Sam Brownback

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Template:Infobox Senator Samuel Dale Brownback (born September 12, 1956) is a Senator from Kansas. He is a member of the Republican Party and is considered by many political pundits to be a likely candidate for president in his party's primaries in 2008.

1 Biography
2 Views
3 Political Future
4 Controversy
5 External links

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Biography

Brownback was born on September 12, 1956 in Garnett, Kansas and grew up on his family's farm near Parker, Kansas. He attended Prairie View High School in Linn County, where he served as school president and as a national officer of the Future Farmers of America. He later graduated from Kansas State University in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Agricultural Economics. While at Kansas State, he was elected student body president and was a member of Alpha Gamma Rho. He received his law degree from the University of Kansas in 1982.

He was a broadcaster, teacher and attorney before becoming the Kansas secretary of agriculture in 1986. In 1990, he was called upon to be a White House Fellow for the Class of '90-91, detailed to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. After serving in that capacity for one year at the White House, Brownback returned to Kansas to resume his position as secretary of agriculture and remained in this position until 1993. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1994, but served there for only one term as he decided to enter into the special Senatorial election in November 1996 to replace Bob Dole, who had resigned his Senate seat during his presidential campaign.

Brownback won the primary by defeating former Lieutenant Governor Sheila Frahm, who had been appointed to temporarily fill the seat. He defeated Democrat Jill Docking in the general election and was elected to a full term in the Senate in 1998. He won re-election in the 2004 senate election with 69% of the vote, easily defeating his Democratic challenger, Lee Jones, a former Washington, D.C. lobbyist who was considered less than viable, especially after losing the Democratic Primary.

Brownback has announced that he would not run for reelection in 2010, in accordance with his support of term limits for members of Congress. He is a member of the Judiciary Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee (where he chairs the Subcommittee on District of Columbia), the Joint Economic Committee, and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Brownback is married to the former Mary Stauffer, heiress to a Topeka newspaper fortune. The couple are the parents of five children (two of them adopted).

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Views

Brownback is an outspoken, socially conservative politician, joining staunch senate conservatives such as Rick Santorum, Pat Roberts and Tom Coburn on issues of social legislation. He favors capital punishment and opposes embryonic stem cell research. He is against same-sex marriage, pornography [1], is anti-abortion, having compared the procedure to The Holocaust [2], and believes there is no inherent right to privacy in the Constitution despite expressing disapproval of President Bush's assertions on the legality of the NSA wiretapping program.[3]

Despite the appeal of Brownback's socially conservative policies to conservative Protestant evangelicals, he converted to the Roman Catholic church in 2002, with the assistance of fellow Republican Senator Rick Santorum. Brownback has also advocated a more progressive foreign policy with respect to Africa. He visited refugee camps in Sudan in 2004 and returned to write a resolution labeling the Darfur conflict as genocide, and has been active on attempting to increase U.S. efforts to resolve the situation [4]. He is also an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network [5].

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he worked with Senator Ted Kennedy on legislation that imposed stricter entry standards at the borders of the United States. Brownback worked with Congressman John Lewis to help win placement of the African American Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Brownback is also trying to introduce price transparency to the US health care industry [6], as well as a bill which would require the disclosure of Medicare payment rate information [7].

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Political Future

Although Brownback has little name recognition outside of Washington, D.C. and his home state of Kansas, he has been working to garner public support since his re-election to the Senate in 2004. Having made visits to early primary and caucus states New Hampshire and Iowa, the senator is taking many of the steps common among future presidential candidates. With his strongly conservative cultural views, he is considered by some to be a front-runner of the socially-conservative wing of the Republican Party. In an appearance on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson voiced support of a Brownback presidential bid.

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Controversy

Brownback's political action committee accepted $42,000 from native American tribes represented by Jack Abramoff, an ex-lobbyist currently involved in a wide-reaching public corruption scandal. Brownback donated these funds to Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas.

In December 2005, Brownback advocated using Washington, DC as a "laboratory" for a flat tax. His advocated position on this issue was "that making D.C. a test case would, with limited potential for negative impact, provide valuable data about the effects of a flat tax that would prove helpful in determining whether it should be applied nationwide." [8] This has irked many residents of the District, as the idea of a Senator from Kansas forcing a system of taxation on them would seem to only further the District's taxation without representation. Indeed, DC mayor Anthony A. Williams said "Leaving aside the merits of this proposal, we continue to resist any efforts on the part of any member of Congress to impose rules and regulations on the people of the District." [9]

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Brownback is quoted as having criticized Sweden for allowing same-sex civil unions. "You'll know them by their fruits," Brownback said, quoting Matthew 7:19 and referring to conclusions drawn by social data regarding marriage in Sweden. Although Rolling Stone writer Jeff Sharlet explained that Brownback was not using the term 'fruits' to demean homosexuals and the Senator denies the charges, Brownback was criticized for this comment.

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