Amy Jean Klobuchar (born May 25, 1960) is an American lawyer and politician currently serving as the senior Senator from the state of Minnesota. Klobuchar graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1982 and earned her J.D. — also magna cum laude — from the University of Chicago Law School in 1985. After over a decade in private practice, where she specialized in telecommunications law, she was elected to the office of Hennepin County Attorney in 1998 and to the Senate in 2006. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 US election, ultimately endorsing Joe Biden just before Super Tuesday.
As of the 117th Congress, she is the Chair of the Senate Rules Committee and the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, and also serves on, among others, the Judiciary Committee (where she chairs the Antitrust subcommittee); the Joint Economic Committee; the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; and the Agricultural, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. She is noted for her work on antitrust legislation, voting rights, and infrastructure law, among others.
Her father was the late, great Minnesota reporter Jim Klobuchar. In 1993 she married attorney and law professor John Bessler, a noted expert on the death penalty; they have one daughter, Abigail, born in 1995.
Books:
- Uncovering the Dome: Was the Public Interest Served in Minnesota's 10-Year Political Brawl Over the Metrodome?note (1986)
- The Senator Next Door: A Memoir from the Heartland (2015)
- Antitrust: Taking On Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age (2021)
- The Joy of Politics: Surviving Cancer, A Campaign, A Pandemic, An Insurrection, and Life's Other Unexpected Curveballs (2023)
Media:
- Saturday Night Live: Rachel Dratch impersonated her during the 2020 election. Klobuchar approved.
- She was part of the Emmy-nominated live episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on January 6, 2021, the day of the U.S. Capitol riot, being the first interview of the show.
- She is a regular guest on The Rachel Maddow Show and one of its longest-running, having made her first appearance there all of about two weeks after it debuted.
- She gave a notable Colbert Bump to Minnesota native rapper Dessa, using her song "The Bullpen" as her walk-on song during her campaign. Written about the musician's own experiences in the heavily male-dominated rap industry, the lyrics are also quite apropos for Klobuchar's own experiences in the equally male-dominated world of national and international politics.
