Rick Santorum in Congress: why his record is costing him now

But Santorum’s record over 12 years in the Senate and two terms in the House does not fall out neatly along partisan lines. A Catholic with strong ties to Evangelicals, Santorum got his start in a district of struggling mill towns in the steel valley southeast of Pittsburgh.

“Unlike most congressional Republicans, I represented a lot of people who were poor, but with rich traditions; bitter, but still proud,” he wrote in his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family” – a counterpoint to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, “It Takes a Village.”

The liberal vision doesn’t work to improve their lives, he wrote. But the conservative vision, too, had its limits.

“I came to the uncomfortable realization that conservatives were not only reluctant to spend government dollars on the poor: They hadn’t even thought much about what might work better,” added Santorum, who used congressional earmarks to direct more resources to struggling manufacturing towns.

A champion for social conservatives, Santorum sponsored the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which criminalized ending late-term pregnancies. In 2005, he rushed to Terry Schiavo’s bedside in a bid to involve the US Senate in blocking a family decision to terminate her life.

According to a study by the Sunlight Foundation, he ranked No. 1 during his years in the Senate in the use of phrases such as abortion, fetus, and womb.

“The United States Senate deals with a wide range of issues, both foreign and domestic, but the ones that preoccupied Rick Santorum the most during his tenure appear to have been gynecological,” says Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, in a Jan. 6 blog reporting on a content analysis of the Congressional Record over Santorum’s years in the Senate.

As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Santorum helped define the Republican position on welfare reform. In a rare move, Senate GOP leaders assigned him to manage the floor debate on welfare reform in his freshman year, even though he was not a member of the lead committee on the issue.

After President Clinton vetoed the previous two welfare reform bills, “We overcame [then Speaker] Newt Gingrich, who didn’t want to give Clinton a third chance at welfare reform,” says Ron Haskins, a former White House and congressional adviser on welfare issues and former Santorum aide.

“Santorum is well known for making statements that seem intemperate,” adds Mr. Haskins, who is now with the Brookings Institution, “but he is a quick study and a great negotiator.”

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