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Roman Hruska was born in 1904 in David City, Nebraska, one of 11 children of Czech immigrants, and moved to Omaha in 1917. He studied at the University of Omaha and the University of Chicago Law School, graduated from Creighton law in 1929, and cofounded the Douglas Theatre Company. In 1944 he accepted a Douglas County Board seat as a favor after a friend resigned, chaired the board until 1952 and led state and national county officials' groups. Elected to the House in 1952, he won the 1954 special election for Hugh Butler's Senate seat and served until 1976 on the Appropriations and Judiciary committees, voting for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act and Thurgood Marshall's confirmation.

In 1970, as the ranking Republican on Judiciary, he defended Richard Nixon's Supreme Court nominee G. Harrold Carswell, whom critics called a mediocre jurist with a high reversal rate. Hruska answered that mediocre judges, people and lawyers are entitled to a little representation, adding that the court could not have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos. The nomination failed 51 to 45. He later defended Nixon through Watergate, calling it a partisan attack even after the resignation. He retired in 1976, returned to Omaha, and died in 1999 at 94, 15 days after breaking his hip, and was buried in Omaha's Bohemian Cemetery.

• The Carswell fight followed the Senate's rejection of Nixon's earlier nominee Clement Haynsworth.
• He also voted to ban poll taxes during the civil rights era.
• He won reelection in 1958, 1964 and 1970, twice defeating Democrat Frank B. Morrison.
• In 1978 Jimmy Carter signed a bill naming the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay County for him.
• The Roman L. Hruska Federal Courthouse stands in Omaha, and a law center named for him in Lincoln houses the state bar association.

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Roland Burris was born in 1937 in Centralia, Illinois, graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1959, studied international law in Germany and earned a Howard University law degree in 1963. He became the first African American national bank examiner for the Comptroller of the Currency, then spent about a decade at Continental Illinois National Bank, rising to vice president. After heading the state's Department of Central Management Services and briefly running Operation PUSH, he was elected Illinois comptroller in 1978, the first African American to win statewide office there, and attorney general in 1990. He then lost bids for U.S. Senate in 1984, governor in 1994, 1998 and 2002, and mayor of Chicago in 1995.

As attorney general he kept fighting Rolando Cruz's appeal despite a memo from one of his assistant attorneys general warning of a wrongful conviction; she resigned, and DNA tests cleared Cruz in 1995. A funeral trust his comptroller's office had licensed collapsed with a $59 million deficit after he lobbied for it. In December 2008 Governor Rod Blagojevich, caught on FBI wiretaps trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat, appointed Burris, and the Senate seated him only after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in his favor. FBI tapes then showed him offering to write a personal check, and the Senate Ethics Committee admonished him for misleading statements. He was the only Black senator during his short term and did not run in 2010.

• His pre-built mausoleum in Chicago's Oakwood Cemetery is carved with the word Trailblazer, with space left for future achievements.
• In the 1998 governor's race he called his primary opponents non-qualified white boys.
• A year after organizing Chicago's first gun turn-in day in 1993, he was found to still keep a handgun at home.
• Secretary of State Jesse White refused to sign his certification, and he was turned away at the Senate chamber doors.
• By April 2009 his campaign had raised a total of $845.

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Robert F. Wagner was born in Prussia in 1877 and came to New York in 1885, growing up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, where his father worked as a janitor. He graduated from City College in 1898 and New York Law School in 1900, then rose through Tammany Hall to the state Assembly in 1905 and the state Senate in 1909, serving as president pro tempore from 1911 to 1914. After the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers, he chaired the Factory Investigating Committee with Al Smith as vice chairman. The committee took about 3,500 pages of testimony from 222 witnesses, walked through factories across the state, and produced 38 new laws that shifted the burden of workplace safety onto employers.

Wagner became a New York Supreme Court justice in 1919 and a U.S. senator in 1927. During the New Deal he sponsored the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Social Security Act and the Housing Act of 1937, which created the U.S. Housing Authority. When the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935, he wrote the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing collective bargaining and creating the National Labor Relations Board. His anti-lynching bill with Edward Costigan was filibustered without Franklin Roosevelt's endorsement, and the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children died in committee. Heart trouble forced his resignation in June 1949, and he died on May 4, 1953.

• The Triangle factory owners had locked the stairwell doors to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft.
• Recorded lynchings fell from 18 in 1935 to eight in 1936 and two in 1939 as he kept pressing his bill.
• Raised Lutheran and a Methodist from college on, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1946.
• A confidential 1943 analysis by Isaiah Berlin called him a veteran liberal Tammany statesman.
• His son Robert F. Wagner Jr. served three terms as mayor of New York City.

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Richard Nixon grew up poor in Yorba Linda and Whittier, California, where his family ran a failing lemon ranch and then a grocery store and gas station. He lost his brothers Arthur and Harold to illness, rose at 4 a.m. to drive to Los Angeles for produce, and turned to debate after a lung scar barred him from football. Rejected by the Franklins at Whittier College, he cofounded the rival Orthogonians, then graduated third in his class from Duke Law on scholarship. He pursued Pat Ryan for two years after meeting her in a community theater production, left his Quaker pacifist upbringing to serve in Navy logistics in the South Pacific, and used poker winnings to fund his 1946 defeat of Jerry Voorhis. The Alger Hiss case and the pumpkin papers made him a national figure.

Dwight Eisenhower chose him as running mate at 39. After losing narrowly to John F. Kennedy in 1960 he declined to contest the result, then lost the 1962 California governor's race and told reporters they would not have Nixon to kick around anymore. Elected president in 1968, he ordered bombing in Cambodia while opening relations with China in 1972 and pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, and he created the EPA and OSHA. The June 17, 1972 Watergate break-in, the cover-up and his own Oval Office taping system led to his resignation on August 9, 1974. Pardoned by Gerald Ford, he wrote nine books and advised later presidents before dying of a stroke in 1994.

• A high school English teacher taught him to converse with an audience rather than shout at it.
• His frozen orange juice company, Citrofrost, went bankrupt after 18 months.
• Even his close friend Bebe Rebozo did not call him by his first name.
• He signed the Endangered Species Act and the lowering of the voting age to 18.
• The burglars' sequential $100 bills were traced to a fund of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

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Quentin Burdick was born in 1908 in Munich, North Dakota, son of Usher Burdick, a Republican lieutenant governor and longtime congressman. He broke wild ponies on the family ranch near Williston, captained his high school football team and played blocking back for Bronko Nagurski at the University of Minnesota, where a knee injury later kept him out of World War II. After law school he returned to Fargo in 1932 and represented farmers facing Depression foreclosures, the period he said gave him a social conscience. Running with the Nonpartisan League on the Republican ticket, he lost races for attorney general, state senate, lieutenant governor, governor and U.S. Senate between 1934 and 1956, then helped merge the league with the Democrats in 1956.

In 1958 his father withdrew from his own House race on the condition that the league back Quentin, who won the seat. His first wife, Marietta, died that year. After Senator William Langer died, Burdick ran in 1960 on the slogan Beat Benson with Burdick, aimed at Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, and defeated Governor John Davis by 1,118 votes. Nine days later he married Jocelyn Peterson, a widow. Over 32 years in the Senate he chaired Environment and Public Works from 1987 and steered federal money into rural North Dakota, earning the nickname King of Pork. He died in office in September 1992 at 84, and Jocelyn was appointed to his seat, becoming North Dakota's first woman senator.

• His first House speech called for Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson to resign over lower crop price supports.
• His son Gage died in a woodworking accident at the family home in 1978 at age 16.
• In 1990 he was one of only nine Democrats to vote against confirming David Souter.
• Late in his tenure, polling showed 76 percent of North Dakotans thought he should step down.
• Kent Conrad reversed his plan to leave the Senate and won the special election for Burdick's seat.

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Philip Hart was born in December 1912 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of a bank president, and was student body president and an award winning debater at Georgetown before earning a University of Michigan law degree in 1937. In 1943 he married Jane Briggs, daughter of the Detroit Tigers' owner, who became Michigan's first female helicopter pilot and later passed Mercury 13 astronaut screening. Serving with the 4th Infantry Division, he was wounded by shrapnel at Utah Beach on D-Day and earned the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Croix de Guerre, recovering at Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek alongside Bob Dole and Daniel Inouye. He then served as Michigan's securities commissioner, state director of price stabilization, and two term lieutenant governor under G. Mennen Williams.

Elected to the Senate in 1958, he was chief Senate sponsor of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which replaced the national origin quota system with a seven category preference system. His support for gun control and school busing inspired bumper stickers declaring that a recall cures Hart attacks, though the Constitution offers no recall of federal officials, and he won reelection in 1964 and 1970. He announced his retirement in June 1976, was diagnosed with melanoma a month later, and died in December 1976, about a week before his term ended. The Senate voted 99 to 0, with Hart abstaining, to name its new office building for him while he was still alive.

• He and Janey lost their son Philip Jr. as a toddler, and Hart was later buried near him on Mackinac Island.
• As price stabilization director he enforced postwar maximum price rules between angry businesses and consumers.
• He was the first Michigan Democrat to serve two terms as lieutenant governor.
• He introduced the 1961 legislation that led to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
• The Battle Creek hospital where he recovered is now the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center.

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Paul Laxalt was born in Reno in 1922 to immigrants from the French Pyrenees: a sheepherder father who made and lost a fortune, and a Le Cordon Bleu trained mother who ran the French Hotel in Carson City. He served as an Army medic at Leyte, became a district attorney and then a lawyer for casino figures, winning the Golden Rooster case by convincing a jury that a 15 pound gold statue was art rather than hoarded bullion. He won the lieutenant governorship in 1962, lost a 1964 Senate race to Howard Cannon by 48 votes after refusing to avoid Barry Goldwater, and won the governorship in 1966. As governor he met with J. Edgar Hoover, licensed Howard Hughes without an in person appearance and created the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency with Ronald Reagan.

He beat Harry Reid for the Senate in 1974 by 624 votes, chaired Reagan's campaigns in 1976, 1980 and 1984, and became general chairman of the Republican Party, earning the name the First Friend. He led opposition to the Panama Canal treaties with a mass mail campaign and brokered a deal with Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden over William Rehnquist's confirmation. As Reagan's envoy he pressed Ferdinand Marcos, and in February 1986 he told Marcos by phone to cut and cut cleanly. He sued the Sacramento Bee over casino skimming stories and was awarded more than $647,000 in fees. His 1988 presidential bid lasted four months, and in 2013 it was revealed that Pete Domenici was the father of his grandson Adam Laxalt. He died in 2018 at 96.

• Running mate Rex Bell died of a heart attack at a Fourth of July rally in 1962, and Laxalt still stayed in the lieutenant governor's race.
• He walked into the yard during a Nevada State Penitentiary riot, remarking that many inmates were his former clients.
• He said Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon felt like a hundred pound weight around his neck in 1974.
• The Sacramento Bee acknowledged it found no evidence of a skim at his family's Ormsby House casino.
• His Senate intern program helped launch the career of future Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval.

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Mark Kirk was born in 1959 in Champaign, Illinois, and studied at Blackburn College, the Autonomous University of Mexico and Cornell before earning a master's from the London School of Economics and a Georgetown law degree. He was chief of staff to Congressman John Porter, worked at the World Bank and Baker McKenzie, and in 2000 won Porter's 10th District seat, where he chaired the centrist Tuesday Group. A Navy Reserve intelligence officer from 1989 to 2013, he was recalled during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, but in his 2010 race for Barack Obama's former Senate seat he admitted embellishing his record, including an intelligence officer of the year award that actually went to his unit. He apologized and narrowly beat Alexi Giannoulias.

In the Senate he took over the candy desk, was ranked the sixth most bipartisan senator by the Lugar Center, supported same sex marriage and met with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. In January 2012, at 52, he suffered an ischemic stroke that required a craniectomy at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. That November he climbed 37 floors of the Willis Tower, and in January 2013 he walked up the Capitol steps on Vice President Joe Biden's arm. In an October 2016 debate he answered Tammy Duckworth's mention of her family's military history by saying he had forgotten her parents came from Thailand to serve George Washington. The Human Rights Campaign withdrew its endorsement, a first for the group, and he lost 55 to 40 percent.

• He claimed on the House floor that Iraqi air defenses fired at him, then admitted there was no record of it.
• The Pentagon counseled him twice for mixing politics with duty, including tweeting about Rod Blagojevich's arrest while deployed to Afghanistan.
• He was the only Republican senator with an F grade from the NRA and the only one to vote for the 2013 assault weapons ban.
• He withdrew his support for Donald Trump in 2016 and said he would write in David Petraeus.
• He pushed to protect the Great Lakes from Asian carp and sewage dumping.

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Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo was born in 1859 in Valle de Allende, Chihuahua, to a wealthy landowning family that was ruined after French soldiers ransacked its estate over the family's support for Benito Juárez. At 11 he was sent to the Arizona Territory under Bishop Jean Salpointe to prepare for the priesthood, graduated from St. Michael's College in Santa Fe in 1876, and chose teaching instead while studying law at night. He became a U.S. citizen in 1884, joined the Texas bar in 1888 and served as a district attorney before moving to Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1895. There he left the Republicans for the Democrats and lost races for territorial delegate in 1900, 1906 and 1908 amid allegations of fraud.

At the 1911 constitutional convention, after Democrats rejected his demand that half of statewide nominees be Hispanic, he formed a coalition that wrote Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo protections, bilingual teacher training and a ban on segregated schools for children of Spanish descent into the constitution, then rejoined the Republicans. Elected governor in 1918, he declared martial law during a coal strike, pardoned Mexican soldiers from the 1916 Columbus raid, signed an income tax and backed women's suffrage, and his party refused to renominate him. After losing bids for governor of Puerto Rico and the state Supreme Court, he won a state House seat in 1927 and in 1928 became the first Mexican American U.S. senator, serving one session before his death in April 1930.

• He left his first local school after being physically abused by a teacher.
• Article 2, Section 5 of the New Mexico constitution preserved rights promised by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
• In the 1918 race his opponent attacked his Chihuahua birth, and he won to become the state's first Mexican born governor.
• He argued the Columbus raiders were soldiers following orders who should not answer for their generals' decisions.
• His one measure in the Senate proposed an industrial school in New Mexico for Spanish speaking youth.

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Norm Coleman was born in Brooklyn in 1949 to a Jewish family whose surname his grandfather had changed from Goldman. At Hofstra University he was an antiwar activist suspended for leading a sit-in, served as Student Senate president, fought the campus newspaper over funding, worked as a roadie for bands like Jethro Tull and turned 20 at Woodstock. After graduating from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1976 he moved to Minnesota and rose to chief prosecutor and solicitor general in the attorney general's office. Elected mayor of St. Paul in 1993 as a fiscally conservative Democrat, he helped bring NHL hockey back with the Minnesota Wild, switched to the Republican Party in 1996 and lost the 1998 governor's race to Jesse Ventura.

Recruited by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, he ran for the Senate in 2002 against Paul Wellstone, whose 1996 campaign he had chaired. Wellstone died in a plane crash days before the election, and Coleman beat replacement nominee Walter Mondale by about 61,000 votes. In the Senate he backed the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts while supporting a minimum wage increase and joining the bipartisan Gang of 20 on energy. His 2008 race against Al Franken went to an eight month recount, and a three judge panel declared Franken the winner by 312 votes, a result the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld in June 2009. He later chaired the Republican Jewish Coalition and lobbied at Hogan Lovells for clients including Saudi Arabia and U.S. Steel.

• He froze St. Paul property tax rates for his entire eight years as mayor.
• He publicly berated FEMA director Michael Brown over the Hurricane Katrina response.
• He tied his opposition to embryonic stem cell research and abortion to losing two infant children to Zellweger syndrome.
• The initial 2008 margin against Franken was just over 200 votes out of nearly 2.9 million cast.
• The Justice Department declined to charge him over a Texas lawsuit involving his wife's employer, and an investigation by a former FBI director cleared him.