Bernie Sanders
American politician and activist (born 1941) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Bernard Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician and activist who is the senior United States senator from Vermont. Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history but has a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, coming second in both campaigns. He is often seen as a leader of the U.S. progressive movement.
Bernie Sanders | |
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United States Senator from Vermont | |
Assumed office January 3, 2007 | |
Preceded by | Jim Jeffords |
Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee | |
Assumed office January 3, 2023 | |
Preceded by | Patty Murray |
Chair of the Senate Democratic Outreach Committee | |
Assumed office January 3, 2017 | |
Leader | Chuck Schumer |
Vice Chair | Catherine Cortez Masto |
Preceded by | Amy Klobuchar[lower-alpha 1] (Steering and Outreach) |
Chair of the Senate Budget Committee | |
In office February 3, 2021 – January 3, 2023 | |
Preceded by | Mike Enzi |
Succeeded by | Sheldon Whitehouse |
Chair of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee | |
In office January 3, 2013 – January 3, 2015 | |
Preceded by | Patty Murray |
Succeeded by | Johnny Isakson |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Vermont's at-large district | |
In office January 3, 1991 – January 3, 2007 | |
Preceded by | Peter Plympton Smith |
Succeeded by | Peter Welch |
37th Mayor of Burlington | |
In office April 6, 1981 – April 4, 1989 | |
Preceded by | Gordon Paquette |
Succeeded by | Peter Clavelle |
Chair of the Liberty Union Party | |
In office 1971–1977 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Bernard Sanders (1941-09-08) September 8, 1941 (age 82) New York City, U.S. |
Political party | Independent (1978–present) |
Other political affiliations |
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Spouses |
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Children | 1[lower-alpha 4] |
Relatives | Larry Sanders (brother) |
Education | |
Occupation |
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Signature | |
Website | |
Born into a working-class Jewish family and raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, Sanders attended Brooklyn College before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student, he was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement. After settling in Vermont in 1968, he ran unsuccessful third-party political campaigns in the early to mid-1970s. He was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 as an independent and was reelected three times. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, representing Vermont's at-large congressional district, later co-founding the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He was a U.S. representative for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, notably becoming the first non-Republican elected to Vermont's Class 1 seat since Whig Solomon Foot was elected in 1850 (Foot was reelected as a Republican in 1856, and Sanders's immediate predecessor, Jim Jeffords, left the Republican party almost immediately after being reelected in 2000). Sanders entered a Senate where Vermont's senior senator, Patrick Leahy, was the first non-Republican to be elected to the U.S. Senate in the post-Civil-War era.
Sanders was reelected to the Senate in 2012 and 2018. He chaired the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee from 2013 to 2015 and the Senate Budget Committee from 2021 to 2023. In January 2023, he became chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and the senior senator and dean of the Vermont congressional delegation upon Leahy's retirement from the Senate.
Sanders was a major candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, receiving the second most votes in each. Despite initially low expectations, his 2016 campaign generated significant grassroots enthusiasm and funding from small-dollar donors, carrying him to victory against eventual nominee Hillary Clinton in 23 primaries and caucuses before he conceded in July.[1] In 2020, his strong showing in early primaries and caucuses made him the front-runner in a historically large field of Democratic candidates. In April 2020, Sanders conceded the nomination to Joe Biden, who had won a series of decisive victories as the field narrowed. He supported both Clinton and Biden in their respective general election campaigns against Donald Trump. He has since emerged as a close ally of Biden.[2][3]
Sanders is credited with influencing a leftward shift in the Democratic Party after his 2016 presidential campaign. An advocate of progressive policies, he is known for his opposition to economic inequality and neoliberalism, and support for workers' self-management. On domestic policy, he supports labor rights, universal and single-payer healthcare, paid parental leave, tuition-free tertiary education, an ambitious Green New Deal to create jobs addressing climate change, and worker control of production through cooperatives, unions, and democratic public enterprises. On foreign policy, he supports reducing military spending, pursuing more diplomacy and international cooperation, and putting greater emphasis on labor rights and environmental concerns when negotiating international trade agreements. Sanders supports workplace democracy, and has praised elements of the Nordic model. Some have compared and contrasted[4] his politics to left-wing populism and the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Bernard Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.[5] His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders (1904–1962),[6] was born in Słopnice, a town in Austrian Galicia that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now in Poland.[7][8] Elias Sanders was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who immigrated to the United States in 1921 and became a paint salesman,[7][9][10] although his family was killed in the Holocaust.[11][12] Bernie's mother, Dorothy Sanders (née Glassberg) (1912–1960), was born in New York City.[13][14] He is the younger brother of Larry Sanders.
Sanders says he became interested in politics at an early age due to his family background.[15] In the 1940s, many of his relatives in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust.[6][14][12]
Sanders lived in Midwood, Brooklyn.[5] He attended elementary school at P.S. 197, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team.[16][17] He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954.[12] His older brother Larry said that during their childhood, the family never lacked for food or clothing, but major purchases, "like curtains or a rug", were not affordable.[18]
Sanders attended James Madison High School, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race.[16] In high school, he lost his first election, finishing last of three candidates for the student body presidency with a campaign that focused on aiding Korean War orphans. Despite the loss, he became active in his school's fundraising activities for Korean orphans, including organizing a charity basketball game.[19] Sanders attended high school with economist Walter Block.[20] When he was 19, his mother died at age 47.[14][12] His father died two years later in 1962 at age 57.[8]
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–1960[21] before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1964.[21] In later interviews, Sanders described himself as a mediocre college student because the classroom was "boring and irrelevant", and said he viewed community activism as more important to his education.[22]
Political activism
Sanders later described his time in Chicago as "the major period of intellectual ferment in my life."[23] While there, he joined the Young People's Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America)[24] and was active in the civil rights movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[14][25] Under his chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of the SNCC.[26] In January 1962, he went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle's segregated campus housing policy. At the protest, Sanders said, "We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments". He and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president's office.[27][28] After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination.[29] After further protests, the University of Chicago ended racial segregation in private university housing in the summer of 1963.[23]
Joan Mahoney, a member of the University of Chicago CORE chapter at the time and a fellow participant in the sit-ins, described Sanders in a 2016 interview as "a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn't terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn't agree with."[30] Sanders once spent a day putting up fliers protesting police brutality, only to notice later that Chicago police had shadowed him and taken them all down.[27] He attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech.[14][27][31] That summer, Sanders was fined $25 (equivalent to $239 in 2022) for resisting arrest during a demonstration in Englewood against segregation in Chicago's public schools.[23][32][33]
In addition to his civil rights activism during the 1960s and 1970s,[26] Sanders was active in several peace and antiwar movements while attending the University of Chicago, becoming a member of the Student Peace Union. He applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War; his application was eventually turned down, by which point he was too old to be drafted. Although he opposed the war, Sanders never criticized those who fought in it, and has strongly supported veterans' benefits throughout his political career.[34][35] He also was briefly an organizer with the United Packinghouse Workers of America while in Chicago.[23] He also worked on the reelection campaign of Leon Despres, a prominent Chicago alderman who opposed then-mayor Richard J. Daley's Democratic Party machine. Sanders said that he spent much of his student years reading history, sociology, psychology, and the works of political authors, from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Erich Fromm—"reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day."[2][36]
Professional history and early years in Vermont
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he worked various jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[22] In 1968, he moved to Stannard, Vermont, a town small in both area and population (88 residents at the 1970 census) within Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom region, because he had been "captivated by rural life". While there, he worked as a carpenter,[24] filmmaker, and writer[37] who created and sold "radical film strips" and other educational materials to schools.[38] He also wrote several articles for the alternative publication The Vermont Freeman.[39] He lived in the area for several years before moving to the more populous Chittenden County in the mid-1970s. During his 2018 reelection campaign, he returned to the town to hold an event with voters and other candidates.[40]
Liberty Union campaigns
From 1969 to 1971, Sanders resided in Montpelier.[41] After moving to Burlington,[42] he began his electoral political career as a member of the Liberty Union Party, a national umbrella party for various socialist-oriented state parties, originating in the anti-war movement and the People's Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate in the special election for U.S. senator in 1972 and in the general election in 1974.[43] In the 1974 senatorial race, he finished third (5,901 votes; 4%), behind 34-year-old Chittenden County state's attorney Patrick Leahy (D; 70,629 votes; 49%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary (R; 66,223 votes; 46%).[44][45]
The 1976 campaign was the zenith of the Liberty Union's influence, with Sanders collecting 11,317 votes for governor and the party. His strong performance forced the down-ballot races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidate for those offices from garnering a majority of votes.[46] But the campaign drained the Liberty Union's finances and energy, and in October 1977, Sanders and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general, Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party.[46][47] During the 1980 presidential election, Sanders was one of three electors for the Socialist Workers Party in Vermont.[48]
After resigning from the Liberty Union Party in 1977, Sanders worked as a writer and as the director of the nonprofit American People's Historical Society (APHS).[49] While with the APHS, he produced a 30-minute documentary about American labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president five times as the Socialist Party candidate.[24][50]
Campaigns
On November 8, 1980, Sanders announced his candidacy for mayor. He formally announced his campaign on December 16 at a City Hall press conference.[51][52] Sanders selected Linda Niedweske as his campaign manager.[53] The Citizens Party attempted to nominate Greg Guma for mayor, but Guma declined, saying it would be "difficult to run against another progressive candidate".[54] Sanders had been convinced to run for the mayoralty by his close friend Richard Sugarman, an Orthodox Jewish professor of religious studies at the University of Vermont, who had shown him a ward-by-ward breakdown of the 1976 Vermont gubernatorial election, in which Sanders had run, that showed him receiving 12% of the vote in Burlington despite only getting 6% statewide.[55]
Sanders initially won the mayoral election by 22 votes against incumbent mayor Gordon Paquette, Richard Bove, and Joseph McGrath, but the margin was later reduced to 10 votes. Paquette did not contest the results of the recount.[56]
Paquette's loss was attributed to his own shortcomings, as he did not campaign or promote his candidacy since neither Sanders nor Bove was seen as a serious challenger. Sanders had not previously won an election.[57] Paquette was also considered to have lost because he proposed an unpopular $0.65 per $100 raise in taxes that Sanders opposed.[58] Sanders spent around $4,000 on his campaign.[59]
Sanders castigated the pro-development incumbent as an ally of prominent shopping center developer Antonio Pomerleau, while Paquette warned of ruin for Burlington if Sanders were elected. The Sanders campaign was bolstered by a wave of optimistic volunteers as well as a series of endorsements from university professors, social welfare agencies, and the police union. The result shocked the local political establishment.[46]
Sanders formed a coalition between independents and the Citizens Party.[60] On December 3, 1982, he announced that he would seek reelection.[61] On January 22, 1983, the Citizens Party voted unanimously to endorse Sanders, although Sanders ran as an independent.[62] He was reelected, defeating Judy Stephany and James Gilson.[63]
Sanders initially considered not seeking a third term, but announced on December 5, 1984, that he would run.[64] He formally launched his campaign on December 7, and was reelected.[65][66] On December 1, 1986, Sanders, who had finished third in the 1986 Vermont gubernatorial election, announced that he would seek reelection to a fourth term as mayor of Burlington, despite close associates saying that he was tired of being mayor.[67] Sanders defeated Democratic nominee Paul Lafayette in the election.[68] He said he would not seek another mayoral term after the 1987 election: "eight years is enough and I think it is time for new leadership, which does exist within the coalition, to come up".[69]
Sanders did not run for a fifth term as mayor. He went on to lecture in political science at Harvard Kennedy School that year and at Hamilton College in 1991.[70]
Administration
During his mayoralty, Sanders called himself a socialist and was described as such in the press.[71][72] During his first term, his supporters, including the first Citizens Party city councilor Terry Bouricius, formed the Progressive Coalition, the forerunner of the Vermont Progressive Party.[73] The Progressives never held more than six seats on the 13-member city council, but they had enough to keep the council from overriding Sanders's vetoes. Under his leadership, Burlington balanced its city budget; attracted a minor league baseball team, the Vermont Reds, then the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds;[14] became the first U.S. city to fund community-trust housing;[74] and successfully sued the local cable television franchise, thereby winning reduced rates for customers.[14]
As mayor, Sanders also led extensive downtown revitalization projects. One of his primary achievements was improving Burlington's Lake Champlain waterfront.[14] In 1981, he campaigned against the unpopular plans by Burlington developer Tony Pomerleau to convert the then-industrial[75] waterfront property owned by the Central Vermont Railway into expensive condominiums, hotels, and offices.[76] He ran under the slogan "Burlington is not for sale" and successfully supported a plan that redeveloped the waterfront area into a mixed-use district featuring housing, parks, and public spaces.[76]
Sanders was a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America throughout the 1980s.[77] In 1985, Burlington City Hall hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky. In his introduction, he praised Chomsky as "a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America" and said that he was "delighted to welcome a person who I think we're all very proud of."[78][79]
Sanders hosted and produced a public-access television program, Bernie Speaks with the Community, from 1986 to 1988.[80][81] He collaborated with 30 Vermont musicians to record a folk album, We Shall Overcome, in 1987.[82][83] That same year, U.S. News & World Report ranked Sanders one of America's best mayors.[84][85] As of 2013[update], Burlington was regarded as one of the most livable cities in the United States.[86][87]
During a trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, Sanders interviewed the mayor of Burlington's sister city Yaroslavl about housing and health care issues in the two cities.[88][89]
When Sanders left office in 1989, Bouricius, a member of the Burlington city council, said that Sanders had "changed the entire nature of politics in Burlington and also in the state of Vermont".[90]
Elections
In 1988, incumbent Republican congressman Jim Jeffords decided to run for the U.S. Senate, vacating the House seat representing Vermont's at-large congressional district. Former Lieutenant Governor Peter P. Smith won the House election with a plurality, securing 41% of the vote. Sanders, who ran as an independent, placed second with 38% of the vote, while Democratic state representative Paul N. Poirier placed third with 19%.[91] Two years later, he ran for the seat again and defeated Smith by a margin of 56% to 39%.[92] Sanders was the first independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Frazier Reams of Ohio won his second term in 1952,[93] as well as the first socialist elected to the House since Vito Marcantonio, from the American Labor Party, who won his last term in 1948.[94][93] Sanders was a representative from 1991 until he became a senator in 2007, winning reelection by large margins except during the 1994 Republican Revolution, when he won by 3%, with 50% of the vote.[95]
Legislation
During his first year in the House, Sanders often alienated allies and colleagues with his criticism of both political parties as working primarily on behalf of the wealthy. In 1991, he co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of mostly liberal Democrats that he chaired for its first eight years,[14] while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or caucus.[96]
In 2005, Rolling Stone called Sanders the "amendment king" for his ability to get more roll call amendments passed than any other congressman during the period since 1995, when Congress was entirely under Republican control. Being an independent allowed him to form coalitions across party lines.[97]
Banking reform
In 1999, Sanders voted and advocated against rolling back the Glass–Steagall legislation provisions that kept investment banks and commercial banks separate entities.[98] He was a vocal critic of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan; in June 2003, during a question-and-answer discussion, Sanders told him he was concerned that he was "way out of touch" and "that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations."[99][100][101][102]
Cancer registries
Concerned by high breast cancer rates in Vermont, on February 7, 1992, Sanders sponsored the Cancer Registries Amendment Act to establish cancer registries to collect data on cancer.[103][104] Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a companion bill in the Senate on October 2, 1992. The Senate bill was passed by the House on October 6 and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush on October 24, 1992.[105]
Firearms and criminal justice
In 1993, Sanders voted against the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks when buying guns and imposed a waiting period on firearm purchasers in the United States; the bill passed by a vote of 238–187.[106][107] He voted against the bill four more times in the 1990s, explaining his Vermont constituents saw waiting-period mandates as more appropriately a state than federal matter.[108]
Sanders did vote for other gun-control measures.[109][106] For example, in 1994, he voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act "because it included the Violence Against Women Act and the ban on certain assault weapons." He was nevertheless critical of the other parts of the bill.[110][111] Although he acknowledged that "clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them", he maintained that governmental policies played a large part in "dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence" and argued that the repressive policies introduced by the bill were not addressing the causes of violence, saying, "we can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails."[112]
Sanders has at times favored stronger law enforcement and sentencing. In 1996, he voted against a bill that would have prohibited police from purchasing tanks and armored carriers.[113][114] In 1998, he voted for a bill that would have increased minimum sentencing for possessing a gun while committing a federal crime to ten years in prison, including nonviolent crimes such as marijuana possession.[113][106][115]
In 2005, Sanders voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.[116] The purpose of the act was to prevent firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been committed with their products.[117] As of 2016[update], he said that he has since changed his position and would vote for legislation to defeat this bill.[118]
Opposition to the Patriot Act
Sanders was a consistent critic of the Patriot Act.[119] As a member of Congress, he voted against the original Patriot Act legislation.[120] After its 357–66 passage in the House, he sponsored and voted for several subsequent amendments and acts attempting to curtail its effects[121] and voted against each reauthorization.[122] In June 2005, he proposed an amendment to limit Patriot Act provisions that allow the government to obtain individuals' library and book-buying records. The amendment passed the House by a bipartisan majority but was removed on November 4 of that year in House–Senate negotiations and never became law.[123]
Opposition to the War in Iraq
Sanders voted against the resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002, and he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists[124] that has been cited as the legal justification for controversial military actions since the September 11 attacks.[125] He especially opposed the Bush administration's decision to start a war unilaterally.[126][127]
Trade policy
In February 2005, Sanders introduced a bill that would have withdrawn the permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status that had been extended to China in October 2000. He said to the House, "Anyone who takes an objective look at our trade policy with China must conclude that it is an absolute failure and needs to be fundamentally overhauled", citing the American jobs being lost to overseas competitors. His bill received 71 co-sponsors but was not sent to the floor for a vote.[128][129]