Patrick Joseph Leahy is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Vermont. He is Vermont’s longest-serving U.S. senator, as well as the first and only Democratic senator from Burlington, Vermont. Leahy has been legally blind in his left eye since birth. He married Marcelle Pomerleau in 1962; she is bilingual with French Canadian heritage from Quebecois immigrants to Vermont.
About Patrick Leahy in brief
Patrick Joseph Leahy is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Vermont. Leahy held the position of president pro tempore of the United States Senate from December 17, 2012 to January 3, 2015, a position he is expect to hold again following the inauguration of Kamala Harris as Vice President. He is Vermont’s longest-serving U.S. senator, as well as the first and only Democratic senator from Burlington, Vermont. In 2001, Leahy was one of the two U. S. senators targeted by the anthrax attacks that killed five people. In 2012 the Leahys celebrated their 50th anniversary, with Leahy saying, ‘We hate it when we’re apart from one another.’ Leahy has been legally blind in his left eye since birth. He graduated from Saint Michael’s College in 1961 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, and received his J. D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1964. He married Marcelle Pomerleau in 1962; she is bilingual with French Canadian heritage from Quebecois immigrants to Vermont. He has three children: Kevin, Alicia and Mark. He was the first non-Republican Senator from Vermont since 1856, and the only Democrat ever elected to the Senate from the state. His successor, Bernie Sanders, was elected as an independent; he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. In May 1981 Leahy and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy requested that the Senate reject the nomination of John Crowell Jr. as Assistant Agriculture Secretary, because of his opposition to his concealed involvement with his former employer, the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation.
He served as Vermont’s state’s attorney from 1966 to 1970, and was elected to a full term in 1966 and reelected in 1970. In 1986, he faced what was on paper an even stronger challenger in former Governor Richard Snelling, but Leahy turned it back, taking 63 percent of the vote. He won a close race against Vermont’s lone congressman, Richard Mallary, and succeeded retiring 34-year incumbent George Aiken. At 34 years old, he was the youngest Senator in Vermont history. In November 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal that had resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August of that year, he became the only remaining Watergate baby in Congress. After Minnesota Representative Rick Nolan retired from Congress in 2019,. Leahy became the last remaining WatergateBaby in Congress, and he is expected to hold that position until he retires in 2018. He also served as the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee since 2017, and is the former chairman of the Agriculture and Judiciary Committees, and has served on the Senate Judiciary Committee since 2007. He is, to date, the only Senator from Burlington to be elected as a Democrat. He is one of only three Democrats to represent Vermont in either house of Congress since the end of the Civil War. However, two other Vermont Senators have caucused with the Democrats since 2001, Jim Jeffords and Bernie Sanders.
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