Tammy Duckworth Will Seek Reelection To U.S. Senate

ILLINOIS — Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth will seek another six year term to the U.S. Senate, she announced on Twitter Monday. A Republican challenger has yet to throw his or her hat into the ring.

Duckworth, 52, joined the Army ROTC in 1992 while pursuing a master’s degree in international affairs at George Washington University. She graduated later that year as a commissioned officer in the Army Reserves.

“I had just been laid off from my job and everything worked out,” Duckworth said in a statement, according to a news release from the Illinois National Guard. “I was able to go to basic training. So off I went to cadet basic training. It was miserable, but I loved the challenge.”

Four years later, Duckworth joined the Illinois Army National Guard and requested combat duty, wanting to follow in her father’s footsteps, according to a profile in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Duckworth was the only woman in her flight school. She finished near the top of her class, and soon deployed to Iraq. Her father, who earned a Purple Heart on Okinawa during WWII, didn’t seem impressed. It wasn’t the marines, he told her.

But, in 2004, Duckworth was awarded her own Purple Heart after a rocket-propelled grenade struck the Black Hawk helicopter she was flying north of Baghdad. The rocket exploded against the Plexiglas window directly below her seat, sending a fireball into the cockpit, according to the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor. Her co-pilot managed to crash-land the helicopter.

“I found out later the pedals were gone, and so were my legs,” Duckworth told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in 2005. She lost one leg below the knee and the other above, becoming the war’s first female double amputee.

After she was injured, Duckworth recalled that she was given a comfort kit that included jockey shorts and shaving cream.

“They just had kits for men,” she told the Huffington Post. “It never occurred to them to make kits for women.”

Later that year, Duckworth was promoted to major and awarded the Air Medal and Army Commendation Medal while still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Duckworth was elected to Congress in 2012 and represented Illinois’ 8th District for two terms. Shortly before winning reelection, Duckworth retired from the Illinois Army National Guard as a lieutenant colonel. In 2016, she defeated several Democratic opponents and Republican Sen. Mark Kirk to reclaim former President Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate for the Democrats.

Kirk was widely criticized for a racist attack on Duckworth during an October 2016 debate.

“My family has served this nation in uniform going back to the Revolution,” Duckworth said, to which Kirk responded: “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.”

According to ProPublica, Duckworth’s family not only fought in the American Revolution but served in colonial militias decades before. Kirk apologized but lost several prominent endorsements and, eventually, the race.

While in the Senate, Duckworth led the opposition to a bill that would have undermined the Americans with Disabilities Act and, in 2016, participated in a sit-in on the Senate floor to call for universal background checks and other gun control measures, even sneaking a phone into the chamber in her prosthetic leg and livestreaming the event after C-SPAN shut off the cameras, a violation of Senate rules.

In 2018, Duckworth became the first U.S. senator to give birth while in office. She later fought to overturn rules banning infants from the Senate floor, and in April of that year voted to confirm the head of NASA while holding her newborn daughter.

While in Washington, Duckworth has served on the Armed Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees in the House, and the Armed Services, Commerce, Science and Transportation, Energy and Natural Resources, Environment and Public Works and Small Business and Entrepreneurship committees in the Senate.