Letter from America: Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania

Last Tuesday, the Democrats in the Pennsylvania buried Senator Arlen Specter's hopes to compete as a Democratic Senator for his reelection bid in November, 2010. By many counts the 80 year-old Senator was a Houdini of Pennsylvania politics.

He was twice a survivor of cancer and twice a survivor of such close political calls. His senatorial career began in the flush of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 and will come to a close after three decades in the Tea Party era. He has been a relentless interrogator of prospective judges and justices, a force for medical research, and a champion earmarker for his state. He promoted plurality and is considered responsible for an influx of women into the upper chamber.

Senator Specter, however, was a very unpredictable politician. In his long senate career (before switching to the Democratic Party in 2009 in the Obama era), a glorious one by most accounts, he sometimes came at odds with his conservative Republican party. He appeared more conservative than an average Democrat but more liberal and moderate than most Republicans. Thus, when it came to voting on the Senate floor, he was too unpredictable; he was not an ideological demagogue voting on the party line.

His prosecutorial grilling of Robert Bork, a Yale Law Professor, whom Ronald Reagan nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, was key to Bork's defeat. Four years later, Specter defended Clarence Thomas -- nominated by another Republican president, George H.W. Bush -- as fiercely as he had fought Bork.

He shifted his alignments depending on the issue and his analysis of it. His seemingly neutral stance, away from nasty party-line politics, was able to gravitate many Democrats and independents who had always considered him liberal and independent enough to vote for and send to the Capitol House. And this, in spite of his unpredictability with voting! In the post-9/11 era, Specter examined Bush's warrantless wiretapping program in hearings and championed limits on executive power.

The most bizarre such behavior of the Senator was probably that related with the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo-related decision in 2006, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Although that decision had invalidated President George W. Bush’s one-sided effort to set up military commissions for the trial of Guantánamo detainees the apex Court invited the Congress to establish military commissions by legislation.

In spite of the fact that many of the recommendations made by the Bush Administration in the post-9/11 era were a slap to the American constitution and international laws, the Congress had become a rubber stamp to legalize Bush’s inhuman and unconstitutional whims, trying to appear tough on terrorism and any such issues. Not surprisingly, the Congress went with the court’s invitation to abolishing the jurisdiction of all federal courts to hear any habeas corpus petition challenging the continued detention or treatment of any Guantánamo detainee.

Senator Specter, then a Republican and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, denounced the jurisdiction-stripping provision as unconstitutional saying that the bill sought to set back basic rights by some 900 years. He was right. He floated an amendment that would delete the provision, which unfortunately failed on the Senate floor. Then, instead of voting against the bill, in a sudden change of mood, Arlen Specter voted for the bill, which became a law.

A few months later, in March 2007, the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a constitutional challenge to the new law’s elimination of habeas corpus. Senator Specter filed a brief urging the justices to accept the case and declare the law unconstitutional. And once the court agreed to hear the case, Boumediene v. Bush, the senator filed a second brief, even more strongly worded than the first. The jurisdiction-stripping provision was “anathema to fundamental liberty interests,” he declared. This from the very man who voted for the bill!

Many keen observers of the Capitol Hill politics are baffled by such seemingly erratic, flip-flop behavior of one of the best legal minds on the Senate floor. I think while his heart was often in the right place, knowing the difference between right and wrong, Senator Specter sometimes compromised his gut feelings to go with the flow. Such behavior is deplorable, but nothing unusual with most politicians!

Looking at his long political career, many Americans, including Pennsylvania voters, may not be aware that Specter started as a registered Democrat who ran for Philadelphia district attorney as a Republican in 1964, and came full circle back to the Democratic Party in 2009. In 2009, when he reinforced his new Democratic credentials, he voted 96 percent of the time with President Barack Obama. However, between 2001 and 2005, as a Republican senator he was very loyal to George W. Bush, voting with him 85 percent to 89 percent of the time.

Specter was a brilliant lawyer who graduated from the Ivy League school U Penn in 1951, majoring in International Relations. During the Korean War, he served as an Air Force officer. In 1956, he graduated from the Yale Law School and joined the Pennsylvania Bar. Later he became an aide to the Warren Commission in the 1960s, investing JFK's assassination. He came up with the single-bullet theory -- that a lone gunman had killed President John F. Kennedy. In 1976, Specter ran in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania and was defeated by John Heinz. In 1978, he was defeated in the primary for Governor of Pennsylvania by Dick Thornburgh. In 1980, he ran for the Senatorial election, and won, representing the state of Pennsylvania, a privilege and honor that he proudly and dutifully held for the next 30 years by winning four more times (1986, 1992, 1998 and 2004).

Senator Specter served longer than any U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history, probably delivering more money to more organizations in 30 years than any human being from this state. He was a senior ranking member in the Senate. No matter who wins the November senatorial race between Congressman Joe Sestak (Democrat) and Pat Toomey (Republican), the winner would be a junior Senator on the Senate floor, and would fail to bring the kind of money Specter brought to the state.

As I see it, Senator Specter's loss in the Democratic senate primary is a loss to the state of Pennsylvania. He will be sorely missed by most Pennsylvanians.

- Asian Tribune -