Lugar clashes with Right

U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, is standing against his party on a number of key issues, causing Tea Party dissent.

The 78-year-old senator has been in Congress since 1976 and is the third most senior member of the U.S. Senate and longest serving U.S. senator in Indiana history.

“One of the Tea Party’s core beliefs is that people who have been around Washington for a long time can’t always be trusted,” IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs professor Leslie Lenkowsky said. “Clearly, Senator Lugar has been around Washington a long time, and there will be Tea Party groups in the state of Indiana that would like to replace him.”

Lugar opposed his party when he voted to confirm liberal Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and most recently when he declined to sign a brief supporting a state lawsuit against President Obama’s health care law.

Lugar also ruffled a few feathers after supporting an arms control treaty with Russia, an earmark ban and an immigration bill that would create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants.

The New START Treaty would combine nuclear weapons of the U.S. and Russia and resume lapsed mutual inspection. While Republican colleagues have opposed the treaty and attempted to set the matter aside until January for the 112th Congress, Lugar has pushed for the bill to pass.

Lugar has been a leader in reducing the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons for most of his career. In 1991, he and Sam Nunn, the Democratic senator from Georgia at the time, worked to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction.

Supporters of the Indianapolis Tea Party protested Lugar’s co-sponsorship of the DREAM Act, the immigration bill, outside his Indianapolis office last month.

“That’s the American dream,” said Mark Helmke, Lugar’s senior adviser. “If you work hard and you don’t get in trouble, you should receive the benefits of our society, and in a sense, the tax payers have already invested a lot of capital in these young people — they’ve gone to public school and high school and have done well. To throw that away is just wasteful.”

Helmke said while it is possible Lugar may lose votes as a result of his support of the DREAM Act, he still has a 66 percent approval rating in the state, according to a poll Lugar commissioned in October.

Four years ago, Lugar won the primary when no one was willing to challenge him, and the Democrats chose not to put up a candidate to oppose him.

“Senator Lugar’s support cuts across party lines,” Lenkowsky said. “He has so much support from the Democratic party that Democrats have had a hard time finding candidates to oppose him.”

There is speculation that Republican State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who won re-election with 62 percent of the vote, may be interested in a primary run.

Other Republicans that may challenge Lugar include State Sen. Mike Delph and banker Don Bates Jr., who ran in this year’s party primary.

“Treasurer Mourdock would probably be the most likely person, but he is not very widely known,” Lenkowsky said.

As for the rumors that Lugar may be retiring, Helmke confirmed these to be fictitious.
Helmke said there’s no reason to question Lugar’s conservative values, and voters can count on the fact that he will be running again for re-election in 2012.