Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)

U.S. Senator (since January 2007)

(Melina Mara/TWP)

Why She Matters

The first female U.S. senator elected from Minnesota, Klobuchar has spent her first years in office focusing on the middle-class, energy policy and the economy. A practicing attorney for many years before entering politics, Klobuchar vaulted from her position as Hennepin County attorney straight to the U.S. Senate. Her platform of "Minnesota common-sense" as well as her depiction of 2006 challenger Mark Kennedy (R) as a "rubber stamp for President Bush" rocketed her to Washington by a 20-point margin of victory.

Klobuchar has advocated relentlessly for issues she believes are important to middle-class Minnesotans, introducing legislation on lead-contaminated toys and early-termination fees for cellphone contracts. After her first ten months in the Senate, her approval ratings from Minnesotans were the highest of any Minnesota senator this decade.

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Background

At a Glance

Career History: Hennepin County attorney (1998 to 2006); attorney (1985 to 1998)
Birthday: May 25, 1960
Hometown: Plymouth, Minn.
Alma Mater: Yale University, B.A., 1982; University of Chicago, J.D., 1985
Spouse: John Bessler
Religion: Protestant
Committees: Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Commerce, Science and Transportation ; Judiciary ; Joint Economic Committee

DC Office: 302 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington DC, 20510, 202/224-3244
State Offices: Fort Snelling, 612/727-5220; Rochester, 507/288-5231
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Path to Power

Klobuchar was born in 1960 in northeast Minnesota's Iron Range to Jim and Rose Klobuchar. She and her sister Beth grew up in Plymouth, a suburb of Minneapolis. As a girl, she was always organizing people: she formed a baby-sitter's club with her friends at age 11, making enough money to take a bus trip to Kansas City, and then selling the girls' parents on the idea over a formal lunch with typed menus and chicken salad in canteloupes.

In high school, she organized a fundraiser for the senior prom, selling so many lollipops that the event was held in a fancy downtown hotel. The budding politician served on the Wayzata high school student council and would graduate as valedictorian.

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Klobuchar's high-school life was partly overshadowed by her father's alcoholism and widely-publicized drunken driving arrests. A columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jim Klobuchar often used material from his own life. When Jim and Rose Klobuchar divorced during Amy's first year in high school, her father wrote about it in a column. After one of Jim Klobuchar's arrests, which was reported in the Star-Tribune, a classmate scrawled "drunk" on Amy's locker.

Klobuchar attended Yale in part, she told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, because it was Ivy League - and it wasn't in Minnesota. "I wanted to go to a place where people couldn't spell my name," she said. She majored in political science and ended up interning with Minnesota Attorney General Warren Spannaus and Vice President Walter Mondale. Her senior thesis was a 300-page book on the political history of Minneapolis's Metrodome.

A scholarship took Klobuchar to the University of Chicago Law School. She received her J.D. in 1985 and returned to Minnesota to work in private practice at Dorsey and Whitney LLP.

Political Career

Klobuchar says she never had a plan to run for a specific office,though friends and acquaintances have said political life was often on her mind. "She was always thinking of where to live, based on what office she could run for," childhood friend Amy Scherber told the Star Tribune.

When the Hennepin County attorney position opened in 1997, Klobuchar's professional experience as a lawyer was mostly representing telecommunications companies.Republican Sheryl Ramstad, the other candidate for the spot, pointed out in debates that Ramstad was prosecuting cases when Klobuchar was in high school. In the 1998 election, Klobuchar won by 1 percent of the vote.

Hennepin County Attorney

For the greater part of the next decade, Klobuchar oversaw 170 attorneys and 10,000 criminal cases a year in Minnesota's most heavily-populated county. During Klobuchar's tenure, crime in Hennepin County dropped significantly. She was re-elected in 2002 with no opposition.

But when then-Sen. Mark Dayton (D) announced his retirement in 2005, Klobuchar was the first to declare her candidacy. Her aggressive fundraising chased three other Democrats out of the primary, and during the campaign, she took aim at Republican challenger Mark Kennedy's ties to George W. Bush administration policies,winning with 58 percent of the vote.

She is the first female Minnesota senator to be elected; Minnesota's other female senator, Muriel Humphrey (D), was appointed after her husband, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D), died in 1978.

During the protracted legal battle between former incumbent Norm Coleman (R) and his replacement, Al Franken (D) in 2009, Klobuchar is also played a delicate role as Minnesota's sole senator. Meanwhile, she was doing "double the work" as the lone senator from Minnesota. "And this isn't just people calling about vote this way, don't vote this way, these are people who have real problems especially with today's economy. Veterans' benefits, the Social Security check that doesn't show up, a baby they're trying to adopt from Guatemala that stalled out because of red tape. And they show up at our office with the picture of the baby."

The Issues

Klobuchar has quickly established herself as concerned with issues facing her middle-class constituents, spearheading legislation on toy safety, cell-phone fees and funding for the repair of the I-35W bridge after it collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007. She has voted with her party 92.2% of the time during the current Congress, breaking with the Democrats on some immigration issues and on farm-bill reform.

The Economy

In October 2008, Klobuchar said she supported the $700 billion financial bailout package "with many reservations." In a statement released by her office, she said: "I do not support it to rescue Wall Street. I support it to protect Main Street by averting an economic catastrophe that would otherwise force millions of Americans to lose their jobs, their homes and their retirement savings."

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Klobuchar has focused on economic issues that impact middle-class Americans, but also has found room for her rural constituents. She introduced a bill in the 2007 Congress that would have provided farmers with assistance for three years if they switched to growing cellulosic energy crops used in ethanol production.

Toy and Child Safety

After the widely-publicized devastating injury of a 6-year-old Minnesotan girl at a public wading pool, Klobuchar co-sponsored the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act that created new safety standards for pool drains. Klobuchar inserted an amendment requiring public pools to install "anti-entrapment drain covers" within the year.

She has also been active on toxic toy measures, introducing the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act that passed in summer 2008 and banned the sale of children's toys containing lead and phthalates. Critics of the act, which took effect February 10, 2009, claim that the regulations are too restrictive and that the law's limits are so tight that even trace amounts of lead in bicycle tires and pre-1985 children's books violate the restrictions. Klobuchar responded: "We gave the [Consumer Product Safety] Commission the power to implement common-sense rules. Congress never intended it to be interpreted this way."

Consumer Protection

The Cell-Phone Consumer Empowerment Act, which Klobuchar authored with her fellow Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee, died in committee but was a key piece of Klobuchar's focus on small-town economic issues.

Supporters applauded the measures that would have allowed consumers to pro-rate early termination fees and give potential customers the ability to test a service for 30 days before entering into a contract with the cell-phone provider. Detractors, including the wireless carrier trade group CTIA and Minnesota state Sen. Ray Vandeveer (R) who proposed similar state legislation in 2003, claimed the bill was too punishing to wireless firms and unnecessary.

Transportation Safety

After the bridge collapse of Aug. 1st, 2007, in Minneapolis, Klobuchar and fellow Minnesotan Sen. Coleman (R) worked quickly to secure emergency funding for restoration of the important downtown artery. Less than a year later, Klobuchar and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced legislation to provide more than $1 billion in additional funding for states to address dangerous bridges.

The Network

Klobuchar endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 primary elections, though she was originally reluctant to publicly reject Hillary Rodham Clinton . She has worked closely with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) on the Environment and Public Works Committee and with her former co-senator, Norm Coleman . After Al Franken was seated, Klobuchar became the state's senior senator.

Additional Resources

Klobuchar tops Kennedy in U.S. Senate race The Associated Press State & Local Wire November 8, 2006
Averill, Brady, "Klobuchar backs new farm source for ethanol," Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 16, 2007
http://klobuchar.senate.gov/newsreleases_detail.cfm?id=303977&
Marcotty, Josephine, "Election 2006: The Life of Amy Klobuchar," Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 8, 2006
"THE MINNESOTA POLL: JOB APPROVAL," Petersen-Perlman, Nina, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Oct. 10, 2007
"Senate GOP prepared to fight if Dems try to seat Franken, " Welch, Chris, CNN.com, Jan 2, 2009.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d110:1:./temp/~bdXgwi:@@@L&summ2=m&|/bss/d110query.html|
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/03/31/klobuchar_endorses_obama.html?hpid=topnews
"Unresolved Minnesota Senate Race Irks Many," All Things Considered, NPR, March 13, 2009. (Transcript)
Condon, Patrick,"For Klobuchar, dad's story is key to her own rapid rise," The Associated Press, November 3, 2006
Washington Post Votes Database
"Top Ten Things Missing From Lobbyist Amy Klobuchar's Campaign Website," Republican Party of Minnesota, June 28, 2006.
Lerner, Maura and Sherman, Jake, "'Amazing Abigail' inspires D.C. to act," Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 24, 2007
Estrada, Heron Marquez, "Zero Tolerance: One small word in a new child-safety law -- `any' -- is causing big problems with products across the country," Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 8, 2009