Jeff Bingaman: The New Mexico Senator Who Unseated an Apollo Moonwalker

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Jeff Bingaman was born in El Paso, Texas in 1943 and raised in Silver City, New Mexico, where his father taught at Western New Mexico University and his mother taught in the public schools. He made Eagle Scout by 15, earned a government degree at Harvard and a law degree at Stanford, where he met his wife, Anne, and from 1968 to 1974 served in the Army Reserve as a chaplain's assistant. He was counsel to the 1969 New Mexico Constitutional Convention and, after winning the attorney general's race in 1978, focused on antitrust and environmental cases until the state's term limits barred another consecutive term.

In 1982 he unseated Republican Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 astronaut, with the slogan What on Earth has he done for you lately? He served from 1983 to 2013, spending 26 years as junior senator behind Pete Domenici while rising to ninth in Senate seniority and chairing the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He backed the Clean Energy Act of 2007, tried a cap and trade bill in 2006, supported more Border Patrol agents and a guest worker program, and voted against the 2006 Secure Fence Act. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 but later against a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, and supported the Affordable Care Act in 2009. After retiring he became an energy policy fellow at Stanford Law School.

• He went through basic training as a private in New Jersey before qualifying as a chaplain enlisted assistant.
• In the 110th Congress he and Domenici were the longest serving senator duo in the Senate.
• In October 2002 he was one of 23 senators to vote against authorizing force in Iraq.
• He argued that indefinite detention at Guantanamo endangered captured U.S. troops.
• He was one of three senators to vote against the 2012 STOCK Act, and in 2022 he published Breakdown: Lessons for a Congress in Crisis.