America's 10 Best Senators

Those who make a difference in the U.S. Senate — and five Senators who are falling short

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    Last November, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposed a controversial amendment barring U.S. courts from hearing cases brought by prisoners in the war on terrorism. It turned out that Kyl was behind it, having worked on the language for months and having assigned his staff to help write the final bill. But "it was a situation where it was best handled by Lindsey," Kyl says delicately, pointing out that Graham had the credibility of a military lawyer and centrist. When urgent legislation to respond to Hurricane Katrina bumped Kyl's long-sought goal of a vote on abolishing the estate tax last fall, Kyl quietly worked to get it back on the Senate agenda by recruiting Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in an unsuccessful attempt to find victims of the disaster who would be paying the tax. And although he denies it, G.O.P. aides say that when Harriet Miers was nominated to the Supreme Court last October, Kyl and his staff led a behind-the-scenes effort to undermine the nomination.

    As the Miers fight showed, Kyl does not always find himself on the same side of the battlements as Bush. The Senator was a leading opponent of the immigration-reform compromise backed by the President that collapsed earlier this month. When the Senate returns from recess next week, the Judiciary Committee will take up the immigration debate again. Watch for Kyl to play a pivotal role--if perhaps not the most conspicuous one. "You can accomplish a lot if you're not necessarily out in front on everything," he says.

    BEST: TED KENNEDY

    The Dealmaker

    Over 43 years in the Senate, democrat Ted Kennedy has fought serial battles on behalf of the working class--from defending overtime pay and workplace-safety regulations to expanding health care and penalizing discrimination. But the key to his legacy is not that he is determined to stick up for his principles. It's that he is willing to compromise on them.

    Late in 1990, for example, Kennedy sat red-faced as House Democrat Pat Schroeder berated him for supporting something he didn't believe in: caps on damages for workplace discrimination. But by agreeing to limits, Kennedy won over the handful of Republican and Southern Democratic Senators he needed to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, strengthening laws that banned job discrimination. The result was a law that protects women from sexual harassment at work and has yielded a surge in lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in damages to aggrieved plaintiffs.

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