5-term Sen. Mikulski says she won’t seek re-election

By Kathleen Hunter

Bloomberg News

Sen. Barbara Mikulski. D-Md., a trailblazer for women in Congress, Monday announced she won’t seek a sixth term next year.

Mikulski, 78, is Congress’s longest-serving woman and the first to be chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“I have thought long and hard about the next two years,” Mikulski said in Baltimore in announcing her decision not to seek re-election. “I want to give 125 percent of my time focused on my constituents.”

“Do I spend my time raising money or do I spend my time raising hell?” she said.

Mikulski served for a decade in the House before she was elected in 1986 to the first of her five Senate terms. Her retirement would open a political opportunity for a crowded field of potential successors in a state that’s historically been a Democratic stronghold.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and half the members of Maryland’s U.S. House delegation are on the short list of possible Mikulski successors, according to a longtime Democratic strategist.

Reps. John Delaney, Chris Van Hollen, Donna Edwards and John Sarbanes, the son of former Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes, are expected to at least consider running. O’Malley is also viewed as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

Mikulski turned over the Appropriations Committee gavel when Republicans took control of the Senate in January. She serves as the top Democrat on the panel.

The tough-talking lawmaker once likened her Republican colleagues to “turkeys.” After super storm Sandy in 2012, she said an amendment to a disaster-recovery funding measure by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn that would cut money for Alaska fisheries was “phony-baloney nonsense.”

Mikulski is a reliable Democrat who supported all of the signature accomplishments of President Barack Obama’s first term: his economic-stimulus plan, health-care overhaul, rewrite of financial industry regulations, the federal takeover of the student-loan industry and two Supreme Court appointments.

Mikulski has a long history of backing legislation aimed at improving women’s lives. She sponsored the first bill Obama signed into law – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was aimed at making it easier for women to sue for pay discrimination.

She successfully added an amendment to Obama’s 2010 health- care overhaul guaranteeing women access to preventive health screenings, such as mammograms, at no cost. Mikulski also has backed legislation to promote women in occupations where they are underrepresented.

When she was one of just two women in the chamber, Mikulski recalls a fuss among her male colleagues when she wanted to wear pants on the Senate floor.

“What you wore became a very big deal,” she told CNN. “For a woman to come on the floor in trousers was viewed as a seismographic event.”

Before doing so, she said, she had to alert the majority leader, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, and “the Senate parliamentarian looked at the rules to make sure it was OK.”

“You would have thought I was walking on the moon,” she said. “It caused a big stir.”

The 1992 election added dozens of women to Congress, including five senators, and was quickly dubbed “Year of the Woman.” Mikulski was neither amused nor inspired by that label.

“Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus,” she said at the time, according to the Washington Post. “We’re not a fad, a fancy or a year.”

In March 2012, after 35 years on Capitol Hill, Mikulski became the longest-serving woman of the 300 or so who have been elected to Congress. She also has regularly been voted “meanest senator” in Washingtonian magazine’s annual survey of congressional aides.

Mikulski is the second veteran Senate Democrat to decide to make this term her last. California’s Barbara Boxer also has announced plans to retire.

Republicans will defend 24 seats in 2016, compared with 10 for Democrats, a reversal from the past two campaign cycles in which significantly more Democratic seats were on the ballot.