Senator Lamar Alexander Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Senator Lamar Alexander - Essay Example Lamar Alexander later served as Education Secretary under President George Bush. He ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency in 1996 and 1999, losing out to the GOP candidate Robert Dole in 1996 and George W Bush in 1999. Senator Lamar Alexander has generally voted with the majority of his Republican colleagues. But one of the issues that the Senator has been deeply concerned with is education. He has consistently provided support in the Senate for scientific research funding. During his tenure as Governor of Tennessee, he helped the State to become one of the first to reward its teachers and pay them more for better performance, while also ending tenure for bad teachers. He also supported a bill put forward in the Senate to provide an additional 10.2 billion dollars for federal education and Health and Human Services projects but has rejected other bills to provide more resources to local educational agencies and to community centers. He has proposed that parents be encouraged to create Education Savings Accounts in order to support the education of their children. On this issue therefore, he follows the line adopted by his own Party, where the effort is to make the available funding more productive in terms of what it is able to achieve. Where abortion and the family is concerned, he follows the line advocated by his party and opposes abortion, but has diverged from his Party line in his support for research carried out using stem cells derived from embryos, as demonstrated by his support for the Bill no: H.R. 810. Another important bill where he voted differently from the Republican Party was the bill H.R. 976, in which the Senate passed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which increased federal funding and provided health insurance for million uninsured American children.