Episode Details

Al D'Amato served as a Republican U.S. Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999. Born in Brooklyn in 1937 of Italian ancestry and raised in Island Park on Long Island, he earned a law degree at Syracuse University and worked his way up through Nassau County politics as public administrator, Hempstead tax assessor, town supervisor and vice chair of the county Board of Supervisors. In 1980 he beat four term incumbent Jacob Javits in the Republican primary with about 56 percent, then won the general election with a 45 percent plurality after Javits stayed in on the Liberal Party line and split the vote with Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman. In the Senate he became known as Senator Pothole for relentless constituent service, and he staged filibusters that rank as the third and 11th longest in Senate history.

His record mixed Long Island conservatism, including support for the death penalty and votes to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, with votes for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and, in 1993, allowing openly gay people to serve in the military. As Banking Committee chair he led the Senate Special Whitewater Committee in 1995 and 1996 and pressed Swiss banks to return funds belonging to Holocaust survivors. Chuck Schumer defeated him 54 to 44 percent in 1998. Afterward he founded the lobbying firm Park Strategies, wrote the memoir Power, Pasta, and Politics, worked as a Fox News analyst, and went through a bitter, heavily covered separation and custody fight with his second wife.

• In 1986 he held the Senate floor for about 23 and a half hours against a military bill, reading from the District of Columbia telephone directory.
• In 1992 he sang South of the Border on the Senate floor while stalling a bill that threatened 750 jobs in upstate New York.
• He stabbed a poster of a dinosaur he called Taxisaurus Rex with an oversized pencil to protest the tax burden.
• In his 1998 race against Schumer he earned the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign.
• In 2017, at age 80, he was removed from a JetBlue flight delayed six times after urging passengers to walk off, and later apologized.