Excerpts from Congressional Quarterly's Politics in America, 2000

In Washington: The tenor of the times is more conservative now than it was when Kildee first entered politics in 1964 - the heyday of Lyndon
B. Johnson’s Great Society, with its war on poverty, civil rights crusades and other social reforms.

Today, many in Congress’ Republican majority would like to eliminate the Great Society model of an activist federal government. But Kildee, a
former divinity student who once considered entering the priesthood, continues to press for Washington to play an aggressive role in improving the lot of people in need. And even though his own party’s president has declared that "the era of big government is over," Kildee can claim some successes.

A teacher by trade, Kildee took over as ranking member on a key Education subcommittee in the 105th Congress and played an active role in crafting a big education bill whose provisions included more federal assistance to college students and a $300 million-a-year program of grants for teacher training and recruitment.  In the 106th, Kildee again has a chance to make a mark, this time on a big reauthorization measure covering elementary and secondary education.
He is the No. 3 Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee and the ranking Democrat on its Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and Families.

Kildee also has a lifelong interest in correcting what he sees as the wrongs done to Native Americans. In 1997, he founded the congressional Native American Caucus, which gives voice on Capitol Hill to the concerns of Indian tribes. Kildee is also the No. 4 Democrat on the Resources Committee,whose jurisdiction includes Indian affairs.

Kildee is the son of an auto worker, and strong support for organized labor is a component of his generally liberal record. In recent years, Kildee’s views have earned him some serious re-election challenges; not since 1990 has he won with more than 60 percent of the vote.
Kildee has made some adaptations to these more conservative times.
In July 1997, he broke with many on the Democratic left to support the tax-and spending-cut bills that implemented the balanced-budget agreement worked out by congressional Republicans and the Clinton White House " even though the plan included spending curbs on Medicare and a reduction in the top capital gains tax rate, provisions that diehard liberals opposed.

And in 1996, Kildee voted for the final version of a bill overhauling the welfare system that was anathema to most liberals. Kildee said Democrats had wrangled enough concessions from the GOP to make the welfare plan worth supporting. 

On the Postsecondary Education Subcommittee, where he was the ranking Democrat in the 105th as the panel worked on the higher education bill, Kildee developed a good relationship with chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, a conservative but pragmatic California Republican. Kildee met regularly over breakfast with McKeon, fostering a bipartisan environment on the subcommittee.

Kildee’s priorities are evident in the bill Clinton signed into law in October 1998. It reduces student loan rates to their lowest level in nearly two decades, increases grants and college-preparatory assistance for needy students and sets up a new teacher training and recruitment program. Kildee praised the measure as a triumph of bipartisan cooperation. "The federal government does good things in this country," he said. "This is a bill that will make a real difference in education."

Kildee first took notice of the plight of Native Americans as a child when he visited his father’s hometown near the Grand Traverse reservation. A pre-vious generation of Kildees had traded with the Indians. "I was impressed by my dad’s concern about the Indians being treated unfairly and the abject poverty," he told The Detroit News.

As a Michigan state legislator, Kildee authored a law allowing Native Americans to go to the state's universities without charge. Well known for keeping a copy of the Constitution in his suit pocket, Kildee also carries a copy of an 1832 Supreme Court ruling that retained sovereignty for Indian nations. He has visited Indian reservations and schools, sometimes finding deplorable conditions. "I’ve been in Indian reservations that a federal judge wouldn’t have let us keep prisoners in," he told The Detroit News. Kildee says that principals of Indian schools sometimes will ask him to visit their institutions, or at least announce that he is planning a visit, because they believe that the Bureau of Indian Affairs may send cleanup crews into schools ahead of Kildee.

When Congress started talking about levying a tax on Indianrun gambling operations in 1997, Kildee founded the Native American Caucus, which he co-chairs with conservative Republican J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. In honor of all his efforts on Indians’ behalf, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in 1998 named April 15 "Dale Kildee Day." Kildee said he was touched by the group’s decision to give him an Indian name during a sacred ritual. "That was the group that my father and his parents came in contact with," he told The Detroit News. His re-election campaigns draw contributions from nearly three dozen Indian tribes across the nation, even though there are no reservations in Kildee’s district, located just north of Detroit.

Kildee is strongly pro-labor. In the 106th, he renewed his push for a bill to grant collective bargaining rights to public safety workers. The measure, introduced with Republican Bob Ney of Ohio, "recognizes the fundamental right of police and firefighters to form and join unions and to bargain collectively with their employers over wages, hours and working conditions," Kildee says.

Kildee was a proponent of a 90-cent minimum wage increase that Congress approved in 1996, and he has opposed a GOP effort to allow com-panies to offer their employees compensatory time off in lieu of pay for overtime work. Labor unions and their Democratic allies in Congress
argue that the bill might lead to workers being coerced to choose the form of compensation preferred by their employers.

Although he rarely breaks ranks with the majority of Democrats, Kildee, who says he has a "deep respect for human life," opposes abortion. In the 105th, he voted for a bill to ban government approval of any drug that could induce abortion, and he also wants to ban a procedure opponents call "partial birth" abortion.