The Better World of Sam Brownback

...Visitors to Brownback's office during July smelled the flowers—bouquets sent daily by Iranian Americans grateful for his sponsorship of the Iran Democracy Act...

...visit about the need to curb religious persecution...

...While all this occurred, Brownback continued to press the State Department on negotiations to end the Sudan government's twenty-year jihad against the country's Christian minority, which has claimed more than two million lives and produced more than 20 percent of the world's current refugees...

...That the Khartoum regime is even talking at all is a direct result of the Sudan Peace Act of 2002, written by Brownback and passed with the help of a coalition of evangelical Christians, Reform Jews, and secular human rights groups he helped shape...

...Indeed, Democrats now talk about the risks—and there are many—of a proactive foreign policy designed to accelerate the spread of human rights and democracy around the world...

...Consider, as both a symbol and cause of the growing shift in American political power, Kansas senator Sam Brownback...

...he's acting in the spirit of Wilberforce's campaigns against bear baiting and dueling and his founding of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, the institution that most effectively dealt with the savage effects of the Industrial Revolution on nineteenth-century English life...

...Like the president—and Ronald Reagan—his positions are seen by adversaries to spring from decency rather than meanness of spirit...

...Zero...

...Today, "ideologues" of the so-called "Christian right" like Hyde and Smith regularly conduct hearings on human rights in East Timor and China's treatment of the Falun Gong, while Brownback takes the lead in condemning the recent Hong Kong sedition law proposals and holding Foreign Relations Committee hearings on issues ranging from North Korea's gulags to Pakistan's blasphemy laws...

...He also spent significant portions of the week drafting a bill reauthorizing the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act of 2000, one of the quiet human rights success stories of the decade, which Brownback successfully cosponsored with the late Paul Well-stone over the Clinton administration's opposition...

...His party and his country will be much the better for it...

...Like the president, Brownback's record and character undermine caricatures of the right-to-life and anti-cloning movements...

...The decision—hardly designed to make life easier for a Kansas politician—shows the respect Brownback enjoys...

...And he continued to play a key broker's role between the White House and the evangelical community on the Africa AIDS initiative...

...During the same period, Brown-back was the subject of intense interest in South Korea and Japan for co-sponsoring, with Ted Kennedy, the North Korea Refugee Act of 2003—action consistent with Brownback's role as Congress's leading advocate for human rights in North Korea...

...Typical of Brown-back's initiatives, the act deals with the acutely vulnerable, in this case the annual trafficking of more than one million women and children into sex and slave bondage by international mafias and corrupt government officials...

...But whether or not Brownback does, there's little doubt that he will become a major figure in American public life and an increasingly critical player in its governing coalitions...

...Brownback even managed to make the front page of the New York Times in July, for co-sponsoring legislation authorizing a National Museum of African American History...

...both men have been shaped by their faith and inspired by faith-based leaders...

...With family roots in Osawatomie, Kansas—a hotbed of pre-Civil War evangelical abolitionism—it's not surprising that Brownback's political role model is William Wilberforce, the English parliamentarian and evangelical Christian who led the early nineteenth-century battle against the slave trade, along the way founding such institutions as the Society for the Education of the Blind, the Society for the Rescue of Debtors Prisoners, the Friends of Foreigners in Distress, and the Ellard Society for Educational Scholarships...

...those who know him did not...

...The president, Brownback, and such House leaders as Henry Hyde, Chris Smith, and Frank Wolf are today's leading advocates of the proposition that American security is most protected in a post-9/11 world by the spread of human rights and democracy...

...Likewise, Brown-back's animating spirit led conservatives who disagreed with his pro-immigration views to mute their criticisms during the years he chaired the Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee...

...As with Republicans of old, they seek "practical" constraints on the "excesses" of the opposing party's vision—a sure formula for permanent minority status...

...Agree or not with Brownback's view that an unborn fetus merits full legal protection, it's clear that his thinking springs from the same moral imperatives that lead him to champion trafficked women, Sudanese slaves, Iranian students, African AIDS victims, Israeli terrorist targets, and prisoners in North Korea's gulags...

...Painful as it may be, Democrats need to come to terms with the fact that President Bush's popularity—and the growing strength of the Republican Party in general—owe much to this fact of American history...

...Agree with him or not about his joint effort with Senator Joseph Lieberman to curb the violence and misogyny of American movies and rock music, it's clear that Brownback is no censorious bluestocking...

...Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Brownback was working to ensure that U.S...

...He quietly helped ensure that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf received strong signals during his U.S...

...Like the president, Brownback is deeply religious yet wholly uncensorious of those who aren't...

...The Times professed "surprise" at Brown-back's involvement...

...Here's a fact: the number of human rights hearings conducted by the Foreign Relations Committee when the Democrats controlled the Senate after the Jeffords defection...

...As with George Bush, Brown-back's character and priorities tell much about why America is moving rapidly toward conservatism as its prevailing ideology and the Republican Party as its governing party...

...Now completing a remarkably successful first term in the Senate, he will face only token opposition in the 2004 elections...

...For these and other reasons many conservative and religious leaders intend for him to be a serious candidate to succeed the president...

...Brownback's more contemporary model, Mother Teresa, was a major inspiration for his recent, remarkable act of joining the Catholic Church...

...Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty was not as charmed, complaining of "nasty" treatment from Brownback after histough questions at a hearing on the rights of American children abducted by Saudi parents...

...In temperament, vision, and faith, Sam Brownback is closer to George Bush than to any member of Congress...

...Largely beneath the radar screen of the national press, Sam Brownback has joined President Bush as a model of modern American conservatism...

...designated consultants drafting new Iraqi and Afghan constitutions did not ignore democracy and religious freedom issues...

...This "idealism," once the province of the Democratic Party, is now a central passion for fewer and fewer of the party's leaders—all the more so since the death of Brown-back's friend Paul Wellstone...

...BY MICHAEL HOROWITZ A merica has always ceded governing status to the leaders and parties most rooted in moral concerns—to those who best understand the powerful links between American interests and underlying values...

...Well liked by colleagues, he is one of the very few senators permitted to serve on two "A" committees, Appropriations and Foreign Relations...

...it has damaged neither his political standing at home nor his strong ties to American evangelical leaders...