Gillibrand Gains Foothold With Victory on 9/11 Aid
Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, with staff members, was a leading proponent of the bill to benefit ground zero workers.
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: December 22, 2010
The spotlight was shining on her at last, and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the oft-overshadowed junior senator from New York, did not hold back.
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Senate Passes 9/11 Health Bill as Republicans Back Down (December 23, 2010)
Times Topic: Kirsten Gillibrand
Drew Angerer/The New York Times
Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand won admirers with forceful work on the gay-rights and 9/11 workers’ bills in the Senate.
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Pounding the lectern on the Senate floor, raising her voice almost to a shout, Ms. Gillibrand hectored, reasoned with and sought to shame her colleagues into ending the 17-year-old ban on gays’ serving openly in the military.
“If you care about national security, if you care about our military readiness,” she demanded, “then you will repeal this corrosive policy.”
The repeal passed two hours later on Saturday, but Ms. Gillibrand, a Democrat, had little time to savor the moment.
The next morning, she was off to Senate strategy sessions, a news conference and Fox News to push for the passage of another major initiative: a bill to provide medical care for rescue workers sickened by inhaling fumes, dust and smoke at the site of the World Trade Center attack.
When that measure, too, won approval on Wednesday, it not only marked a victory of legislative savvy and persistence. It also signaled the serious emergence of Ms. Gillibrand, the 43-year-old successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Once derided as an accidental senator, lampooned for her verbosity and threatened with many challengers who openly doubted her abilities, a succinct, passionate and effective Senator Gillibrand has made her presence felt in the final days of this Congress.
Her efforts have won grudging admiration from critics, adulation from national liberals and gay rights groups, and accolades from New York politicians across the political spectrum, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who once shopped for potential candidates to oust her.
Even her relentlessness, which once drew mockery, is now earning the highest compliment of all: professional jealousy from her more senior colleagues.
“To have gone from a virtual unknown to being a major player on some landmark legislation in such a short period of time just shows what Kirsten is capable of,” said Ilyse Hogue, director of political advocacy for MoveOn.org.
Ms. Gillibrand faced extreme skepticism when, as an obscure House member, she was appointed in January 2009 by Gov. David A. Paterson.
Shortly after being sworn in as senator, she began delving into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, in what amounted to a perfect marriage of an issue without a champion and a would-be champion in search of a defining issue.
She had just met with a National Guardsman and West Point graduate, Lt. Dan Choi — a linguist with a specialty in Arabic who was facing discharge because of his homosexuality. At the time, the effort to repeal was languishing: its leader in the Senate, Edward M. Kennedy, was dying of cancer.
Ms. Gillibrand hit on a new approach to get the issue moving again: proposing an 18-month moratorium on the discharge of gay men and lesbians from the military. She polled Senate Democrats — the first time anyone had done so on “don’t ask,” she said — and was 10 votes shy of the 60 needed, so she did not introduce the bill.
Some of those opposed told her they wanted to hear from the Pentagon on the issue. Ms. Gillibrand, who was not even a member of the Armed Services Committee, asked Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is its chairman, to hold the first hearings on the policy. He agreed.
“She’s been a bird dog on this,” Mr. Levin said. “She is not shy about her views, and pressing her views and talking to anybody and everybody, on the floor and not on the floor, and in office visits, and in the hallways.”
Ms. Gillibrand, who had represented a conservative upstate district in Congress, was not well known to liberals or gay rights groups at the time. But in an interview, she said she had realized from an early age that discrimination against gays was wrong.
Her mother — a black belt in karate who the senator said “did things differently her whole life” — worked in the arts and surrounded herself with gay friends. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Ms. Gillibrand’s sister, a playwright and actress, volunteered to help children with AIDS.
And when Ms. Gillibrand was a young associate, working long nights at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, she recalled, “the straight men found time to date and get married and have kids and went home at six every night, and the only ones left were the women and gay men.”
So she wound up vacationing with gay colleagues on Fire Island and in the Hamptons, and forging lifelong friendships. “A lot of them are now having children,” she said. “And it never occurred to me that they should not have every benefit that I have.”
Richard Socarides, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and founder of Equality Matters, a gay advocacy organization, said he was initially wary of Ms. Gillibrand, thinking she was courting gays for purely political reasons as she sought to broaden her appeal statewide.
But she won him over with her fervor, strategic thinking, fearlessness and litigator’s tenacity. “If she has decided she’s going to get something done,” he said, “don’t get in her way, because you will get run over.”
Last February, the hearings she had pushed Mr. Levin to hold made headlines when Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for an end to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, saying it was undermining the military’s integrity by forcing service members to “lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”
“My jaw dropped,” Ms. Gillibrand recalled. “I couldn’t believe how powerful that testimony was, and I knew, at that moment, we were going to repeal the policy.”
Ms. Gillibrand also set up a Web site featuring videos of gay and lesbian veterans, some of whom had been discharged, telling their personal stories.
She followed a similar playbook in pressing the 9/11 health care legislation, for which Mrs. Clinton had long struggled to attract Republican support.
In summer 2009, Ms. Gillibrand introduced the bill in the Senate. She helped lobby House members — at one point prompting Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, who briefly considered a challenge to Ms. Gillibrand, to lash out at her for being late to the issue. She persuaded Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the health committee, to call the only Senate hearing on the bill.
And she buttonholed fellow senators, especially Republicans. “On the 9/11 bill, one of my colleagues said to me, ‘Can you please talk to your friend from New York, Kirsten, and tell her to stop asking me?’ ” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said.
Ms. Gillibrand has scored smaller victories during the lame-duck session, including approval of new food safety rules and a ban on drop-side cribs, after 32 infant deaths.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Gillibrand reflected on how far she had come since those first ugly days after her appointment. Back then, she recalled, she had to reassure her own relatives that she had made the right decision.
“We had a lot of bad press early on,” she said, “and I said to my husband: ‘Don’t worry, honey — it’ll work out.’”
And with that, she hung up and walked back onto the Senate floor, pinned a 9/11 ribbon on Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was presiding, and waited for the vote on the bill. It passed, unanimously, on a voice vote.
Gillibrand Emerges as Senate Force With 9/11 Aid Victory - NYTimes.com
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