Lugar Casts 13000th Senate Vote

U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar, the Senate’s most senior Republican and longest serving U.S. Senator in Indiana history, today cast his 13,000th vote in the U.S. Senate. He is in 10th place on the all-time Senate voting list, having passed earlier this year former Senator and current Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) who cast 12,959 votes.

Lugar has maintained a better than 98 percent attendance record during his more than 35 years of Senate service.

Lugar is currently the third most senior Senator and ranks as the 22nd most senior senator in the history of the body. There have been 1,931 individuals to serve in the United States Senate since it was convened on March 4, 1789. On January 3, 1977, Lugar was the 1,705th Senator sworn into the Senate.

On May 1, 1996, Lugar became the longest-serving Senator from Indiana when he surpassed Daniel Wolsey Vorhees (1877-1897).

Active Senators who have cast more than 13,000 votes include Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who cast his 14,000th vote at the same time as Lugar’s milestone. Though of different parties and ideological affiliations, Senator Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senator Lugar (R-Ind.) have closely partnered in advancing legislation in the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee since they were junior members of the committee together in the mid-1970s. They eventually both became Chairmen of the Committee and their portraits are included in the Chairmen’s gallery of the Agriculture Committee hearing room. They have also worked together on Foreign Relations issues, Lugar as top Republican member/Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Leahy as the top Democratic member/Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs.

Lugar has served with all the senators on the all-time top ten list:

Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) 1959-2010 18,689

Strom Thurmond (R-SC) 1955-2002 16,348

Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) 1963-present 16,265

Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) 1963-2009 15,236

Ted Stevens (R-AK) 1969-2008 15,033

Ernest Hollings (D-SC) 1967-2004 14,194

Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) 1975-present 14,000

Pete V. Domenici (R-NM) 1973-2008 13,666

Claiborne Pell

You can read the rest of this article at: http://kokomoperspective.com/news/lugar-casts-th-senate-vote/article_7e8c9c32-d720-11e1-b853-0019bb2963f4.html