page_title: Bernie Sanders
section_title: United States senator, 2007–present
hierarchical_section_title: Bernie Sanders / United States senator, 2007–present
caption_attribution_description: AFGE, Senators Sanders, Warren, and Casey, and coalition partners to deliver petition signed by taxpayers opposing $500 million in cuts to SSA.
context_page_description: Bernard "Bernie" Sanders is an American politician. He is the Junior United States senator from Vermont. He is an Independent, but often votes with the Democratic Party in the Senate. He became senator on January 3, 2007. He ran for President of the United States twice in 2016 and in 2020.
  Sanders was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student, he was active in organizing protests for civil rights. In 1963, he took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
  Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981. He was re-elected three times. In 1991, he became a United States representative for Vermont's at-large congressional district. He was a congressman for 16 years. In 2006, he was elected to the U.S. Senate after he won 64.5% of the vote. In 2012, he was re-elected by winning almost 71% of the vote. In 2018, he was re-elected by winning nearly 68% of the vote.
  Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist. He thinks that a social democratic government for the United States is a good idea.
context_section_description: After Jim Jeffords retired from the Senate in 2006, Sanders became senator when he won the Senate election with 65% of the vote.
  Sanders has been a leading voice on issues such as income inequality, climate change, and campaign finance reform. Sanders continued to be a major critic on mass surveillance policies such as the Patriot Act.
  On December 10, 2010, Sanders gave a 8½-hour speech against the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. After the speech, people wanted Sanders to be a candidate for president in the 2012 presidential election.
  Sanders' filibuster was published in February 2011 by Nation Books as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.
  In 2012, he was re-elected with almost 71% of the vote beating Republican John MacGovern.
  On January 3, 2013, Sanders became chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. After his term as chairman ended on January 3, 2015, Sanders became a member of the Senate Budget Committee. Sanders made proposals to raise the minimum wage, stop income inequality, and increase Social Security payments.
  Sanders is the longest serving Independent member of Congress in American history. In November 2015, Sanders changed parties and became a member of the Democratic Party. On July 26, 2016, however shortly after losing the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders said he would serve as an Independent in the Senate.
  Following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, Sanders accepted his victory and promised to work with Trump.
  On January 4, 2017, while on the Senate floor, Sanders showed a large cutout of a tweet by President-elect Trump from May 2015 where Trump said he was the "first & only potential GOP candidate" who opposed any cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, citing it as what Trump appealed to older voters to elect him on.
  While in Los Angeles on February 19, Sanders called Trump "a pathological liar". He promised the defeat of "Trump and Trumpism and the Republican right-wing ideology."
  On March 30, two days after President Trump signed an "Energy Independence" executive order, Sanders called Trump's choice to focus on job creation over climate change is "nonsensical, and stupid, and dangerous".
  Sanders was against the nomination of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. He outlined his issues with Gorsuch in an April 4, 2017 appearance on the Senate floor. Sanders said he believed Gorsuch would support removing restrictions on campaign finance and would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
  On April 7, 2017, Sanders showed disapproval of President Trump's ordered airstrike from the day before: "If there’s anything we should’ve learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the lives of thousands of brave American men and women and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been lost and trillions of dollars spent, it’s that it’s easier to get into a war than out of one."
  In May 2017, Sanders endorsed Labour Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 United Kingdom general election.
  On June 11, 2017, Sanders was a keynote speaker at the People's Summit in Chicago, Illinois. In his speech, Sanders discussed of a plan that "can enhance and expand issue campaigns and hold all elected officials accountable to popular demands for justice, equality, and freedom". During his speech, he repeatedly criticized the Democratic Party, calling it an "absolute failure" and blaming it for the election of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
   I’m often asked by the media and others: How did it come about that Donald Trump, the most unpopular presidential candidate in the modern history of our country, won the election? And my answer is—and my answer is that Trump didn’t win the election; the Democratic Party lost the election. Let us—let us be very, very clear: The current model—the current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure. This is not—this is not my opinion. This is the fa
caption: Sanders at a rally to protect Social Security, January 2018
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