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Stevens reflects on a changed Senate Alaska’s senior senator says drilling in ANWR will pass, in spite of professional campaign by extreme environmentalists Mary Pemberton Associated Press Writer
U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska won’t be tucking away his Incredible Hulk tie anytime soon.
At age 82, Stevens is the most senior Republican in the Senate and third in line to the presidency, but a drubbing he received last month has some asking if the senator is ready to call it quits.
There have been signs of discontent. There was the threat Stevens made about quitting the Senate if he lost the “Bridges to Nowhere” money. Later, he called it “the saddest day of my life” when he again lost a fight to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling.
Is Stevens thinking about stepping down?
Hardly. He’s taking names.
Stevens, who likes to wear the Hulk tie when waging an important fight in the Senate, may have some bruised feelings but he’s a long way from folding. Stevens: staying for ANWR “I’m going to stay and get ANWR,” Stevens said recently at a news conference in Anchorage. “If they want to get rid of me, they will have to pass ANWR.”
Stevens — known for his quick flashes of temper and his ability to bring gobs of federal money back to his home state — sounds more hurt than angry when asked about what occurred recently in the Senate. The rough treatment came when he staged two fights, one to open the refuge in northeast Alaska to oil drilling and the other to keep $450 million in transportation funds for two bridges, dubbed by critics as the “Bridges to Nowhere.”
“When I first went there, you would never hear a senator talk about another senator the way they spoke about me that night,” Stevens said about the ANWR fight. “There are people I’ve considered to be personal friends without regard to politics, and they were turning into vipers as far as I was concerned.”
Stevens angered some of his colleagues when he tried to open the refuge to drilling by attaching a measure to a must-pass defense spending bill. Anti-drilling forces united around freshman Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who described Stevens’ tactics as “legislative blackmail” and “trickery.”
Stevens’ longtime friend, 88-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., got up to oppose Stevens, arguing that Republicans were breaking the rules to achieve their political purposes.
In the end, in what was a crushing defeat for Stevens, the effort to open ANWR fell short by three votes.
Although Byrd’s statements were “tough to take,” Stevens said he is not including his old friend among the senators he won’t associate with any more.
“I’ve written them off,” he said.
He refused to say who the senators were. “I’m not going to name anybody. Why would I do that?” he said. Senate has changed After 36 years in the Senate, Stevens said the place has changed. No longer can colleagues with opposing political views argue passionately for or against an issue and then play tennis or go swimming afterward.
“It is a different world,” he said. “The extreme venom on the floor ... That never would have happened in days gone by.”
Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said cooperation is on the decline in the Senate.
“With the increased obstruction and partisan politics from Democrats, including on issues like ANWR, the comity and trust in the Senate has certainly declined,” she said in an e-mail. “It’s unfortunate that things which are important to the people of Alaska have fallen victim to that — despite Senator Stevens’ best efforts and history of working in a bipartisan effort.”
As far as the ANWR issue, Stevens said he was counting on help from certain senators who had come to him for help over the years when he was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the committee that allocates billions in federal money. Stevens held the chairmanship from 1997 through 2004.
“We missed this by three votes that night, but we had those votes. It changed in the last few minutes,” Stevens said, anger etching his voice. “They needed help and ... I’ve helped a great many of them.” Barrage from extremists Stevens has been fighting for a quarter century to open ANWR to drilling. During the most recent fight, he said he was under a constant barrage from “extremist environmental groups” over the drilling issue and an “extreme taxpayer union” over the bridge issue.
The attacks were professional, coordinated and effective in manipulating the media, he said.
“I am Harry Potter’s wicked wizard in the Chicago paper. They also made me King Kong,” he said. “It is character assassination as far as I’m concerned.”
The situation got so bad at one point that Stevens threatened to quit the Senate if the bridge money was stripped from the transportation bill. Congress dropped the earmark for the bridge money but let Alaska keep the millions anyway. The state now will decide how to spend it.
Stevens said the hardest part of being a senator is the personal nature of the attacks on him.
“It gets a little tiresome,” he said.
He also said it was hard to deal with the “absolute duplicity” of some people in the Senate.
“It is so vituperative now. It is really bad,” he said.
Stevens may feel ganged up on but he remains a political powerhouse — one that stands just 5-feet-7 1/2 inches tall and weighs 160 pounds. He blames a 2-inch loss in height to back surgeries.
“As a result of three back operations, I have sort of been reduced in size,” he said, chuckling.
However, as Senate President Pro Tempore and chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, he still stands tall in the Senate, and he knows it.
“I’m here, I’m going to stay and get ANWR, there’s no question about it. It’s going to happen,” he said.
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