Ted Stevens

Theodore Fulton “Ted” Stevens (born November 18 1923) is a U.S. Senator from Alaska. He is currently the longest serving Republican in the U.S. Senate and, because of this, is the current president pro tempore. Stevens served as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005 except for the 18-month interlude when Democrats controlled the chamber. The chairmanship gave Stevens considerable influence among fellow Senators, who relied on him for home-state project funds. But it also made him a target for critics who have said Stevens has directed excessive amounts of pork barrel spending to Alaska, including the Gravina Island Bridge, dubbed the "Bridge to Nowhere". Because of Republican Party rules that limit committee chairmanships to six years, Stevens gave up the Appropriations gavel at the start of the 109th Congress. He is currently the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. He is a member of the Episcopal church.

Early life

Ted Stevens was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1923. During World War II, he was an Army Air Forces C-47 pilot in the China-Burma-India theater with the “Flying Tigers” of the Fourteenth Air Force from 1943 to 1946, holding the rank of First Lieutenant. There he received two Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals, as well as the Yuan Hai medal awarded by the Republic of China.

After the war ended, Stevens attended UCLA, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Harvard Law School. In the early 1950s he moved to Alaska, then a territory.

In Fairbanks Stevens practiced law, and he was appointed U.S. Attorney for Fairbanks in 1953.

Political career

Department of the Interior

In 1956 Stevens was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he worked as legislative counsel and assistant to Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton. He also pushed for the statehood of Alaska and Hawaii, which occurred in 1959. In 1960, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower promoted Stevens to solicitor of the Department of the Interior.

Alaska House of Represenatives

After returning to Alaska, Stevens practiced law in Anchorage. He was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1964, and became House majority leader in his second term.

United States Senate

In December 1968, Governor Walter Joseph Hickel appointed Stevens to the U.S. Senate after the death of Democrat Bob Bartlett. In 1970, Stevens was elected to finish the term in a special election, and has been reelected six times since, in 1972, 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996 and 2002. His current term will expire in 2009.

Stevens served as the Assistant Republican Whip from 1977 to 1985. In 1994, Stevens was appointed Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee. Stevens became the Senate’s president pro tempore when Republicans regained control of the chamber as a result of the 2002 mid-term elections, during which the previous longest-serving republican senator and former president pro tempore Strom Thurmond retired. He is a former Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. In the past, Stevens also has served as Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, the Arms Control Observer Group, and the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress.

His campaign political action committee is called the “Northern Lights PAC.”

Issues

Network neutrality

On June 28, 2006, the Senate commerce committee was in the final day of three days of hearings during which the Committee members considered over 200 amendments to an omnibus telecommunications bill. Senator Stevens authored the bill, S. 2686 [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.02686:, the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.

Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) cosponsored and spoke on behalf of an amendment that would have inserted strong network neutrality mandates into the bill. In between speeches by Snowe and Dorgan, Stevens gave an 11 minute speech in which he made several technical and terminological errors while attempting to explain his opposition to the amendment. Among others, Stevens referred to the internet as a "series of tubes" that could be clogged with information. He also complained that an email addressed to him by his staff had been delayed by five days. He said, "an internet was sent by my staff", and he said commercial traffic was to blame for the delay.

Of 22 Senators, 11 voted for the amendment and 11 against. Because it failed to garner majority support, the amendment failed.

The audio from the day's hearing is available at the Committee web site ^* as a streaming media file in RealMedia format, playable with RealPlayer. Stevens' speech begins at 1:13:11 and ends at 1:24:19.

Soon after, the blogosphere was buzzing about Stevens' unique interpretation of how the internet worked; many writers and commentators derisively cited several of Senator Stevens' misunderstandings of internet technology, arguing that the speech showed that Senator Stevens had apparently formed a strong opinion on a topic which he understood poorly. The internet phenomenon sparked mainstream media attention, including a mention in a New York Times story The technology podcast This Week in Tech discussed the incident in Episode 60, [http://www.twit.tv/60 A Series of Tubes.

Hurricane Katrina

On October 20 2005, Stevens threatened to resign from the Senate if lawmakers passed language that would have stripped money allocated for two bridges in Alaska, (primarily the Gravina Island Bridge, referred to commonly in the media as 'The Bridge to Nowhere) and redirected it to Hurricane Katrina repairs in Louisiana. That language was defeated, but in the face of intense public and private criticism, Congress later removed funding from the bridges specifically and instead redirected the money to a pot for Alaska’s general transportation use. Stevens said later that he would not resign over this action because the money was not being taken away from Alaska in general. The Senator’s comments on December 21 2005 after a contentious vote on a defense bill from which ANWR provisions had been removed again prompted speculation over his resignation. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122102127.html

Science

A member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, Stevens supports human embryonic stem cell research and abortion rights, with restrictions.

Energy

Despite objections from other committee members, Stevens refused to swear in the executives of the major oil companies when investigating Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force.

Family

In December 1978, Stevens survived the crash of a Lear jet at the airport, which killed five people, including his first wife, Ann.

Stevens’ son, Ben Stevens, was appointed to the Alaska Senate in 2001 by Democratic Governor Tony Knowles, and is currently the Senate President.

Stevens’ current home in Alaska is in Girdwood.

Recognition

Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Anchorage is named after him.

When he is discussing issues that are especially important to him (such as opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling), he wears a necktie with The Incredible Hulk on it to show his seriousness. Marvel Comics responded by sending him free Hulk paraphernalia and throwing a Hulk party for the Senator. ^*

Stevens is the focus of the Ted Stevens Foundation, a charity established to “assist in educating and informing the public about the career of Senator Ted Stevens.” Tim McKeever, who is chairman of the Foundation and is a lobbyist who was treasurer of Stevens’s campaign, has said that the charity is “nonpartisan and nonpolitical.” ^*

In May of 2006, the Senate Majority Project, a partisan political organization, nominated Stevens as “Drama Queen of the US Senate” for his entertaining tactics. ^*

References

Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper. “Senator’s Way to Wealth Was Paved With Favors.” The Los Angeles Times. December 17, 2003, ^*. A1.
Dana Milbank and Justin Blum. “Document Says Oil Chiefs Met with Cheney Task Force,” The Washington Post. November 16, 2005, ^*

External links

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