The Story:
Pat Roberts (R – Kan), a man who has been in the US Senate for more than two decades and who for a period chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence, announced on January 4 that he will not run for a fifth term.
Background:
Before advancing to the Senate in the 1996 election, Roberts had served eight terms in the House of Representatives for Kansas’ 1st, a largely rural district that includes Dodge City and Emporia.
Roberts is usually a reliable conservative vote. He sometimes, though, has voted in unexpected ways on environmental issues. For example, Roberts has supported legislation to intensify research into a link between agriculture and climate, with an emphasis on how global warming might be resisted by practices that take carbon out of the atmosphere and “sequester” it in the soil.
The Thing to Know:
Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the US Senate since the 1930s. The state will almost surely elect another Republican to take Roberts place in two years. Who will that next Republican be? That is the question….
