Let’s be frank. There are politicians in Washington, D.C., who seem to rack up pension credits and cruise into retirement, and there is Tennessee’s U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander.
The state’s senior senator said months ago he wouldn’t seek a fourth six-year term in 2020, so it would have been easy for him to serve out his days and go gently into that good night.
But not Alexander.
Just this month, he penned an opinion piece for the Washington Times on the need for a new Manhattan Project for clean energy, shepherded through the Senate Appropriations Committee a fifth consecutive year of record funding for the Office of Science, moved through the same committee the largest pay raise for military service members since 2010, supported Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to give the state more flexibility in federal Medicaid dollars with block grants and voted in the Senate Appropriations Committee to approve $189.1 million for the construction of a new federal courthouse in Chattanooga.
And just Thursday, the Republican spoke in favor during a Senate confirmation hearing of the nomination of Eugene Scalia as U.S. Labor secretary. A photograph taken after the end of the hearing showed him still at work, talking to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which he chairs, and trying to convince her of Scalia’s merits.