Carl Levin: The Senator Who Mastered Oversight
If you serve six terms in the U.S. Senate — ranking among the 20 longest-serving members in that body’s history — you tend to get stuff named after you in your home state. For Joe Biden, an Amtrak station in Delaware. For Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye, a highway, a lighthouse and a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration center, among many other things (he got federal funding for all three). For West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, king of congressional pork … well, there’s so much named after him in the Mountain State that “List of places named after Robert Byrd” has its own lengthy Wikipedia page.
But how do you memorialize a man like Carl Levin, whose legacy was not in bringing home pork, but in the less-glamorous work of advocating for governmental oversight?