Born in Garnett, Kansas and raised in Parker, Kansas, Sam Brownback was born to a farming family of German descent who settled in Kansas after leaving Pennsylvania following the Civil War [2]. Brownback was state president of Future Farmers of America, and eventually went on to become the national vice president from 1976-1977.[3] While at Kansas State University, he was elected student body president and was a member of Alpha Gamma Rho. He received his J.D. from the University of Kansas in 1982.
He was a broadcaster, teacher,[citation needed] 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 1990-1991, 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 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, also known as the Helsinki Commission. He is the current Chairman of the Helsinki Commission, which monitors compliance with international agreements reached in cooperation with Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
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 married to the former Mary Stauffer, heiress to a Topeka, Kansas newspaper fortune. The couple are the parents of five children (three daughters and two sons; two of the children are adopted).
Raised as a Methodist, Brownback later joined a nondenominational evangelical church, and in 2002 he became Catholic.[4]
According to a profile in Rolling Stone by Jeff Sharlet, Brownback first ran for Congress in 1994 as a moderate, but between the campaign and the start of his term changed his views so that he entered the House as one of the most conservative members of the freshman class of ’94. Brownback told Rolling Stone that he had also moved from mainline Protestantism to evangelicalism, and that in 1994 he became involved with The Family or The Fellowship, a deliberately low profile network of mostly Christian conservative activists and politicians.
Brownback defines himself as a social conservative. He cites former Senator Jesse Helms as a model. He is strongly pro-life, having referred to the number of abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade as “a holocaust.” Columnist George Will interviewed him on the topic: And he says the youngest voters, ages 18 to 25, are the most pro-life cohort. They were born, he (Brownback) says, when abortion rates were highest, so “many of them feel they’re the survivors of a holocaust: one in four of their compatriots are not here.” Actually, almost one in three: the abortion rate peaked in 1983 at 30.4 percent.[5] Brownback was a co-sponsor of the Constitution Restoration Act, which would have limited the power of federal courts to rule on church/state issues. The legislation had little chance of passing, but it served to rally support from religious conservatives. Brownback told Rolling Stone that he chairs the Senate Values Action Team, an off-the-record weekly meeting of representatives from religious conservative organizations founded by former Representative Tom DeLay.
With the departure from the Senate of Rick Santorum, Brownback is the leading opponent of same-sex marriage and other legislation favored by gay rights organizations. He is in favor of an amendment to the Constitution banning not just same-sex marriage but civil unions.[citation needed]
He favors teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.[citation needed]
While believing there is no inherent right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution (as asserted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v Wade), yet he expresses disapproval of President Bush‘s assertions on the legality of the NSA wiretapping program.[6] These positions are not inconsistent, in that the legality or otherwise of the NSA wiretap program is not dependent on the right to privacy asserted in Roe v Wade and later cases. In accordance with his Roman Catholic beliefs (after he converted in 2002), he has, however, taken a moderate approach to capital punishment. In a speech on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he questioned the current use of the death penalty as potentially incongruent with the notion of a culture of life, and suggesting for its employment in a more limited fashion.[7]
Senator Brownback has stated that he opposes President Bush’s proposed 2007 troop surge in Iraq, but he also condemned the Democrats strategy to “cut and run“:
It does mean that there must be bipartisan agreement for our military commitment on Iraq. We cannot fight a war with the support of only one political party. And it does mean that the parties in Iraq–Sunni, Shi’a and Kurds–must get to a political agreement, to a political equilibrium. I think most people agree that a cut and run strategy does not serve our interest at all, nor those of the world, nor those of the region, nor those of the Iraqi people. So I invite my colleagues, all around, particularly on the other side of the aisle, to indicate what level of commitment they can support.“[8]
— Senator Sam Brownback, U.S. Senate floor speech, January 16, 2007”
According to an Associated Press report by reporter Laurie Kellman[9], “Brownback appeared with three children adopted from in vitro fertilization clinics” to coincide with a Senate debate over the Cord Blood Stem Cell Act of 2005 to show his support for the bill and adult stem cell research and to demonstrate his belief that these children and others like them, conceived through in vitro fertilization, may not exist today if as embryos they were used in embryonic stem cell research. According to the Religious Freedom Coalition, children conceived through the in vitro process are known as “snowflake children.”[10] The term, as proponents explain, is an extension of the idea that the embryos are “frozen and unique,” and in that way are similar to snowflakes.[11] Brownback supports the use of cord blood stem cells for research and treatment, instead of embryonic stem cells and was one of the sponsors of the bill in the Senate.[12]
Brownback 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.[13] He is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network, which called him a “champion of Darfur” in its Darfur scorecard, primarily for his early advocacy of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act.[14]
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,[15] as well as a bill which would require the disclosure of Medicare payment rate information.[16]
In December 2005, Brownback advocated using Washington, DC as a “laboratory” for a flat tax. He stated, “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.”[17] Some residents of the District believe that the proposed system of taxation would seem to only further what many believe to be the District’s taxation without representation. 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.”[18]
On September 27, 2006, Brownback introduced a bill called the Truth in Video Game Rating Act (S.3935), which would regulate the rating system of computer and video games
On December 4, 2006, Brownback formed an exploratory committee, thus taking the first steps toward candidacy. He has announced his Presidential bid as of December 5, 2006 on his website.[19] His expressed views position him in the social conservative wing of the Republican party. He has also stressed his fiscal conservatism. “I am an economic, a fiscal, a social and a compassionate conservative,” he said in December 2006.[20]
Brownback’s close advisors for his presidential bid, as listed by the Washington Post [21] are David Kensinger, a political consultant who is a former executive director of GOPAC and former Brownback chief of staff; Rob Wasinger, Brownback’s chief of staff in 2005; and Paul Wilson, a media consultant with Wilson Grand Communications. Also listed as “playing a key role” was Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza.
On January 20, 2007, in Topeka, Brownback announced that he was running for President in 2008.[22] If elected President in 2008, Brownback will have been a United States Senator for 12 years, equivalent to two full terms as senator.
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