Barbara Mikulski

Barbara Mikulski

Barbara Ann Mikulski (born July 20, 1936 in Baltimore , Maryland ) is an American politician of the Democratic Party . From 1987 to 2017 she represented the state of Maryland in the US Senate . Since she did not run again in the 2016 election, she left the Senate in 2017.

Education and beginning of political career

Barbara Mikulski was born the great-granddaughter of Polish immigrants who ran a local bakery. She is the eldest of three daughters of the married couple Christine Kutz and William Mikulski and grew up in East Baltimore. During her years in high school at the Institute of Notre Dame , she worked in her parents' grocery store, delivering goods to seniors who could not leave their homes.

After graduating from Mount Saint Agnes College , now part of Loyola University in Maryland, she received her Masters in Social Work (MSW) from the University of Maryland School of Social Work . She has worked as a social worker for Catholic foundations and the Baltimore City Government Social Services, helping young people at risk and teaching seniors about the Medicare program. Mikulski's political career began when she campaigned against the construction of a 16-lane highway through Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood. She organized political resistance against the construction of the road, which was never built afterwards. This resulted in her election to the Baltimore City Council in 1971.

Political rise in Washington

In 1974, Mikulski first appeared in the election to the US Senate. After her primary victory over Bernard L. Talley she was defeated in the actual election to the Republican incumbent Charles Mathias with 42.7 percent of the vote. Two years later, she ran to succeed Congressman Paul Sarbanes , who ran for the second Maryland Senate seat and defeated Republican incumbent John Glenn Beall . Barbara Mikulski easily won the election in the democratically dominated third congressional constituency of her state with 74.6 percent of the vote against the Republican Samuel Culotta and thus moved into the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC on January 3, 1977 .

After that she was a member of the Congress without interruption until 2017. After four safe re-elections to the House of Representatives, she made her second attempt in 1986 for a seat in the Senate; her former opponent Charles Mathias no longer ran, so the choice was open. Mikulski won a clear majority of votes against Linda Chavez with 60.7 percent and consequently moved to the Senate on January 3, 1987 within Congress. As a result, she ran for re-election four times, with the best result in the first confirmation in 1992 , when she won 71 percent against the conservative Republican Alan Keyes .

In 1993, together with Carol Moseley Braun , she opposed the rule that was in effect at the time that women had to wear dresses or skirts in the Senate when she appeared in the Senate with suit pants. In the same year, Martha S. Pope, as Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate , allowed women to wear suit pants in the Senate.

Most recently, she was re-elected against Eric Wargotz in November 2010 ; With 61.8 percent of the vote, however, it achieved its worst result since its first election to the Senate.

Work as a senator

Mikulski, like the majority of her Democratic Senate colleagues, voted in 1995 for a Republican welfare law . This was seen as an expression of a socio-political turnaround of her party, which had campaigned for the support of poorer people since the 1930s . Of the Democratic Senators at the time, Mikulski also voted for the Republican law; Dianne Feinstein ( California ), Barbara Boxer (California) and Patty Murray ( Washington ); only Carol Moseley Braun ( Illinois ) voted against.

After Daniel Inouye's death , Mikulski became chair of the influential Committee on Appropriations in December 2012 and held that position until the Democrats lost a majority in the Senate in January 2015. Mikulski's political style is described as spirited and combative; She advocates classic left-wing liberal issues and more women in leadership positions, which she supports by organizing monthly meetings of female US senators from both parties.

In March 2015, Mikulski announced that she would not run again in the November 2016 election, so she left the Senate on January 3, 2017; her mandate then fell to Chris Van Hollen . She has been a member of Congress longer than any other woman before her. In November 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

Web links

Commons : Barbara Mikulski  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Barbara Mikulski  - Sources and full texts (English)

• Barbara Mikulski in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Barbara Mikulski in the nndb (English)
• Overview of the election results at ourcampaigns.com

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jasmin Lörchner, DER SPIEGEL: Washington 1993: Pants uprising in the US Senate - DER SPIEGEL - history. Retrieved March 25, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Chicago Tribune - We are currently unavailable in your region. Retrieved March 25, 2020 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Jennifer Steinhauer: Senator Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Democrat and Role Model, to Retire in 2017. In: The New York Times , March 2, 2015.