The Economy

Leahy voted in favor of the revised $700 bailout bill, which he called "far from perfect" but "better than the alternatives."

Civil Liberties

As an advocate for civil liberties, Leahy found much to protest under President George W. Bush.

In addition to authoring legislation to restore the right of habeas corpus that was suspended in the 2006 Military Commissions Act, Leahy spoke out on behalf of Maher Arar, a Canadian who was deported from the U.S. to Syria because he was a suspected terrorist.

When he became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007, Leahy established a new subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law.

After Sept. 11, Leahy led Senate negotiations on the USA Patriot Act, striving for checks and balances. But as early as September 2002, Leahy was asking the Justice Department to disclose the number of secret wiretaps and the amount of people under surveillance. He disagreed when Bush stated that the Geneva Convention does not apply to enemy combatants and criticized a lack of leadership when the photos surfaced of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. (He did not appear to be scared by the anthrax-tainted letter sent to his office, but intercepted by the FBI, in November 2001.)

In 2006, when it was reported that major phone companies had cooperated with the president by providing the phone records of tens of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency, Leahy lashed out. On Capitol Hill, he said, "Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda? Shame on us for being so far behind and being so willing to rubber stamp anything this administration does. We ought to fold our tents."

Leahy led the Democrats' charge against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the suspicious firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. He issued subpoenas for top Bush administration officials like Karl Rove and threatened other them with contempt of Congress charges. President Bush and his staff claimed executive privilege and the matter has landed in the courts.

When Vice President Dick Cheney declined to turn over to Congress documents regarding the warrantless wire-tapping program, Leahy again threatened contempt charges. This came three years after the infamous incident in which Leahy questioned Cheney at a photo session about the no-bid Iraq contracts awarded to Halliburton, the company where Cheney was CEO, and Cheney told him, "**** yourself."

Truth Commission

In February 2009, Leahy proposed a "Truth Commission" that would comprehensively examine the alleged misdeeds of the Bush Justice Department from warrantless wiretapping to the attorney general firings to the infamous memos legalizing torture. But President Obama nixed the plan before it launched, saying he preferred to move forward.

Human Rights

Leahy has been more vocal about the issue of landmines than perhaps any other lawmaker. In 1989, Leahy created the Leahy War Victims Fund, funded by Congress, to help those living with disabilities caused by mines. The fund now provides about $14 million annually to people with limited mobility.

In 1992, the senator wrote the first law by any government that banned anti-personnel landmines. He has also pushed for an international treaty banning the production, export and use of the devices. He once even wrote a preface for a Batman comic book about the risks posed by landmines.

Leahy works to prevent unnecessary deaths in another arena: capital punishment. His "Innocence Protection Act" is a series of measures designed to reduce the chances that an innocent person will wrongly be sentenced to death. Some of the measures, passed in 2004, include post-conviction DNA testing and equal access to legal counsel.

Technology

Leahy earned himself the nickname "the cyber senator" because of his early interest in and promotion of the Internet. In 1995, he launched his Senate homepage, then becoming only the second senator to have one.

Already interested in copyright and intellectual privacy laws, Leahy has fought to maintain them in the wild frontier of the Internet.He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus.

In Vermont, he has led efforts to expand broadband lines to rural areas. For more than a decade, Leahy has been holding regular online chats with school children and posting the transcripts on his website. Leahy asks for stringent enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act; in 1996 he was inducted to the FOIA Hall of Fame.

In 2005 he teamed with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) on the OPEN Act, which sought to make FOIA requests more efficient and to ensure that even bloggers are able to access documents.

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