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The 'Nastiest' Democrat: Sen. Patrick Leahy, Republican nightmare - overview of controversial senator's political career
National Review, July 9, 2001 by Jay Nordlinger
The other Vermont senator's no day at the beach. He is Patrick Leahy, and when James Jeffords pulled his big switch, Leahy landed a big job: chairman of the Judiciary Committee. It's a job Leahy has always wanted; and a Republican nightmare has begun.
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By consensus-a consensus of Hill Republicans-Pat Leahy is the meanest, most partisan, most ruthless Democrat in the Senate. Ask a Republican about Leahy, and he'll shudder. Then he will say that, though Leahy can be nice and smiling on the surface, underneath he is-take your pick-"a left-wing brute," "nasty," "a pile of pure malice." Republicans are not in complete agreement, however: One says, "He's the most obnoxious [SOB] in the Senate now that Howard Metzenbaum's gone"; another says, "Nah, he was always worse than Metzenbaum, it's just that the general public didn't know it." Republicans, to a man, swear that they would take Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, John Kerry-any famously partisan Democrat over Leahy. They were very much hoping that Biden, for example, would resume his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee; he was chairman, recall, during the years that included the pummeling of Robert Bork and the pummeling of Clarence Thomas. Instead, however, Biden chose the Foreign Relations post, leaving Judiciary to Leahy.
And, following the ancient rule that a staff reflects the politician at its head, the consensus is that Leahy's staff is just as partisan, just as ruthless as the senator himself. Not even Democrats much trust or like that bunch. Says one veteran GOP staffer, "You can work with Kennedy's staff, you can work with Biden's-and chances are, they won't stab you in the back. Leahy's staff, however, plays to win, whatever it takes. And they'll roll over Democrats just as fast."
So, what about this "junkyard dog in a Vermont sweater" (to quote yet another staffer)? Several different Senate-watchers cite one recent episode. It's a relatively small thing, they say, but an instance in which the underside of Leahy was revealed. Sen. Strom Thurmond is almost 100 now, and when he appears at a committee meeting, he generally reads a short statement from a card, and shuffles off. You don't try to engage him in debate, or much else, anymore, and most everyone knows it, and accepts it. At a meeting in April, Thurmond read his statement as usual-and Leahy jumped in to question him about it. Orrin Hatch, then Judiciary chairman, intervened, saying he would handle Leahy's questions himself, trying to spare Thurmond embarrassment. But Leahy kept it up. Witnesses were appalled, seeing no purpose in it except to humiliate the old man.
The public got a little taste of what a Leahy chairmanship would be like back in January, when he conducted the confirmation hearings of attorney-general nominee John Ashcroft. (Because Dick Cheney had not yet been sworn in as vice president, and the Senate was 50-50, presided over by Al Gore, Leahy had the gavel for a little over two weeks.) Leahy threw at Ashcroft everything he had, trying to sink the nomination. There were hostile witness panels, hostile allegations-the works. Says one person close to the Ashcroft team, "Our reaction was, Wow! I mean, holy Moses! The guy's trying to slay us!" In the end, Ashcroft squeaked through, but not before being tarred before the nation as a racist, reactionary nut.
Leahy was just warming up, perhaps, for the confirmation hearings of Ted Olson, to be solicitor general. Leahy did not have the gavel then, but he led a crude assault on the nominee's integrity. Olson had been a lawyer and board member for The American Spectator magazine, which for a time ran something called "the Arkansas Project," to pursue stories in Bill Clinton's home state. Olson testified that he had nothing to do with this "project"-but Leahy essentially accused him of lying, based on the tales of a couple of left-wing journalists with a high flake quotient. These tales had been thoroughly discredited, and were again. Yet Leahy persisted, casting aspersions on Olson and demanding records and testimony from the Spectator (which galled First Amendment defenders in particular). Olson, like Ashcroft, in the end squeaked through-but it seems likely that Leahy as chairman could have stopped him. From now on, he will be chairman. According to Republican fears, the Leahy years (if years they be) will make the Biden years seem like a golden age of fair play and collegiality.
One Leahy foe puts the beef of many this way: The senator "always likes to have an ethical veneer for his purely partisan attacks. He can't just say [for example] that he despises Ted Olson's views, that he resents his representation of [George W.] Bush in Bush v. Gore, that he's sorry there has to be a conservative solicitor general at all. No, he has to say that Olson lacks integrity, that he lacks honesty, and that's what stinks about Patrick Leahy."
Leahy is only 61 years old, but he is one of the most senior members of the Senate: He was 34 when he was first elected, in 1974. He was, and remains, the only Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Vermont. But times, they clearly have a-changed. Once the home of rock-ribbed Republicanism, the state is now the home of gay marriage and a remarkably left-wing congressional lineup: Leahy and Jeffords are the two senators, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist-that is, an avowed socialist-is the (lone) House rep. Vermont seems to have passed Massachusetts as the American Sweden; must be something in the milk.
