FEINGOLD: A New Democratic Party

Russ Feingold is an independent voice for Wisconsin and the nation in the United States Senate - an effective legislator who works across party lines, and a respected leader in both domestic and foreign policy.

A leading defender of privacy and personal freedoms, Feingold cast the Senate's lone vote against the USA PATRIOT Act, and has fought to change the Act to protect the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. He strongly opposed the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and was the first Senator to call for a timetable to redeploy troops out of Iraq. Well known for pushing through campaign finance reform in the Senate with Republican Senator John McCain, Feingold has also been a tireless advocate for restoring fiscal discipline in Congress and reducing the federal deficit.



So why am I blogging about a random Senator from Wisconsin? I'd read and heard things here and there about him so I did some more research and found some pretty interesting things.

Feingold's senatorial career began in 1992, with a victory over incumbent Republican Senator Bob Kasten. Feingold, who had little name recognition in the state and was campaigning in a primary against a pair of millionaire opponents, adopted several proposals to gain the electorate's attention. The most memorable of these was a series of five promises written on Feingold's garage door in the form of a contract[8]. These were:

I will rely on Wisconsin citizens for most of my contributions.
I will live in Middleton, Wisconsin. My children will go to school here and I will spend most of my time here in Wisconsin.
I will accept no pay raise during my six-year term in office.
I will hold a "Listening Session" in each of Wisconsin's 72 counties each year of my six-year term in office.
I will hire the majority of my Senate staff from individuals who are from Wisconsin or have Wisconsin backgrounds.

Feingold is also a well-known advocate for reductions in pork barrel spending and corporate welfare. Citizens Against Government Waste, the Concord Coalition, and Taxpayers for Common Sense, three nonpartisan organizations dedicated to those causes, have repeatedly commended him.[40]

Feingold, who was elected to Congress on a promise not to accept pay raises while in office, has so far returned over $50,000 in such raises to the U.S. Treasury.[41] In addition, he is notoriously frugal in his office's spending, and sends back the money that he does not use. In one six-month period in 1999, for example, his office received $1.787 million in appropriations and returned $145,000, a higher percentage than any other senator.[42]

Feingold was the only senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act when first voted on in 2001.[43] At the time, Feingold stated that provisions in the act infringed upon citizens' civil liberties.[44]

When the bill was up for renewal in late December 2005, Feingold led a bipartisan coalition of senators that included Lisa Murkowski, Ken Salazar, Larry Craig, Dick Durbin, and John Sununu to remove some of the act's more controversial provisions. He led a successful filibuster against renewal of the act. This ultimately led to a compromise on some of its provisions. This compromise bill passed the Senate on March 2, 2006, by a vote of 89-10. Feingold was among the ten senators who voted nay, stating that the bill still lacked necessary protections for some civil liberties.



Following Democratic victories in the November 2006 mid-term elections, Feingold announced that he would not run for president in 2008. He said that running for president would detract from his focus on the Senate, and the likely prying into his recent divorce "would dismantle both my professional life (in the Senate) and my personal life."[1] In his parting comments, he warned his supporters against supporting anyone for the presidency who voted for the Iraq War, whether they later regretted it or not, saying his first choice for president in 2008 was someone who voted against the war, and his second choice is someone who wasn't in Congress but spoke out against the war at the time.[29]

On February 22nd 2008, he stated that he voted for Barack Obama as the Democratic Party nominee for the 2008 Presidential Election.

On August 1st, Russ Feingold wrote to the president
http://feingold.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/08/08/20080801sp.html