Richard Lugar

Richard Lugar
United States Senator from Indiana
Incumbent
Assumed office  January 3, 1977 Serving with Evan Bayh
Preceded by	Vance Hartke
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
In office January 3, 1985 – January 3, 1987 January 3, 2003 – January 3, 2007
Preceded by	Charles Percy (1985) Joe Biden (2003)
Succeeded by	Claiborne Pell (1987) Joe Biden (2007)
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture
In office January 4, 1995 – January 3, 2001 January 20, 2001 – June 6, 2001
Preceded by	Patrick Leahy (1995) Tom Harkin (2001)
Succeeded by	Tom Harkin (2001)
44th Mayor of Indianapolis
In office January 1, 1968 – January 1, 1976
Preceded by	John J. Barton
Succeeded by	William H. Hudnut III
Born	April 4, 1932 (1932-04-04) (age 78) Indianapolis, Indiana
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Charlene Smeltzer Lugar
Residence	Indianapolis, Indiana
Alma mater	Denison University Oxford University
Profession	manufacturing executive
Religion	Methodist
Website	Senator Richard Lugar
Military service
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1957-1960

Richard Lugar with then-Senator Barack Obama in August 2005 near Perm, Russia

Richard Green "Dick" Lugar (born April 4, 1932) is the senior United States Senator from Indiana. He is a member of the Republican Party and served as the mayor of Indianapolis from 1968 to 1976 and was elected to the United States Senate in 1976 where he has been the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1985 to 1987 and 2003 to 2007. Much of Lugar's work in the Senate is toward the dismantling of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons around the world.

On January 3, 2009, upon Ted Stevens' losing his reelection bid, and the retirement of Pete Domenici, Lugar became the most senior Republican in the U.S. Senate, and is currently the 3rd most senior United States Senator overall. By tradition, were the Republican Party to gain control of the Senate, Lugar would be elected the President pro tempore of the United States Senate.

Early life

Lugar was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Bertha Green and Marvin Lugar.^[1] He attended the public schools of Indianapolis. During this time he attained the Boy Scouts' highest rank: Eagle Scout.^[2] Later, he became a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America.^[3] He graduated first in his class at Shortridge High School in 1950 and from Denison University in 1954 where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi.^[4] He went on to attend Pembroke College, Oxford, England, as a Rhodes Scholar, and received a graduate degree in 1956. Lugar was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He served in the United States Navy from 1957 to 1960; one of his assignments was as an intelligence briefer for Admiral Arleigh Burke.

Lugar manages his family's 604-acre (2.4 km²) Marion County corn, soybean and tree farm. Before entering public life, he helped his brother Tom manage the family's food machinery manufacturing business in Indianapolis.^[4]

Senator Lugar is member of the United Methodist Church. He married Charlene Smeltzer on September 8, 1956, and the couple has four sons and thirteen grandchildren.^[4]

Early political career

Lugar served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967. At the age of 35, he was elected mayor of Indianapolis in 1967 and began serving the first of two mayoral terms in 1968. A political cartoon of the time questioned how an Eagle Scout could survive in the world of politics.^[2] He is closely associated with the adoption of Unigov in 1970, which unified the governments of Indianapolis and Marion County. The Unigov plan helped trigger Indianapolis' economic growth and earned Lugar the post of president of the National League of Cities in 1971. In 1972, Lugar was the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention.^[5] During this time he became known as "Richard Nixon's favorite mayor" due to his support for devolving federal powers to local communities.^[6]

U.S. Senate career

Lugar unsuccessfully sought election to the U.S. Senate as the Republican nominee in the 1974 U.S. Senate election, losing to incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh. Two years later, he ran again, unseating incumbent Senator Vance Hartke in the 1976 election. Mitch Daniels served as his chief of staff from 1977 to 1982.^[7] During the 1980 Republican National Convention, Lugar was rumored as a potential Vice Presidential nominee for Presidential nominee Ronald Reagan.^[8]

Lugar was reelected in 1982, 1988, 1994, in 2000, and again with over 85% of the vote in 2006. Lugar served as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 1984 Senate elections. In 2006, he ran without a Democratic Party challenger and earned over 87% of the vote, and won over three fourths of the votes in every county. In 1994, Lugar became the first Indiana senator to be re-elected to a fourth term. He is currently the third most senior senator.

While in the US Senate, Senator Lugar has supported numerous gun control measures including the 1991 Crime Bill S.1241 (see U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote here) sponsored by then senator Joseph Biden that instituted a national waiting period for handgun purchases as well as a federal ban on semi-automatic firearms.^[9]

In 1993 Lugar voted for the Brady Bill sponsored by Charles Schumer (see U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote here), and the Feinstein Amendment 1152 (see U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote here) to ban the purchase, sale and transfer of certain semi-automatic rifles, and capping the size of new magazines / clips to a maximum of 10 rounds. In November 1994 Lugar voted for additional gun control measures contained in H.R.3355 (see U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote here).

In 1998, Lugar voted for Barbra Boxer's Trigger Lock Amendment 3230 (see U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote here), which requires the purchase of a trigger lock with the sale of each handgun.

Lugar ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1996, but his campaign failed to gain traction. His announcement of candidacy speech was made on April 19, 1995, in Indianapolis. He finished fifth in the Republican primaries, with 127,111 votes or 0.83%.

Lugar has been influential in gaining Senate ratification of treaties to reduce the world's use, production and stockpiling of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In 1991, he initiated a partnership with then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn – a fellow Eagle Scout – aiming to eliminate latent weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.^[2] To date, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program has deactivated more than 7,500 nuclear warheads. In 2004, Senators Lugar and Nunn were jointly awarded the Heinz Awards Chairman's Medal for their efforts.^[10]

As Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Lugar built bipartisan support for 1996 federal farm program reforms, ending 1930s-era federal production controls. He worked to initiate a biofuels research program to help increase U.S. dependency on ethanol and combustion fuels, and led initiatives to streamline the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reform the food stamp program, and preserve the federal school lunch program.

Lugar has received numerous awards, including Guardian of Small Business, the Spirit of Enterprise, Watchdog of the Treasury, and 42 honorary doctorate degrees. In 2001 he received the Democracy Service Medal of the National Endowment for Democracy.^[11] In October 2008 Lugar and Joe Biden, his partner in the Committee on Foreign Relations, received the Hilal-i-Pakistan (Crescent of Pakistan) Award from the government of Pakistan for their continued support of the country. In July 2008 Lugar and Biden introduced a plan that would give $1.5 billion in aid per year to support economic development in Pakistan.^[12]

Senator Lugar is a member of the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).

During the August recess of 2005, Lugar and freshman Senator Barack Obama visited Russia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine to inspect nuclear facilities there.^[13] He was detained for three hours at an airport in the city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains, where they were scheduled to depart for a meeting with the President and the Speaker of the House of Ukraine. He was released after a brief dialogue between U.S. and Russian officials, and the Russians later apologized for this incident. In January 2007, President Bush signed into law the Lugar-Obama Proliferation and Threat Reduction Initiative which was furthering Lugar's work with Senator Nunn in deactivating weapons in the former Soviet Union. The Lugar-Obama program focuses on terrorists and their use of multiple types of weapons.^[14]

In April 2006, Time magazine selected Lugar as one of America's 10 Best Senators.^[15]

On the day of the final 2008 presidential debate, Lugar gave a speech at the National Defense University praising Obama's foreign policy approach, and warning against the isolationist, reactive policies espoused by Senator McCain.^[16] At that debate, Obama also listed Lugar as among the individuals "who have shaped my ideas and who will be surrounding me in the White House."^[17] There were rumors that either Obama or McCain would select Lugar to be Secretary of State, but that he would rather keep his Senate seat.^[14][18]

In the 2006 election, Lugar was opposed by Steve Osborn, the Libertarian candidate. The Democratic Party did not field a candidate – in part because of Lugar's popularity in Indiana – deciding instead to focus on key state and national races. Lugar won the election with 87% of the vote, the highest percentage of the 2006 senate elections despite a Democratic take-over of Washington.

Although Lugar's party is in the minority in the Senate, he has good relationships with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Lugar was named an honorary co-chairman of their inauguration.^[19]

On March 18, 2009, Lugar cast his 12,000th Senate vote, putting him in 13th place for all-time most votes. In 32 years in the Senate, he has a better than 98% attendance record.^[20] Senator Lugar has not announced that he will run for reelection in 2012, but an official campaign site exists.^[21]

Senator Richard Lugar meeting with actress Ashley Judd

Committee assignments

• Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
  • Subcommittee on Energy, Science and Technology
  • Subcommittee on Domestic and Foreign Marketing, Inspection, and Plant and Animal Health
  • Subcommittee on Hunger, Nutrition and Family Farms (Ranking Member)
• Committee on Foreign Relations (Ranking Member)
  • As Ranking Member of the full committee, Sen. Lugar is an ex officio member of all subcommittees

Other activities

Lugar served on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy from 1992 to 2001.^[22]

Lugar is a member of the board of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organization involved in international elections.^[23]

Political positions

Abortion

Lugar's 2007 rating from NARAL was 40%.^[24] His 2007-2008 rating from the National Right to Life Committee was 85%.^[25] This reflects a moderate stance on abortion.

Cuba

Lugar believes that the US sanctions on Cuba have failed and wrote to President Obama that "additional measures are needed...to recast a policy that has not only failed to promote human rights and democracy, but also undermines our broader security and political interests." ^[26] He supports the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act (S.428), which would lift the travel restrictions that have prevented U.S. citizens from visiting Cuba since the early 1960s.^[27]

Immigration

Senator Lugar has a generally liberal stance on immigration, supporting the DREAM Act and the McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill which died in Congress.

Iraq War

On June 25, 2007, Senator Lugar, who had been "a reliable vote for President Bush on the war," said that "Bush's Iraq strategy [is] not working and... the U.S. should downsize the military's role." ^[28]

Lugar's blunt assessment has been viewed as significant because it showed the growing impatience and dissatisfaction with President Bush's strategy in Iraq. Lugar's speech had particular resonance given his stature as one of the party's elder statesmen on foreign policy. After Lugar finished his remarks, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), a sharp critic of the war, praised Lugar's "thoughtful, sincere and honest" speech, which Durbin said was in "finest tradition of the U.S. Senate." ^[29] Senator Durbin urged his Senate colleagues to take a copy of Lugar's speech home over the Fourth of July break and study it before returning to work.^[29] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, in reaction to Lugar's speech: "When this war comes to an end, and it will come to an end, and the history books are written, and they will be written, I believe that Sen. Lugar's words yesterday could be remembered as a turning point in this intractable civil war in Iraq." ^[30]

Two days later, on June 27, 2007, Lugar said that Congressional measures aimed at curtailing U.S. military involvement in Iraq – including "so-called timetables, benchmarks" – have "no particular legal consequence," are "very partisan," and "will not work." ^[31]

Judicial nominees

Senator Lugar was the first republican senator to announce his support for President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor and also voted in favor of his second Supreme Court nominee Solicitor General Elena Kagan.

LGBT rights

Senator Lugar voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment, limiting the definition of marriage to one man and one woman. However, he has also voted in favor of the Matthew Shepard Act, which expanded the federal hate crime statutes to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Election history

References

External links

• United States Senator Richard G. Lugar, U.S. Senate site

• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Voting record maintained by The Washington Post
• Biography, voting record, and interest group ratings at Project Vote Smart
• Issue positions and quotes at On The Issues
• Current Bills Sponsored at StateSurge.com
• Financial information at OpenSecrets.org
• Campaign finance reports and data at the Federal Election Commission
• USC Center on Public Diplomacy Profile
• Profile at SourceWatch Congresspedia
• Bills sponsored by Senator Lugar in the 110th Congress from the Library of Congress
• Larson, Christina (September 2006). "Hoosier Daddy". Washington Monthly. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.larson.html. Retrieved 15 May 2010. 

Campaign sites

• Dick Lugar for U.S. Senate

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