Former US Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker dies
Former Kansas senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker has died in the United States at the age of 94. The Guardian World reports. According to her son, Bill Kassebaum, she died on Friday of natural causes.
Three terms in the Senate
Kassebaum Baker was elected to the US Senate in 1978. She served three terms and represented Kansas in the upper chamber of Congress for 18 years.
She became the first woman elected to the US Senate without succeeding her husband in office. Her father was Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas and the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in the 1936 election.
Kassebaum Baker shared her father’s moderately progressive Republican views. After leaving the Senate in early 1997, she continued to serve in public roles.
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Work in the Senate and political position
Kassebaum Baker worked with senators of different political views. The 1996 health insurance law was named after her and Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ted Kennedy.
When she announced her retirement from the Senate, there were eight women there, and Kassebaum Baker was the only one of them to chair the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. She also supported a ban on assault weapons promoted by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
In 1996, Nancy Kassebaum married former US Senator from Tennessee, Republican Howard Baker. He died in 2014.
In later years, Kassebaum Baker supported Democratic Party candidates for governor of Kansas and US senator, including Governor Laura Kelly. In 2021, she said Donald Trump should be impeached after his supporters attacked the US Capitol.
