In the final days of his 48-year career in the U.S. Senate, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy bid his colleagues farewell in an emotional floor speech Tuesday morning — and called on them to put aside partisan politics for the good of the country.
Elected to his first term in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, Leahy harkened back to his entrance into the upper chamber, saying, “I began my time in the Senate in the aftermath of a constitutional crisis.”
“And as I leave,” he continued, “the nation is coping with strains and challenges of other kinds, including very real threats to the whole concept of a working democracy, the sanctity of our Constitution, our elections, and the strength of the rule of law.”
In just two weeks on Jan. 3, when he escorts U.S. Sen.-elect Peter Welch to his swearing-in, Leahy expects to enter the Senate chamber for the final time as a U.S. senator and walk out a civilian for the first time in nearly five decades. Welch, Vermont’s Democratic U.S. House member for nearly 16 years, was elected this November to fill Leahy’s seat.
When he was sworn in to the Senate as a 34-year-old in 1975, Leahy said Tuesday, the body was “far from perfect.” For one thing, he had no female colleagues. And serving alongside him were lawmakers who had fought hard against landmark civil rights legislation, including some who had signed the anti-integration Southern Manifesto.
“Progress was a long way away” at the time, Leahy said. But he also mourned the collegiality and bipartisanship among senators that he suggested did not exist in the chamber anymore — at least to the extent it once did. Cooperation, he said, “was the norm, not the exception. It was ingrained in the fabric of what it meant to be a United States senator.”
“The overwhelming majority of senators believed they were here to do a job, not just score political points or reduce debate oratory to bumper sticker slogans,” Leahy said.
Today, he said, the Senate looks different than it did when he first entered it, and the institution “is broken in too many places.”
“Some of that change is good, a lot of it is tragic, and all of it simply is what it is,” Leahy said. “I tell my colleagues, ‘You can point fingers, or you can point the way forward to something better.’ That’s America, isn’t it?”
David Carle, Leahy’s press secretary of 26 years — and the longest serving press secretary in congressional history, Carle noted — told VtDigger on Tuesday that he estimated that more than 40 current Leahy staffers, dozens of former staffers and Leahy’s family piled into the Senate chamber’s benches to watch the farewell address. Welch also joined. Most senators stayed for the duration of Leahy’s speech. Carle quipped that the Capitol press gallery was fuller than is typical for a farewell speech.
It was when Leahy began thanking his staff and family that he became choked up. “One of the problems with being half Irish and half Italian is that sometimes your emotions get the better of you,” he joked.
It is typical for politicos, when speaking of Leahy’s legacy, to mention his wife, Marcelle Leahy, in their second breath. In his own floor speech paying tribute to Leahy on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Sen. Leahy is “just one-half of the equation. The other half, of course, is Marcelle, an amazing, amazing person.” From the lectern, Schumer blew a kiss to where she sat in the gallery.
Leahy recalled, “I was 19 and she was 17 when we met. I took one look at Marcelle, and I knew I wanted to go on every journey together. Sixty-three years later, we are still on that journey, and she is still my closest friend, my partner and my anchor.”
It is common for Leahy to make self-deprecating jokes about his first, unlikely win to the Senate. A 34-year-old state’s attorney at the time, he was the youngest senator ever elected by Vermonters, as well as the first Democrat and first Catholic.
Also a self-proclaimed “accidental senator” is U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who admitted to his colleagues on Tuesday that his own first Senate candidacy in 2010 was considered a “real, real longshot.” Just weeks into his first term, the Delaware Democrat recounted in a tribute speech, he was “summoned” to Leahy’s Capitol Hill office, where the then-seventh-term senator “thundered” at him.
“I’m thinking of an obscure county elected official, someone no one thought could win, someone with none of the qualifications or experience for a United States senator, someone 99th in seniority,” Coons recalled Leahy saying. “Who am I thinking about?”
“And I shrank back in my chair and said, ‘Why, Mr. Chairman, clearly, you’re thinking of me,’ ” Coons said.
“No, me,” Leahy responded, according to Coons. “When I first got here as a (34)-year-old former county prosecutor, everyone said I was an accidental senator. Today, you call me chairman. … Don’t ever forget this moment and how it feels — your awe at this place.”
Now exiting as the most senior member of the current Senate, the third-longest-serving senator in U.S. history, the person who has cast the second-most votes in Senate history and the third person in line to the presidency, Leahy mused on Tuesday about what he would now say to himself at 34, “nervously walking for the first time onto the Senate floor.”
“ ‘Don’t lose that sense of awe, kid,’ ” Leahy said to his younger self. “ ‘Hold on to it. Treasure it. Don’t even for a minute forget what a privilege and a responsibility it is to serve here.’
“I never have forgotten.”