Santorum is considered both a social and fiscal conservative. He is known for his stances on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Social Security, intelligent design, homosexuality, and the Terri Schiavo case.
In March 2007, Santorum joined the law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC. He was to primarily practice law in the firm’s Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. offices, where he was to provide business and strategic counseling services to the firm's clients. In addition to his work with the firm, Santorum also serves as a Senior Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and was a contributor to Fox News Channel.
Santorum is a candidate for President of the United States in the 2012 election. He formed a presidential exploratory committee on April 13, 2011 and formally announced his candidacy on June 6.
Santorum was born in Winchester, Virginia, and raised in Berkeley County, West Virginia, and Butler County, Pennsylvania. He is the son of Aldo Santorum (born 1923) and Catherine Keane (née Dughi; born 1918). His father was an Italian immigrant, and his mother was of half Italian and half Irish descent.
Both of Santorum's parents worked at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Butler, and the family lived on the VA hospital post. His father became licensed as a psychologist in August 1974. He attended schools in the Butler Area School District, where he gained the nickname "Rooster", allegedly because he "always had a few errant hairs on the back of his head that refused to stay down", and he was "noisy, showy, dogged and determined like a rooster and never backed down.
Santorum and his wife, Karen Garver Santorum, have seven children: Elizabeth Anne (born 1991); Richard John ("Johnny"), Jr. (born 1993); Daniel James (born 1995); Sarah Maria (born 1998); Peter Kenneth (born 1999); Patrick Francis (born 2001); and Isabella "Bella" Maria (born 2008). Bella was subsequently diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a serious genetic disorder which is fatal before birth in 90 per cent of cases. In 1996, their son Gabriel Michael was born prematurely and lived for only two hours (a sonogram taken before Gabriel was born revealed that his posterior urethral valve was closed and that the prognosis for his survival was therefore poor). While pregnant, Karen Santorum developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant and allowed doctors to give her Oxytocin to speed the birth.
Karen Santorum wrote a book about the experience: Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum. In it, she writes that the couple brought the deceased infant home from the hospital and introduced the dead child to their living children as "your brother Gabriel" and slept with the body overnight before returning it to the hospital. The anecdote was also written about by Michael Sokolove in a 2005 New York Times Magazine story on Santorum.
After earning his Juris Doctor, Santorum became an administrative assistant to Republican State Senator Doyle Corman (until 1986). He was director of the Pennsylvania Senate's local government committee from 1981 to 1984, then director of the Pennsylvania Senate's Transportation Committee until 1986.
In 1990, at age 32, Santorum was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 18th District, located in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. He scored a significant upset, defeating a seven-term Democratic incumbent, Doug Walgren. Although the 18th was heavily Democratic, Santorum attacked Walgren for living outside the district for most of the year. He was reelected in 1992, in part because the district lost its share of Pittsburgh as a result of redistricting. In Congress, as a member of the Gang of Seven, Santorum worked to expose congressional corruption by naming the guilty parties in the House banking scandal.
In 1994, at the age of 36, Santorum was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating the incumbent Democrat, Harris Wofford, who was 32 years older. The theme of Santorum's 1994 campaign signs was "Join the Fight!" Santorum was re-elected in 2000 defeating Congressman Ron Klink by a 52.4% to 45.5% margin.
In 1996 he endorsed Arlen Specter for president.
In a 2002 PoliticsPA Feature story designating politicians with yearbook superlatives, he was named the "Most Ambitious".
In November 2004, a controversy developed over education costs for Santorum's children. Santorum's legal address is a three-bedroom house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, which he purchased for $87,800 in 1997 and is located next to the home of his wife's parents. But since 2001, he has spent most of the year in Leesburg, Virginia, a town about one hour's drive west of Washington, D.C., and about 90 minutes' drive south of the Pennsylvania border, in a house he purchased for $643,000. The Penn Hills Progress, a local paper, reported that Santorum and his wife paid about $2,000 per year in property taxes on their Pennsylvania home ($487.20 per year to Allegheny County, 2006 through 2008, based on a 2007 value of $106,000, plus Penn Hills School District tax). The paper also found that another couple—possibly renters—were registered voters at the same address.
At the time the issue arose, Santorum's five older children attended the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, with 80 percent of tuition costs paid by the Penn Hills School District. At a meeting in November 2004, the Penn Hills School District announced that it did not believe Santorum met the qualifications for residency status, because he and his family spent most of the year in Virginia. They demanded repayment of tuition costs totaling $67,000.
When news reports showed Sen. Santorum was renting his Penn Hills home, Santorum withdrew his five children from the cyber education program that Penn Hills School District paid for. That saved Penn Hills taxpayers about $38,000 a year. Although Santorum said he would make other arrangements for his children's education, he insisted that he did not owe the school board any back tuition. Once the controversy surfaced, the children were withdrawn from the cyber school and were then home schooled.
In June 2006, Santorum declared that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) had been found in Iraq. The specific weapons he referred to were chemical munitions dating back to the Iran–Iraq War that were buried in the early 1990s. The report stated that while agents had degraded to an unknown degree, they remained dangerous and possibly lethal. Officials of the Department of Defense, CIA intelligence analysts, and the White House have all explicitly stated that these expired casings are not part of the WMDs threat that Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched to contain.
Santorum's declaration was based in part on declassified portions of a classified report from the National Ground Intelligence Center of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Portions were declassified in a summary that made six key points:
Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded or vacant mustard or sarin nerve agent casings.
Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre–Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled warheads are believed to still exist. They have no viable military capability, however.
Pre–Gulf War chemical munitions could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups could have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq.
The most likely munitions remaining are sarin- and mustard-filled projectile casings.
The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, the residue could be hazardous upon dermal contact.
It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical
weapons.
In 2005 a coalition of animal rights groups, spearheaded by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the Doris Day Animal League (DDAL) mounted a failed effort to push the Pet Animal Welfare Statute of 2005 (PAWS) through Congress. The bill was proposed by Senator Santorum and sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (then-R-PA). PAWS would have reclassified most small and hobby breeders as commercial breeders subjecting them to USDA regulations, allowed home inspections and placed fees and compliance expenses on pet breeders. Fellow Congressmen were told that PAWS was "the puppy mill bill". This was Santorum's third failed attempt at pet-related legislation.
In 2005, four teenagers were ejected from a bookstore in Wilmington, Delaware, where Santorum was scheduled for a book signing, after they were overheard expressing critical opinions of the senator. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit, which was settled in 2007. As a result of the settlement, the Delaware State Police were required to pay legal fees for the plaintiffs and provide training to officers on free speech rights. The Santorum staff members who requested the ejection were required to apologize and to relinquish their salaries for the event—$2,500.00—to plaintiffs in damages.
In reference to the Iraq war in 2006, Santorum drew an analogy with The Lord of the Rings in one of his addresses:
As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.Rick Santorum
Santorum informed senator John Ensign that Ensign's affair with a staff member was about to become publicly known.
In the fall of 2009, Santorum hinted that he was considering a run for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2012 presidential election. On September 11, 2009, Santorum spoke to a group of Catholic leaders in Orlando, Florida. He told them, "I hate to be calculating, but I see that 2012 is not just throwing somebody out to be eaten, but it's a real opportunity for success." He scheduled appearances with political non-profit organizations that took place in Iowa on October 1, 2009.
Santorum repeated his consideration of a 2012 run in an e-mail and letter sent on January 15, 2010 to supporters of his Political Action Committee saying, "After talking it over with my wife Karen and our kids – I am considering putting my name in for the 2012 presidential race. I'm convinced that conservatives need a candidate who will not only stand up for our views, but who can articulate a conservative vision for our country's future," Santorum writes. "And right now, I just don't see anyone stepping up to the plate. I have no great burning desire to be president, but I have a burning desire to have a different president of the United States". He formed a presidential exploratory committee on April 13, 2011.
On May 26, a staffer close to the Santorum camp told CNN that Santorum will formally announce his candidacy on June 6, in the same town where his father worked in a coal mine.
Santorum formally announced his run for the Republican presidential nomination on ABC's Good Morning America Monday, June 6, 2011. Santorum, who will make an official announcement at 11 am in Somerset, Pennsylvania, said he's "in it to win."
On June 15, Santorum resigned from the board of Universal Health Services, a for-profit hospital chain receiving 38% of its income from taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid services.He was paid $168,000 in cash and stock in 2010 for attending board and compensation committee meetings.
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