) is an American politician and attorney who represented Vermont in the United States Senate from 1975 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the president pro tempore of the United States Senate from 2012 to 2015 and again from 2021 to 2023.
Leahy was the first Democrat ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Vermont and the third-longest-serving U.S. senator in history at 48 years. During his tenure he chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Agriculture Committee. Leahy became the most senior senator in 2012 and in 2022 he became the most senior member of either house of Congress. At the time of his retirement, Leahy was the dean of Vermont's congressional delegation, Vermont's longest-serving U.S. senator. Leahy was succeeded by Peter Welch, who became the second Democrat to represent Vermont in the Senate.
Leahy's signature legislation is the Leahy Law forbidding the United States from funding foreign military units which violate human rights. Leahy was the presiding officer at Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, becoming the first senator to preside over a former president's impeachment trial. In 2023, Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport was renamed after him.
Early life and education
Leahy was born in Montpelier, Vermont, the son of Alba and Howard Francis Leahy. He has been legally blind in his left eye since birth. Leahy's maternal grandparents were Italian, and his father was of Irish ancestry; some of his ancestors came to Vermont in the 19th century to work at the granite quarries and manufacturing plants in Barre Town and Barre City. The Leahys ran a printing business across from the Vermont State House, and were also the publishers of the Waterbury Record newspaper. Leahy attended the parochial schools of Montpelier, and graduated from Montpelier's St. Michael's High School in 1957.In 1961, Leahy graduated from Saint Michael's College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government. While attending college, Leahy was a member of the National Federation of Catholic College Students. He was also involved with the Knights of Columbus, the Saint Michael's College Glee Club, and the school's pre-law society and politics club. He was active with the Reserve Officers' Training Corps rifle team, and was a member of the varsity rifle team. He was also on the staff of The Shield, the Saint Michael's College yearbook and WSSE, the school's AM radio station. In 1964, Leahy received his Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center. While in law school, Leahy was active in the Phi Delta Phi legal honor society. In addition, Leahy participated in Georgetown Law's Legal Aid Society and Legal Argument Program. He was also a representative to the school's Student Bar Association.
At graduation, Leahy was offered an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship, which would have enabled him to earn a Master of Laws degree from Georgetown while receiving training in courtroom advocacy. Leahy was also interviewed by the United States Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy as one of several Georgetown Law students being considered for recruitment into the United States Department of Justice. He declined the fellowship and did not pursue a position at the Department of Justice because he intended to return to Vermont, and because he did not plan to practice criminal law.
Early career
Leahy was admitted to the bar soon after his law school graduation and became an associate at the Burlington firm headed by Philip H. Hoff, who then was governor of Vermont. In January 1965, Leahy was appointed as an assistant to Lewis E. Springer Jr., the legislative draftsman for the Vermont General Assembly. While working for Hoff's firm, Leahy was also appointed as Burlington's assistant city attorney.In May 1966, Hoff appointed Leahy State's Attorney of Chittenden County after the incumbent resigned. Leahy was elected to a full term in 1966 and reelected in 1970. His service as state's attorney was notable for his participation in the sting operation that caught Paul Lawrence, an undercover police officer for numerous departments in Vermont. Lawrence falsely claimed to have purchased illegal drugs from several people, resulting in numerous convictions based on his perjury.
From 1971 to 1974, Leahy served as vice president of the National Association of District Attorneys, and in 1974 the organization named him one of the country's three outstanding prosecutors. Beginning in 1971, he was also involved in the extensive effort to solve the murder of Rita Curran, who had been killed in her Burlington apartment. The murder, which Leahy later called among the most violent he saw while working as a prosecutor, went unsolved until 2023, when DNA testing of evidence left at the crime scene led to the identification of the perpetrator.
U.S. Senate
Early career (1975–1987)
Leahy originally aspired to the governorship, but in 1974 ran for the United States Senate in the wake of the Watergate scandal that had resulted in President Richard Nixon's resignation in August of that year. He won a close race against Republican Congressman Richard W. Mallary to succeed the retiring George Aiken. At age 34, Leahy was the youngest U.S. senator in Vermont history, the first non-Republican senator from Vermont since 1856, and the first Democrat to represent Vermont in the chamber. In 1980, Leahy defeated Republican Stewart Ledbetter by only 2,700 votes amid Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in the presidential election. In 1986, he faced what was on paper an even stronger challenge from former Governor Richard Snelling, but Leahy turned it back, taking 63 percent of the vote. In 1992, Vermont Secretary of State Jim Douglas held him to 54 percent of the vote. After that, Leahy did not face a strong Republican challenger.In May 1981, Leahy and Senator Ted Kennedy requested that the Senate reject John Crowell Jr.'s nomination as Assistant Agriculture Secretary. Leahy said his opposition was "because documents have been uncovered since his approval by the Agriculture Committee which suggest that he was aware of and involved in the anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of his former employer." Leahy and Kennedy contended that Crowell concealed his involvement with Louisiana-Pacific, Panhandle Logging Company, and Ketchikan Spruce Mills during the confirmation process. Crowell was confirmed by the Senate.
In October 1981, Leahy introduced an amendment that would have increased the Energy Department's enforcement budget by $13 million. He called the Reagan administration's cuts to the enforcement budget "de facto amnesty" for violations made by alleged increases in prices for oil companies. The amendment was defeated in the Senate on October 28 by a vote of 48 to 43. On December 2, 1981, Leahy voted for an amendment to Reagan's MX missiles proposal that would divert the silo system by $334 million, as well as earmark further research for other methods that would allow giant missiles to be based. The vote was seen as a rebuff of the Reagan administration. In March 1982, Leahy was named to the Senate Select Committee to Study Law Enforcement Undercover Activities of the Department of Justice, an eight-member select committee formed to investigate undercover operations. The resolution introducing the committee was the result of Harrison A. Williams's resignation for his involvement in the Abscam sting operation. On December 23, 1982, Leahy voted for a five-cent per gallon increase on gasoline taxes across the U.S. to finance highway repairs and mass transit. The bill passed on the last day of the 97th United States Congress. On October 19, 1983, Leahy voted for a bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Reagan signed the legislation the next month. In March 1984, Leahy voted against a proposed constitutional amendment authorizing periods in public school for silent prayer, and against Reagan's unsuccessful proposal for a constitutional amendment permitting organized school prayer in public schools.
Senate Agriculture Committee and other activities (1987–1999)
Leahy was appointed chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee on January 3, 1987. During his tenure as vice-chair of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1987, Leahy showed a news reporter an unclassified draft report on the Iran–Contra affair. At a press conference afterward, Leahy said, "Even though it was declassified, I was way too careless about it" and accepted blame. Disclosure of that information was against Intelligence Committee rules; Leahy said he hastened his already planned departure from the committee because he was so angry at himself. Later that year, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Leahy said that if Reagan could not produce an acceptable Supreme Court nominee to replace Lewis F. Powell Jr., after Robert Bork was rejected and Douglas Ginsburg withdrew, Senate Democrats would refuse hearings for any nominee until after the 1988 presidential election. In May 1989, Leahy urged the Agriculture Department to withdraw the proposals regarding the reduction of federal inspections. In May 1990, he and Representative Dan Glickman introduced the Consumer Seafood Safety Act, a bill that would have strengthened fish inspections. Leahy has been active in the international effort to ban the production, export, and use of anti-personnel land mines. In 1992, he penned a bill to prohibit the export of land mines, the first law of its kind.In February 1992, the George H. W. Bush administration and Israeli officials struggled to strike a deal that would entice both sides to proceed with a loan guarantee package. After a meeting between Secretary of State James Baker and Zalman Shoval failed to generate a compromise, Baker informed Leahy of the meeting's contents and Leahy announced that he would introduce his own plan if the U.S. and Israel could not come to an agreement in the following weeks. Later that month, the Bush administration announced the U.S. would present Israel with loan guarantees only if the Israeli government halted settlement building. Leahy supported the measure and introduced his own proposal that retained the $10 billion in loan guarantees, but "disbursed at a pace up to $2 billion a year for five years". On November 20, 1993, Leahy voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement linked the U.S., Canada, and Mexico into a single free trade zone, and was signed into law on December 8 by President Bill Clinton. Clinton publicly weighed reducing funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program by half. In March 1994, during a news conference, Leahy pledged that he would preserve funding for TEFAP, noting his 1987 lawsuit against Agriculture Secretary Richard Edmund Lyng and declaring that TEFAP maintained the same level of significance as it did then. In August 1994, Leahy attended a news conference with the health advocacy group Public Voice, as it urged the federal government to take more ambitious steps to increase the healthiness of school lunches. He praised the 41 schools involved with Public Voice for setting a good example for the rest of the country and cited the importance of school lunches to education. The 1994 midterm elections resulted in a Republican majority in the House for the first time since the 1950s, and conversation arose of limiting feeding programs. Leahy remarked, "Not since the Great Depression has the possibility of millions of children lining up at soup kitchens been so real." He cosponsored legislation with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar that led to the downsizing of the Agriculture Department. In December 1994, the department announced it was closing 1,274 field offices around the US, a scaling back that was estimated to save over $3 billion over the next five years. Leahy said the Agriculture Department was the only federal agency to succeed in its downsizing efforts and called on other agencies to follow its example. In 1994, Leahy introduced legislation to encourage schools to ban soft drinks and other food items of "minimal nutritional value", saying, "These vending profits go for good causes. But when it comes to vending machine junk food, it would be better to put pupils ahead of vending profits." The bill overcame opposition from The Coca-Cola Company and other representatives of the beverage industry, as well as some education organizations, and was enacted. In October 1999, Leahy voted for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The treaty was designed to ban underground nuclear testing and was the first major international security pact to be defeated in the Senate since the Treaty of Versailles.