Senator Arlen Specter will be joining former congressman Lee Hamilton (now president of the Woodrow Wilson Center) for a special presentation/discussion. Specter, Pennsylvania’s senior U.S. Senator, was elected to the Senate in 1980, and is the state’s longest serving Senator. He is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a senior member of the Appropriations and Veterans Affairs committees. Senator Specter has been a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee since he came to the Senate. Now the Chairman, he has played an instrumental role in many of the Senate’s most important issues, including the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He has worked in a bi-partisan fashion to reauthorize key provisions of the USA Patriot Act as well as legislation to help consumers better protect the privacy of their personal information in the face of recurrent data security breaches across the country.

As a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Specter also plays a key role as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, which oversees federal funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control, and educational programs like Head Start, Pell grants, and GEAR-UP. Under his leadership, funding for education has increased by more than 130%. The budget for the NIH, which has made major advances in curing Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease and delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s, has more than doubled.
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Senator Arlen Specter will be joining former congressman Lee Hamilton (now president of the Woodrow Wilson Center) for a special presentation/discussion. Specter, Pennsylvania’s senior U.S. Senator, was elected to the Senate in 1980, and is the state’s longest serving Senator. He is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a senior member of the Appropriations and Veterans Affairs committees . . . full bio