Bernie Sanders, American politician who represented Vermont in the U.S. Senate from 2007. Previously he served as the mayor of Burlington (1981–89) and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1991–2007). He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.
"Bernie Sanders proposes sweeping labor law reforms". Al Jazeera. Retrieved October 6, 2015. ^ " (Video) Bailout Petition Statement". Senate.gov. September 24, 2008. Archived from the original on October 14, 2008. Retrieved August 29, 2010.
Sanders's elder brother, Larry, lives in England; he was a Green Party county councillor, representing the East Oxford division on Oxfordshire County Council, until he retired from the council in 2013. Larry ran as a Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon in the 2015 British general election and came in fifth.
He voted against Gorsuch's confirmation as an associate justice. As an independent, Sanders worked out a deal with the Senate Democratic leadership in which he agreed to vote with the Democrats on all procedural matters unless the Democratic whip, Dick Durbin, agreed that he need not (a request rarely made or granted).
For other uses, see Senator Sanders (disambiguation). Bernard Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician and activist who has served as the junior United States senator from Vermont since 2007 and as U.S. Representative for the state's at-large congressional district from 1991 to 2007.
Sanders later described his time in Chicago as "the major period of intellectual ferment in my life." While there, he joined the Young People's Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America) and was active in the civil rights movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Under his chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of the SNCC. In January 1962, he went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle 's segregated campus housing policy. At the protest, Sanders said, "We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments". He and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president's office. After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination. After further protests, the University of Chicago ended racial segregation in private university housing in the summer of 1963.
On April 6, 2019, Sanders participated in a Fox News town hall that attracted more than 2.55 million viewers. His decision to appear on Fox was controversial given the Democratic National Committee 's decision not to allow Fox to host any of its debates. His appearance saw an increase of Fox News viewers by 24% overall and 40% in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic, surpassing the ratings of all other Democratic presidential candidate town halls that year. As of September 2019, the town hall had received more than 1.5 million views on YouTube.
During his first year in the House, Sanders often alienated allies and colleagues with his criticism of both political parties as working primarily on behalf of the wealthy. In 1991, he co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of mostly liberal Democrats that he chaired for its first eight years, while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or caucus.
Using the large email list it built during the 2016 campaign, the 2020 campaign recruited more than one million volunteers within weeks of its launch. It enlisted several former NowThis News employees to produce professional videos for wide social media distribution, live-streamed various forums to its millions of social media followers, and launched a podcast and smartphone app for grassroots organizing.
Sanders began his electoral political career in 1971 as a member of the Liberty Union Party , which originated in the anti-war movement and the People's Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate in the special election for U.S. senator in 1972 and in the general election in 1974. In the 1974 senatorial race, he finished third (5,901 votes; 4%), behind 33-year-old Chittenden County state's attorney Patrick Leahy ( D; 70,629 votes; 49%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary ( R; 66,223 votes; 46%).
At the end of the year, the campaign had raised a total of $73 million from more than one million people, making 2.5 million donations, with an average donation of $27.16. The campaign reached 3.25 million donations by the end of January 2016, raising $20 million in that month alone.
On January 10, 2016, in the midst of Sanders’ sudden stardom—just weeks before the votes in Iowa and New Hampshire—the U.S. attorney for Vermont was sent a “Request for an Investigation into Apparent Federal Bank Fraud.”.
Around the same time that the Sanders Institute went public, former Burlington College board member Robin Lloyd got a phone call from Rich Cassidy, a lawyer representing Jane Sanders, inquiring about the bank loan matter. Lloyd referred him to her lawyer.
Even so, Sanders’ salary rose to $150,000 in 2009, according to college records, as tuition increased by $5,000, to $22,407 in 2011, and enrollment dropped to 156 students. Sanders’ 2008 dismissal of Genese Grill, a popular literature professor, exposed more of the college’s inner turmoil.
The couple met and fell in love during Sanders’ startling 10-vote victory in Burlington’s 1980 mayoral race. His victory uprooted the Democratic machine in Vermont’s largest city and elevated an unabashed socialist at a time when Republicans across the U.S. started using liberal as an epithet. At the time, she was 31.
Backed by six exhibits and a dozen documents, the four-page letter described how Jane Sanders had “orchestrated” the purchase of 33 acres along Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, where her husband had minted his populist political brand as mayor.
While he was mayor, Jane Sanders directed Burlington’s youth services division. When he ran for the House in 1990, she managed his campaign, then ran his congressional office as chief of staff.
Sanders was out October 14, 2011, with a parting package worth $200,000 in salary, retirement payments and deferred bonus, paid out over two years. “The financing problems were important,” says Robin Lloyd, a Burlington College donor who served on the board of trustees from 2000 to 2013.