The New York Times called him "folksy." CNN identifies him as a "moderate," which would surprise his colleagues and constituents.
Alan K. Simpson died at his home in Cody, Wyo., on Thursday. He was 92.
Alan Kooi Simpson was impossible to pigeonhole. A strong advocate for a balanced budget, military strength, and other conservative positions, he was also pro-choice and supported the 1986 immigration reform bill that granted amnesty to many illegal aliens if they had lived in the U.S. for five years, spoke English, and paid taxes.
Simpson may have been a supporter of abortion rights but opposed federally funding abortions except in cases of rape or incest.
He was also one of the first prominent Republicans to support gay marriage. “I’ve worked very closely with the gay-lesbian community; we’re all human beings, for God’s sake,” he said in 2008.
His fierce advocacy for conservative Supreme Court nominees endeared him to Republican presidents. This advocacy also got him in deep trouble with the NAACP, the women's rights lobby, and environmentalists. This didn't bother him a bit.
His gentle, good humor was legendary.
”In your country club, your church and business, about 15% of the people are screwballs, lightweights and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress,” he once said.
The immigration bill he supported also contained the first penalties for employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. He also advocated for tough border restrictions and better enforcement.
Former George H.W. Bush aide David Gergen, who reviewed Simpson's biography in 1996, said that the senator often complained about the one-dimensional caricature the press painted him as.
“Alan Simpson was a much more valuable public servant than his critics admit,” Mr. Gergen wrote. “He worked effectively to create bipartisan coalitions that moved important legislation through Congress. His personal friendships and his humor were part of the glue that kept the place together. And unlike most of his critics, he owned up to mistakes.”
When bipartisanship was the way things worked on Capitol Hill, Simpson was a tremendous player. His encyclopedic knowledge of the budget process gave him a massive advantage over anyone except Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd knew Senate rules inside and out and would often clash with Simpson over some arcane rule or another. Both men respected each other despite the fierceness of their disagreements.
“I’m a legislator. I love to legislate,” he told the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in 2008. “Plotting, strategizing, philosophizing, those things mean nothing to me. I’m a trigger guy. Give me an issue; let me wrench the emotion, fear, guilt, and racism out of it and get some facts into it and see if we can pass the son-of-a-b***h.”
Simpson retired after three terms in the Senate in 1996. He taught for a while, sat on the boards of several non-profits, and returned to Cody in 2000 to practice law.
Then, in 2010, Barack Obama asked him to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with former Bill Clinton aide Erskine Bowles.
At the time, I asked, "Can the White House Deficit Reduction Commission Succeed?"
One can hardly blame the cynics. Obama’s ploy of creating the Commission in the first place was due to the inability of Washington politicians to face the consequences of their own callous mismanagement and undisciplined actions with taxpayers’ money. Why should this statutorily toothless Commission succeed when Republicans and Democrats continue to act like spoiled brats, refusing to make the hard choices that would untie this Gordian knot of unsustainable deficits?
The "unsustainable deficits" that I wrote about in 2010 were $400 billion. Today, the Biden deficit for 2024 is in excess of $2 trillion. As it was called, the Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed $4 trillion in spending cuts and tax increases to cope with mounting federal deficits. Obama thanked Erskine and Simpson for their efforts, ignoring the recommendations.
I met Simpson several times in the 1980s. He and Sen. Paul Simon were the most genuine, unpretentious politicians I ever met. They were both cut from the same cloth. And the U.S. could do better with more men like them.
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