Senator Alfonse Marcello D’Amato

Alfonse Marcello D’Amato (born August 1, 1937) is an American attorney, lobbyist, and Republican politician who represented the state of New York in the United States Senate from January 3, 1981, to January 3, 1999. A member of the Republican Party, he served three consecutive terms and became a prominent figure in both New York and national politics. From 1995 to 1999 he chaired the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and as of 2026 he remains the most recent Republican to serve New York in the federal U.S. Senate.

D’Amato was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937 and raised in Island Park, a village in Nassau County on Long Island. He attended Syracuse University, where he completed his undergraduate studies and went on to earn a law degree. After law school he returned to Island Park and entered private legal practice while becoming active in local Republican politics. Rising through the party ranks, he held offices at the village, town, and county levels, building a reputation as an effective organizer and constituency-focused official within the strongly conservative political environment of Nassau County and Long Island.

By 1980, D’Amato had emerged as a serious challenger to four-term Republican U.S. Senator Jacob Javits. Although initially regarded as a relatively obscure candidate, he capitalized on dissatisfaction within the party and Javits’s 1979 diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In the 1980 Republican primary, D’Amato defeated Javits by a margin of 56–44 percent. Javits continued his campaign on the Liberal Party ticket in the general election, splitting the left-leaning vote in traditionally liberal New York with Democratic U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman. This three-way contest enabled D’Amato to win the seat with a 45 percent plurality. He was re-elected in 1986 and 1992, but in 1998 he lost his bid for a fourth term to Democratic Congressman Chuck Schumer, a future Senate Majority Leader, by a margin of 54–44 percent, a defeat widely attributed to weakened support among moderate voters in New York City, the base of Schumer’s House district.

During his eighteen years in the Senate, D’Amato became known for his intense focus on constituent services, earning the nickname “Senator Pothole.” While some New Yorkers used the moniker pejoratively, others viewed it as a testament to his attention to individual cases and local concerns. He also gained national attention for his dramatic use of the filibuster. D’Amato holds the record for the third- and eleventh-longest filibusters in Senate history. In 1986, in a filibuster against a military bill that lasted 23½ hours, he read from the District of Columbia telephone book. In 1992, opposing a bill that he argued would cost 750 jobs in upstate New York, he filibustered by singing “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” He was also remembered for his flair on the Senate floor, including a notable episode in which he presented a poster of a “Taxasaurus Rex” and then stabbed it with an oversized pencil to dramatize his opposition to tax increases.

As a legislator, D’Amato’s record reflected both conservative and occasionally moderate positions. He strongly supported his party’s “law and order” agenda, backing capital punishment and harsh penalties for drug offenses, positions that resonated with many voters in his Long Island base. At the same time, he sometimes broke with most Republicans on social issues. In 1993 he was one of only three Republican senators to vote in favor of allowing gays to serve openly in the U.S. military. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, but that same year he was among a minority of Republicans to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, aimed at protecting employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1998, the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ advocacy organization, endorsed D’Amato for re-election over his socially liberal Democratic opponent, Chuck Schumer, reflecting his comparatively moderate record on certain civil rights questions.

D’Amato’s committee assignments and leadership roles gave him significant influence over financial, housing, and civil rights matters. As chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs from 1995 to 1999, he became a leading Republican critic of the Clinton administration’s handling of the Whitewater controversy and chaired the hearings-intensive Senate Special Whitewater Committee in 1995 and 1996. He also served on the Senate Finance Committee, where he played a key role in facilitating lawsuits by Holocaust survivors seeking to recover relatives’ assets from dormant accounts in Swiss banks, an effort that contributed to international negotiations and settlements on Holocaust-era claims. Over the course of his Senate career, he voted in favor of the legislation establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday and supported the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987. In judicial matters, he voted to confirm Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, though the nomination was ultimately rejected by the Senate, and he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Court in 1991.

Within New York, D’Amato was widely regarded as the dominant figure in state Republican politics during his Senate tenure and was often described as the “boss” of the state party. He exercised considerable influence over candidate recruitment and party strategy. Notably, he played a leading role in recruiting George Pataki to run for governor in 1994 and in securing Pataki the Republican nomination, a decision that contributed to the party’s statewide resurgence when Pataki defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo.

After leaving the Senate in January 1999, D’Amato transitioned to a career in lobbying and political consulting. He founded Park Strategies, a lobbying firm based in New York, through which he has represented a wide range of corporate and institutional clients before federal, state, and local governments. Remaining active in national Republican politics, he periodically endorsed presidential candidates. On June 12, 2007, he endorsed his former Senate colleague Fred Thompson of Tennessee for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, describing Thompson as “a real conservative” and a candidate around whom the party could unify. Following Thompson’s poor primary showings, D’Amato shifted his support on January 22, 2008, to Senator John McCain, stating that McCain was the Republican best positioned to win the general election in November.