Ben Cardin

Ben Cardin is one of the longest-serving elected officials in modern American history. He first won election to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966 at age 23, while still in law school, and served there until 1987. He then won election to the US House of Representatives from Maryland's 3rd congressional district, serving from 1987 until 2007 — ten terms covering 20 years. In 2006, when Paul Sarbanes retired from the Senate, Cardin won a competitive Democratic primary and the general election to succeed him, serving in the Senate until January 2025.

His career spans every major political era from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society through the Biden presidency. He voted on legislation ranging from the Vietnam War supplementals of the late 1960s (in the state legislature) to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. He served under every president from Nixon through Biden. That kind of institutional continuity — combined with genuine expertise on foreign policy, small business, and environmental issues — defined his Senate legacy. He was not a headline-grabbing senator in the Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren mold, but a meticulous legislator with deep subject-matter knowledge.

Cardin announced his retirement in April 2023, triggering one of the most closely watched 2024 Senate primaries. The race in Maryland pitted well-funded Congressman David Trone against Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Alsobrooks won the primary and then won the general election against former Republican Governor Larry Hogan, preserving the seat for Democrats despite Hogan being the strongest possible Republican candidate in the state.

The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, signed into law in December 2016, is Ben Cardin's most significant legislative achievement and the piece of legislation most closely associated with his Senate career. The law authorizes the US President to impose sanctions — asset freezes and visa bans — on foreign nationals responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or serious human rights abuses, regardless of whether they are Russian nationals (the original Magnitsky Act, named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in Russian detention, was Russia-specific).

The Global Magnitsky Act transformed US foreign policy tools. It gave administrations of both parties a way to target individual human rights abusers without imposing broad country-level sanctions that harm civilian populations. The law has been used to sanction officials in Saudi Arabia (in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi), Myanmar, China (Xinjiang), Guatemala, Nicaragua, and dozens of other countries. The EU, UK, and Canada subsequently passed their own Magnitsky-style legislation, creating a coordinated Western human rights sanctions regime that Cardin helped inspire.

Cardin's retirement and Angela Alsobrooks's election represent a generational transition in Maryland Democratic politics. Alsobrooks — younger, Black, a county executive with a different political profile than the Jewish congressman-turned-senator Cardin — brings different constituent priorities and a different style to Maryland's Senate majority. The 2024 race also tested whether former Republican Governor Larry Hogan could win back a Senate seat for Maryland Republicans; he could not, though he ran a more competitive race than most Maryland Republicans in recent memory.

For the Senate Democratic caucus, Cardin's departure removed one of its most consistent foreign policy voices at a particularly fraught moment — just as the Trump administration was signaling reduced US support for Ukraine, weakened commitment to NATO, and a general withdrawal from the liberal international order that Cardin spent decades building. His absence from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee left a gap in institutional knowledge and relationships with foreign counterparts that takes years to replace.