Born in Madison, Wisconsin in February 1962, Tammy Baldwin graduated (with degrees in mathematics and government) from Smith College in 1984 and earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1989. While still pursuing her legal studies, Baldwin at age 24 was elected to the Dane County board of supervisors. Six years later, in 1992, she was elected to the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature where she served, as a Democrat, until 1998. In 1998 Baldwin ran for a seat in Wisconsin’s Second Congressional District. With a $1.5 million war chest (much of which came from the feminist group EMILY’s List), she won the general election with 53 percent of the vote. Upon joining the House of Representatives, she became a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The first self-identified lesbian elected to Congress, Baldwin has consistently attracted considerable campaign money from gay activist organizations nationwide, most notably the Human Rights Campaign. Other noteworthy supporters include groups like Greenpeace International, the Council for a Livable World, and the American Association for Justice. Additional heavy backing has come from the members and political action committees of large and powerful labor unions like the SEIU, AFSCME, the National Education Association, the Teamsters, the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, and numerous others. Baldwin is also a favorite of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which in 2004 praised her as someone who “vocally supports equal rights, gay rights, and expanded health insurance benefits, and [whose] public posture as an out lesbian is symbolically important.”

In October 2002, Baldwin voted against the resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. Thereafter, she became a vocal critic of America’s Iraq War effort and often voting against funding it.

In 2003 Baldwin served on the advisory committee of the Progressive Majority, a political networking group dedicated to electing leftist candidates to public office. In 2005 she joined the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus.

Baldwin was one of 27 Members of Congress to co-sponsor H. Res. 333, which Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced in April 2007. This bill set forth articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney, for having “purposely manipulated the intelligence process” to “deceive” U.S. citizens and Congress alike “about a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, to justify the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against Iraq in a manner damaging to U.S. national security interests.”

In 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2009, Baldwin joined Rep. Dennis Kucinich‘s (failed) efforts to pass legislation calling for the creation of a federal Department of Peace and Nonviolence. She also has co-sponsored legislation (in 2005 and 2009) that would permit taxpayers to opt out of funding the Defense Department if they are “conscientiously opposed to participation in war.”

On December 22, 2009, Baldwin was one of 33 U.S. Representatives who signed a letter to Hillary Clinton, calling on the Secretary of State to pressure the Israeli government to end its ban on Palestinian student travel from Gaza to the West Bank.

An outspoken advocate of a single-payer, government-run health-care since her days as a state legislator, Baldwin introduced the Health Security for All Americans Act, aimed at creating such a system, multiple times beginning in 2000. In November 2009 she voted for the version of healthcare reform that passed in the House and included a public option, a government-run healthcare plan that would have competed with private insurers. She ultimately voted for the Obamacare bill that became law in March 2010.

On January 27, 2010, Baldwin was one of 54 members of Congress who signed a letter imploring President Barack Obama to use diplomatic pressure to end Israel’s blockade of Gaza—a blockade which had been imposed in order to prevent the importation of weaponry from Iran and Syria.

In November 2010, Baldwin and 15 other congressional Democrats met—either personally or through their respective staffers—with supporters of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack (FRSO/FB), a Marxist-Leninist group. Those FRSO/FB supporters expressed their condemnation of “the FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas of people doing international solidarity work and anti-war organizing.” It was reported that Baldwin and her congressional colleagues expressed “genuine concern” about the FRSO/FB complaints.

Baldwin maintains that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity cause potentially catastrophic global warming. To deal with that perceived threat, she supports the implementation of cap-and-trade programs. Further, she has proposed legislation to create a greenhouse gas registry that would catalogue the levels of carbon emissions associated with all manufactured products, so as to enable consumers to know the “carbon footprint” of each product. Baldwin also has co-sponsored legislation to ban oil drilling in the Great Lakes, and legislation to help reduce global population as a strategy for combating climate change.

In 2012, Baldwin defeated Republican Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin’s former governor) to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In January 2015, the Center for Investigative Reporting released a report revealing that the Veterans’ Administration (VA) facility in Tomah, Wisconsin was dispensing strong narcotic painkillers to its patients with alarming and inappropriate frequency, and that one of those patients had died of an overdose in 2014. After the story broke, Baldwin called for a federal investigation of the Tomah facility while indicating that she theretofore had been aware of the problem. But in March 2015, a former Tomah VA empoyee named Ryan Honi reported that: (a) an Inspector General report had made Baldwin’s office aware of the Tomah abuses as early as the summer of 2014; (b) Honi had repeatedly emailed and called Baldwin’s office exhorting the senator, without success, to address the problem; and (c) Honi had spoken at length with Baldwin about the problem in November 2014, only to be instructed not to take the story public, lest Honi and other VA staffers end up getting fired as a result.

In April 2015, Baldwin’s former deputy state director, Marquette Baylor, filed an ethics complaint against Baldwin alleging that she (Baylor) had been wrongly scapegoated and terminated for the Tomah VA office’s negligence. Said the complaint: “After the public outcry, Senator Baldwin immediately sought to place the blame squarely on me. She instructed her Chief of Staff, Bill Murat, to fly to Milwaukee, fire me, and offer me a severance package that required me to stay quiet. Murat then moved into damage control, meeting with individuals in Wisconsin and telling them that the inaction was my fault. When I rejected the severance package, Senator Baldwin revised her plan. She hired a high-powered law firm, paid that firm to prepare an internal report for her—at no point requesting to interview me or ask me questions—and used that report to further deflect blame toward me while protecting those truly at fault.” Also in April 2015, the watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) sent a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee calling for an investigation into Baldwin’s apparent “attemp[t] to use taxpayer funds to hide information from those very taxpayers.”

In April 2018, Baldwin was one of 12 U.S. senators who sought to punish the Sinclair Broadcast Group – widely perceived as a conservative media company – which (a) consisted of 193 television stations and 614 channels in 89 markets nationwide, and (b) had recently announced plans to acquire the Tribune Media Company’s 42 TV stations in 33 markets, a merger that, if completed, would extend Sinclair’s reach to 72% of all American households. The twelve senators included Baldwin, Independent Bernie Sanders, and 10 other Democrats: Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Maria Cantwell, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray, Tina Smith, Tom Udall, Elizabeth Warren, and Ron Wyden.

In a letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai, these senators expressed concern over the fact that Sinclair had recently aired an ad showing its various local anchors reading from a corporate script extolling the virtue of “balanced journalism”; stating that “truth is neither politically ‘left or right’”; emphasizing the importance of a “commitment” to reporting that “seek[s] the truth and strive[s] to be fair, balanced and factual”; criticizing “some members of the media” for “us[ing] their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’”; and condemning “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”

Viewing the Sinclair ad as an implicit defense of President Donald Trump, who had long been under withering attack by media outlets nationwide, the senators wrote in their letter: “We are concerned that Sinclair is engaged in a systematic news distortion operation that seeks to undermine freedom of the press and the robust localism and diversity of viewpoint that is the foundation of our national broadcasting laws.” “We have strong concerns,” they added, “that Sinclair has violated the public interest obligation inherent in holding broadcast licenses. Sinclair may have violated the FCC’s longstanding policy against broadcast licensees deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information.” The senators also demanded that the FCC put on hold its review of Sinclair’s potential merger with Tribune.^[1]

On August 25, 2020 — during a violent Black Lives Matter/Antifa riot which followed an incident where a white Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer had shot and permanently disabled a knife-wielding black criminal named Jacob Blake — Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white youth from Antioch, Illinois, drove to Kenosha, where his father resided, with the intent of: (a) helping to prevent further vandalism in that city, and (b) providing medical aid to people injured in the melee. At the scene of the unrest, Rittenhouse was armed with a semi-automatic rifle that had been purchased (with his money) and held for him by his friend Dominick Black, a resident of Kenosha. When white rioter and Kenosha resident Joseph Rosenbaum — who had spent 15 years in prison for multiple child molestation convictions that included anal rape — chased Rittenhouse, threatened to kill him, and tried to take away his rifle, Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum. While subsequently being chased by a crowd of approximately a dozen rioters, Rittenhouse ran down a street toward police vehicles, in hopes that the officers might protect him from his pursuers. But the fleeing Rittenhouse tripped and fell to the ground, at which point he was struck on the head by a 39-year-old white man who jump-kicked him. Then, while Rittenhouse was still on the ground, white Silver Lake resident Anthony Huber — a domestic abuse repeater and an ex-convict who in 2013 had pleaded guilty to multiple felony counts of strangulation, suffocation, and false imprisonment — struck him on the head and neck with a skateboard and attempted to pull away his rifle, at which point Rittenhouse killed Huber with a single gunshot to the chest. And when white West Allis resident Gaige Grosskreutz — who had a long arrest history that included multiple misdemeanors and felonies — then approached the fallen Rittenhouse and pointed a handgun directly at him, Rittenhouse shot him once in the right arm, wounding but not killing the man. Rittenhouse was subsequently tried on six criminal charges which included homicide, reckless endangerment, and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. A large number of leftists portrayed him as a racist, Trump-supporting white vigilante who had recklessly fired his gun at “social justice” and “racial justice” demonstrators in Kenosha. After a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts on November 19, 2021, Baldwin said:

“[Rittenhouse] took the law into his own hands, killing two people and injuring another. They were victims of gun violence and too many families have lost loved ones to these tragedies. I understand why people believe that justice was not served in this case, because I feel the same way. The fact that some people are cheering a ruling that has allowed someone to take the law into his own hands and walk free from any accountability after shooting and killing two people is disrespectful to the lives that were lost. I am deeply concerned that it will encourage more tragic gun violence from those like Kyle Rittenhouse who think they have a license to take the law into their own hands in a violent way.”

The leftwing Americans for Democratic Action consistently rates Baldwin’s voting record as 95 to 100 percent on the left side of legislation. Click here for an overview of Baldwin’s voting record on key pieces of legislation during her years in Congress.

Baldwin is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, the College Democrats of America, the International Network of Lesbian and Gay Officials, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, and Wisconsin Citizen Action.

Support From Islamists

Over the years, Baldwin has received a few donations from high-ranking officials and/or board members of Islamist organizations. Specifically, from 2015-2018, she received a total of $2,354 in contributions from individuals affiliated with the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Footnotes:

1. In his response, Pai said he “must respectfully decline” the senators’ request “in light of my commitment to protecting the First Amendment and freedom of the press.” “I understand that you disliked or disagreed with the content of particular broadcasts,” he added, “but I can hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast station because of disagreement with its news coverage or promotion of that coverage.”
   * Resources for the Sinclair Broadcasting Group matter: “Democrats Running for Office Pull Ads from Sinclair over Anchor Statements on Fake News” (TheBlaze.com, 4-4-2018); “Twelve Senators Seek FCC Probe of Sinclair News Scripts, Pause in Tribune Review” (Reuters.com, 4-12-2018); “12 Senators Want FCC to Probe Sinclair” (Newsmax.com, 4-12-2018); “Ajit Pai Rejects ‘Chilling’ Democratic Request for FCC Investigation into Sinclair” (Washington Examiner, 4-12-2018).

Additional Resources:

Tammy Baldwin’s Voting Record

Further Reading: “Tammy Baldwin” (Votesmart.org, Keywiki.org); “WI Senate Candidate Tammy Baldwin Wanted Department of Peace” (Breitbart.com, 10-28-2012); “Watchdog Group Calls for Ethics Investigation of Baldwin [and VA Painkiller Scandal]” (Washington Free Beacon, 4-23-2015); “Sen. Baldwin Had Tomah VA Report for Months” (Green Bay Press Gazette, 1-19-2015).