Subject:  It's time for Kathleen Townsend to run for the Senate! |
Author:
Joe
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Date Posted: 19:55:22 03/11/05 Fri
Senator Paul S. Sarbanes is not running for re-election. After 6 years of BUSH, the people are ready to elect a Kennedy. Let's all do all we can to see to it that she runs. Of course, if she does not run, there is always her Shriver cousin....=)
March 11, 2005
Senator Sarbanes Won't Run for Re-election
By DAVID STOUT
ASHINGTON, March 11 - Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, a son of Greek immigrants who became the longest-serving United States senator in Maryland history, said today that he would not run for a sixth term next year.
"It was not my ambition to stay there until they carried me out," Mr. Sarbanes, a Democrat, said in a news conference at his Baltimore office, according to The Associated Press. "It was just the right time. We think we've served long and well and honorably, and we're very comfortable with this decision."
Mr. Sarbanes, 72, said his health was not a factor in his decision, The A.P. said.
The senator has had a generally liberal voting record in his three decades in the chamber. He won his most recent re-election, in 2000, by a margin of 63 to 37 percent. Although Senator Sarbanes was considered nearly invincible as an incumbent, and although Maryland elected a Republican, Robert Ehrlich, governor in 2002 over the Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Mr. Sarbanes's departure may offer only a nominal opportunity for Republicans to add to their 55 seats in the Senate.
Despite Mr. Ehrlich's victory, Maryland has tended to be Democratic in recent years. Senator John Kerry easily carried it last year over President Bush, and Vice President Al Gore trounced Mr. Bush there in 2000.. And Maryland's other senator, Barbara Mikulski, is also a Democrat, first elected in 1986 and re-elected last November by an overwhelming majority.
Mr. Sarbanes declined to speculate on who would run for his seat, but said he expected a Democrat to win. "We've a number of very able Democrats," he said,. "I'm confident that one of them will be elected to the United States Senate in 2006, and I will do everything I can to bring around that result."
Mr. Sarbanes became familiar to millions of American television viewers during the House impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. He was a member of the House Judiciary Committee and introduced the first article of impeachment, for obstruction of justice, against the president.
After the collapse of the Enron Corporation in 2001, Mr. Sarbanes, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, convened hearings on abuses in the accounting industry. (The fall of Enron took many investors by surprise; its shaky situation was later found to have been masked in part by misleading balance sheets.)
In 2002, Mr. Sarbanes was a principal sponsor, along with Representative Mike Oxley, Republican of Ohio, of a law to tighten standards in the accounting industry, in part by creating an independent standards board.
Mr. Sarbanes served four years in the Maryland State Legislature before being elected in 1970 to the House of Representatives, where he served for three terms before winning his first Senate race in 1976.
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