Ted Stevens Totally Explained

Everything about Theodore F Stevens totally explained

Theodore Fulton Stevens (born November 18, 1923) is the senior United States Senator from Alaska. As the longest serving Republican in the Senate, Stevens served as President pro tempore from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007.
   Stevens has had a six-decade career of government service, beginning with his service in World War II. In the 1950s, he held senior positions in the Eisenhower Interior Department. He has served continuously in the Senate since December 1968.
   When the 110th Congress convened and Democrats took control of the chamber, he was replaced as President pro tem by Robert Byrd, and thus took Byrd's previous honorary role of "President pro tempore emeritus". He is one of three persons, alongside Byrd and Strom Thurmond, who served previously as president pro tem and remained in Senate.
   Stevens is currently under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for possible corruption based on his relationship with an oil service company executive who has pled guilty to bribing Alaskan legislators, including Stevens' son, former State Senator Ben Stevens. On July 30, 2007, the IRS and the FBI searched Stevens' home in Alaska.

Early life and career

Childhood and youth

Stevens was born November 18, 1923 in, the third of four children, in a small cottage built by his paternal grandfather after the marriage of his father, George A. Stevens, to Gertrude S. Chancellor. The family later lived in Chicago, where George Stevens was an accountant before the stock market crash of 1929 instigated the Great Depression, ending his job. Around this time, when Ted Stevens was six years old, his parents divorced, and Stevens and his three siblings went back to Indianapolis to live with their paternal grandparents, followed shortly thereafter by their father, who developed problems with his eyes and went blind for several years. Stevens' mother moved to California and sent for Stevens' siblings as she could afford to, but Stevens stayed in Indianapolis helping to care for his father and a mentally retarded cousin, Patricia Acker, who also lived with the family. The only adult in the household with a job was Stevens' grandfather. Stevens helped to support the family by working as a newsboy, and would later remember selling a lot of newspapers on March 1, 1932, when newspaper headlines blared the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping. attending for a semester. After scoring near the top of an aptitude test for flight training, Stevens was transferred to preflight training in and received his wings in early 1944. He went on to Bergstrom Field in Texas, where he trained to fly P-38s, but due to an incident during graduation, in which a graduate booed at the colonel who delivered the graduation address, Stevens never flew a fighter in combat. Instead, Stevens later recalled, "Suddenly we were copilots in a troop carrier squad." He was discharged from the Army Air Forces in March 1946.
   While at Harvard, Stevens wrote a paper on maritime law which received honorable mention for the Addison Brown prize, a Harvard Law School award made for the best essay by a student on a subject related to private international law or maritime law. whose scholarship Justice Jay Rabinowitz of the Alaska Supreme Court praised 45 years later, telling the Anchorage Daily News in 1994 that the high court had issued a recent opinion citing the article. Twenty years previously Ely had been executive assistant to Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur during the Hoover administration, and by 1950 headed a prominent law firm specializing in natural resources issues. was trying to sell coal to the military, and Stevens was assigned to handle his legal affairs. In 2000, the Alaska Legislature voted to rename the airport the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.
   Stevens' son, Ben Stevens, was appointed to the Alaska Senate in 2001 by Democratic Governor Tony Knowles, and was the Senate President until the fall of 2006.
   Aside from Ben, Stevens and his first wife Ann had two daughters, Susan and Beth, and two sons, Walter and Ted. He and his second wife Catherine have a daughter, Lily.
   Stevens' current home in Alaska is in Girdwood.

Early Alaska career

In 1952, while still working for Norcutt Ely, Stevens volunteered for the presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower, writing position papers for the campaign on western water law and lands. By the time Eisenhower won the election that November, Stevens had acquired contacts who told him, "We want you to come over to Interior." Stevens left his job with Ely, but a job in the Eisenhower administration didn't come through and, traveling on a $600 loan from Clasby, they drove across country from Washington, D.C. and up the Alaska Highway in the dead of winter, arriving in Fairbanks in February 1953. Stevens later recalled kidding Gov. Walter Hickel about the loan. "He likes to say that he came to Alaska with 37 cents in his pocket," he said of Hickel. "I came $600 in debt." having already delayed his resignation by several months at the request of Justice Department officials newly appointed by Eisenhower, who asked McNealy to delay his resignation until Eisenhower could appoint a replacement. which confirmed him on March 30, 1954. "Ted would get red in the face, blow up and stalk out of the courtroom," a former court clerk later recalled of Stevens' relationship with Taylor. By the time he arrived in June 1956, McKay had resigned in order to run for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Oregon Seaton, a newspaper publisher from Nebraska, The 55 delegates also elected three unofficial representatives, all Democrats, as unofficial delegates to Congress: Ernest Gruening and William Egan as U.S. "senators" and Ralph Rivers as U.S. "representative." "It's still in the law but it's never been exercised," Stevens later recollected. "Now that the problem with Russia is gone, it's surplusage. But it's a special law that only applies to Alaska." to work with him in the Interior Department. "We were violating the law," Stevens told a researcher in an October 1977 oral history interview for the Eisenhower Library. "[W]e were lobbying from the executive branch, and there's been a statute against that for a long time.... We more or less, I'd say, masterminded the House and Senate attack from the executive branch."

Alaska House of Representatives

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.

U.S. Senator

Elections

In 1968, Stevens ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, but lost in the primary to Anchorage Mayor Elmer E. Rasmuson. Rasmuson lost the general election to Democrat Mike Gravel. In December 1968, after the death of Democratic Senator Bob Bartlett, Governor Walter Joseph Hickel appointed Stevens to the U.S. Senate.
   In a special election in 1970, Stevens was elected to finish the term of Bartlett with 60% of the vote. Stevens has been reelected six times since, in the 1972, 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996 and 2002 elections. His current term will expire in January 2009. Since his first election to a full term in 1972, Stevens has never received less than 66% of the vote.
   Stevens has announced he'll run again for an Alaska seat in the US Senate in 2008.
   Stevens' campaign political action committee is called the "Northern Lights PAC."

Committees

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 most senior republican senator and former president pro tempore Strom Thurmond retired.
Stevens chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005, except for the 18 months when Democrats controlled the chamber. The chairmanship gave Stevens considerable influence among fellow Senators, who relied on him for home-state project funds. Due to Republican Party rules that limited committee chairmanships to six years, Stevens gave up the Appropriations gavel at the start of the 109th Congress, in January 2005. He chaired the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation during the 109th Congress. He is currently the ranking member on the committee.
Stevens also has been Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate Ethics Committee, the Arms Control Observer Group, and the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress.

Political issues

Internet and 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, 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. For example, he referred to the internet as "not a big truck," but a "series of tubes" that could be clogged with information. He also complained that "an Internet [sic] was sent by my staff" and that commercial traffic delayed it by five days; it's believed he was referring to an email which was sent by his staff. 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 This Internet phenomenon sparked mainstream media attention, and was prominently featured on several episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. "Series of tubes" has now become an Internet meme.

Logging

Stevens has been a long time logging proponent. Recently, he's strongly supported a plan that would allow of roadless old growth forest, a refuge for endangered wildlife, to be clearcut. He believes that this would revive Alaska's logging industry and bring jobs to unemployed loggers. However, the proposal would mean that thousands of miles of roads would be constructed at the expense of the Forest Service, judged to cost taxpayers 200,000 dollars per job created.

Abortion

Stevens considers himself "pro-choice". According to Ontheissues.org and NARAL, Ted Stevens has a mildly pro-life voting record, despite some notable pro-choice votes.
However, as a former member of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, Stevens presumably supported human embryonic stem cell research.

Global Warming

Stevens, once an avowed critic of anthropogenic climate change, began actively supporting legislation to combat climate change in early 2007. "Global climate change is a very serious problem for us, becoming more so every day," he said at a Senate hearing, adding that he was "concerned about the human impacts on our climate."
However, in September 2007, Stevens said:

We're at the end of a long, long term of warming. 700 to 900 years of increased temperature, a very slow increase. We think we're close to the end of that. If we're close to the end of that, that means that we'll starting getting cooler gradually, not very rapidly, but cooler once again and stability might come to this region for a period of another 900 years.

Criticism of political positions and actions

Ted Stevens has taken criticism for a wide variety of positions and actions taken in the Senate. This includes placing a secret hold on a bill that would allow easier accountability and research of all federal funding measures, describing the Internet as a "series of tubes" when taking a strong alliance with the telecommunications industry against network neutrality, and supporting perceived pork barrel projects such as the Gravina Island Bridge and the Knik Arm Bridge (collectively known as the "Bridges to Nowhere" by their opponents). He threatened to resign from the Senate if Congress targeted only Alaska's annual transportation funds to help repair Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina damage if not required from every other State proportionally. The funding in consideration would have been redirected from funds restricted by Congress for Alaskan bridges. Critics falsely portrayed the funds as an additional federal earmark for the Alaskan bridges. Citizens Against Government Waste is a frequent critic of Stevens' affinity for pork and keeps a list of his projects.
Additionally, he received criticism for introducing a bill in January 2007 that would heavily restrict access to social networking sites from public schools and libraries. Sites falling under the language of this bill could include MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Wikipedia and Reddit.

Ethical issues and federal investigations

In December 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Stevens had taken advantage of lax Senate rules to use his political influence to earn a large amount of his personal wealth. According to the article, while Stevens was already a millionaire "thanks to investments with businessmen who received government contracts or other benefits with his help," the law maker who is in charge of $800 billion a year, writes "preferences he wrote into law" that he benefits from. In June, the Anchorage Daily News reported that a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., heard evidence in May about the expansion of Stevens' Girdwood home and other matters connecting Stevens to Veco. In mid-June, FBI agents questioned several aides who work for Stevens as part of the investigation. In July, Washingtonian magazine reported that Stevens had hired "Washington’s most powerful and expensive lawyer", Brendan Sullivan Jr., in response to the investigation. Stevens' Alaska home was raided by the FBI and IRS on July 30, 2007.

Former aide McCabe

The Justice Department is also examining whether federal funds that Stevens steered to the Alaska SeaLife Center may have enriched a former aide. Currently the United States Department of Commerce and the Interior Department's inspector general are investigating "how millions of dollars that Stevens, R-Alaska, obtained for the nonprofit Alaska SeaLife Center were spent." The airstrip would connect the roughly 100 permanent residents of Akutan, but the biggest beneficiary is the Seattle-based Trident Seafoods Corp. that operates "one of the world’s largest seafood processing plants on the volcanic island in the Aleutians."

Other notes

The Ted Stevens Foundation is a charity established to "assist in educating and informing the public about Senator Ted Stevens". The chairman is Tim McKeever, a lobbyist who was treasurer of Stevens' 2004 campaign. In May 2006, McKeever said that the charity was "nonpartisan and nonpolitical," and that Stevens doesn't raise money for the foundation, although he's attended some fund-raisers.
   When he's discussing issues that are especially important to him (such as opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling), Stevens wears a necktie with The Incredible Hulk on it to show his seriousness. Marvel Comics has sent him free Hulk paraphernalia and thrown a Hulk party for him.
   On December 21, 2005, Senator Stevens said that the vote to block drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge "has been the saddest day of my life," .
   In May 2006, the Senate Majority Project, a partisan political organization, nominated Stevens as "Drama Queen of the US Senate" for his "entertaining tactics".
   On April 13, 2007, Senator Stevens was recognized as being the longest serving Republican senator in history with a career spanning over 38 years. His colleague, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), referred to Stevens as 'The Strom Thurmond of the Arctic Circle'. November 18, 2003, the senator's 80th birthday, was declared "Senator Ted Stevens Appreciation Day" by the Governor of Alaska, Frank H. Murkowski.
   Stevens delivered a eulogy of Gerald R. Ford at the 38th President's funeral ceremony on December 30, 2006.

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