1. Charles Patrick Roberts was born on April 20,1936 and is a retired American politician and journalist who served as a United States senator from Kansas from 1997 to 2021.
50 Facts About Pat Roberts
1. 2.
Pat Roberts served as a First Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps and worked as a newspaper reporter before entering politics in the late 1960s.
3.
Pat Roberts was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1980 to succeed 1st District Congressman Keith Sebelius, for whom he had worked.
4.
Pat Roberts served eight terms in the House, including one as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
5.
Pat Roberts was first elected to the US Senate in 1996.
6.
Pat Roberts was the dean of Kansas's congressional delegation and Chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.
7.
Pat Roberts is the first person to chair both the House and the Senate agriculture committees.
8.
On January 4,2019, Pat Roberts announced that he would not seek reelection in 2020.
9.
Pat Roberts was succeeded by Representative Roger Marshall of Great Bend on January 3,2021.
10.
Pat Roberts's father served for four months as Chairman of the Republican National Committee under Dwight D Eisenhower.
11.
Pat Roberts, was the founder of the Oskaloosa Independent, which is the second-oldest newspaper in Kansas.
12.
Pat Roberts graduated in 1954 from Holton High School in Holton, Kansas.
13.
Pat Roberts was a reporter and editor for several Arizona newspapers between 1962 and 1967, when he joined the staff of Republican Kansas Senator Frank Carlson.
14.
Pat Roberts was re-elected seven times without serious difficulty, never receiving less than 60 percent of the vote; in 1988, he ran unopposed.
15.
Pat Roberts served as the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee from 1995 to 1997.
16.
Term limits were an issue during the campaign; while Pat Roberts said he was not totally opposed to term limits, he was wary of limits that did not apply to current members of Congress, saying the proposed limits should apply to everyone.
17.
Pat Roberts was opposed in the Republican primary by Tom Oyler, who had run against him in 1996.
18.
Pat Roberts was unopposed in the Republican primary and defeated the Democratic nominee, former Congressman Jim Slattery, in the general election by 727,121 votes to 441,399.
19.
Pat Roberts defeated Wolf in the Republican primary by 125,406 votes to 106,202.
20.
However, after Brownback gave up his seat to make a successful run for governor, Pat Roberts became Kansas's senior senator.
21.
Pat Roberts was a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, chairing the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
22.
In March 2009, Pat Roberts was one of fourteen senators to vote against a procedural move that essentially guaranteed a major expansion of a national service corps.
23.
Pat Roberts continued to chair the Committee for the duration of his tenure in the 115th Congress and the 116th Congress.
24.
In February 2019, when asked about comments by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson regarding the passage of the reauthorization of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Pesticide Registration Enhancement Act, Pat Roberts stated his support for both, and in passing child nutrition reauthorization legislation.
25.
In September 2020, with less than two months to the next presidential election, Pat Roberts supported an immediate vote on President Trump's nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
26.
Pat Roberts argued that it was the "Senate's constitutional duty to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court".
27.
Previously in March 2016, around seven months before the next presidential election, Pat Roberts argued that President Obama's Supreme Court nominee should not be considered by the Senate, as the process would be "rushed", and that this was "about giving the American people and the next president a role in selecting the next Supreme Court justice" via the upcoming presidential election.
28.
When interviewed about why he supported it, Pat Roberts repeatedly refused to say why he thought the bill was good, and avoided speaking about the bill's policy contents.
29.
Pat Roberts introduced a biotech labeling and GMO foods bill on February 19,2016.
30.
Pat Roberts worked to secure $15million for research on carbon sequestration.
31.
Pat Roberts voted to confirm Gale Norton as Secretary of the Interior, to exclude oil and gas smokestacks from mercury regulations, and to reclassify the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a Cabinet department.
32.
In 2012, Pat Roberts introduced an amendment that would open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil and approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.
33.
In 2017, Pat Roberts was one of 22 senators to sign a letter to President Donald Trump urging the President to have the United States withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
34.
In January 2014, Pat Roberts introduced the Opportunities Created At the Local Level Act.
35.
In February 2019, Roberts was one of twenty senators to sponsor the Employer Participation in Repayment Act, enabling employers to contribute up to $5,250 to the student loans of their employees as a means of granting employees relief and incentivizing applicants to apply to jobs with employers who implement the policy.
36.
Pat Roberts was the only senator blocking the nomination of Army Secretary Eric Fanning.
37.
In June 2018, Pat Roberts was one of thirteen Republican senators to sign a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions requesting a moratorium on the Trump administration family separation policy while Congress drafted legislation.
38.
Pat Roberts is in favor of increasing border patrols to reduce undocumented immigrant flow.
39.
In May 2018, Pat Roberts voted against a bill that would reinstate net neutrality rules and thereby overturn the FCC's repeal via a law authorizing Congress to reverse regulatory actions by a simple majority vote.
40.
In March 2019, Pat Roberts was a cosponsor of a bipartisan bill to undo a drafting error in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that mandated stores and restaurants to have to write off the costs of renovations over the course of 39 years via authorizing businesses to immediately deduct the entirety of costs of renovations.
41.
In March 2019, Pat Roberts was a cosponsor of a bipartisan resolution led by Gary Peters and Jerry Moran that opposed privatization of the United States Postal Service, citing the USPS as an establishment that was self-sustained and noting concerns that a potential privatization could cause higher prices and reduced services for customers of USPS with a particular occurrence in rural communities.
42.
Pat Roberts has an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association of America for his consistent, ongoing support of pro-gun legislation.
43.
One month after the Orlando nightclub shooting Pat Roberts voted for two Republican-backed proposals on gun policy: Chuck Grassley's amendment to increase funding for background checks and John Cornyn's policy that would have put a 72-hour hold on any terrorist suspect buying a gun.
44.
Pat Roberts voted against both the Democrat's policies, including the Feinstein Amendment, which banned suspected terrorists from buying guns.
45.
Pat Roberts voted against the Manchin-Toomey amendment to expand background checks for gun purchases.
46.
In February 2018, after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in which 17 were killed, Pat Roberts came out in favor of age limits on the AR-15, the weapon used at the high school shooting.
47.
In January 2019, Pat Roberts was one of thirty-one Republican senators to cosponsor the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, a bill introduced by John Cornyn and Ted Cruz which would grant individuals with concealed carry privileges in their home state the right to exercise this right in any other state with concealed carry laws while concurrently abiding by that state's laws.
48.
In September 2016, Pat Roberts was one of thirty-four senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of State John Kerry advocating for the United States using "all available tools to dissuade Russia from continuing its airstrikes in Syria that are clearly not in our interest" and saying there should be clear enforcement by the US of the airstrikes violating "a legally binding Security Council Resolution".
49.
In June 2017, Pat Roberts voted against a resolution by Rand Paul and Chris Murphy that would block President Trump's $510million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia which made up a portion of the $110billion arms sale Trump announced during his visit to Saudi Arabia the previous year.
50.
In March 2018, Pat Roberts voted to table a resolution spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee that would have required President Trump to withdraw American troops either in or influencing Yemen within the next thirty days unless they were combating Al-Qaeda.