Alan Simpson, three-term senator known for barbed wit, dies at 93

Alan K. Simpson, a Wyoming Republican who served three controversy-rich terms in the U.S. Senate – a tenure animated by a feistiness that was as earthy as it could be intemperate – and who later returned to the national stage as a leading deficit hawk, died Friday in Cody, Wyoming. He was 93.

Simpson had been struggling to recover from a broken hip in December, said a statement from his family. His health problems were complicated by lingering issues from frostbite to his left foot about five years ago, the statement added.

Simpson, who was first elected in 1978 and served 10 years as the GOP whip, had an unrivaled talent for leavening dry policy discussions with evocative aphorisms. “Don’t squat with your spurs on” was one favorite. Pushing the 1986 immigration reform bill through a reluctant Congress – his major legislative accomplishment – was like “giving dry birth to a porcupine.”

Along with his wit came a sharp tongue and a propensity for siccing it on opponents. More than once, his folksy candor turned into an acidity that he later regretted.

“Over the last 40 years, I have had my size 15 feet in my mouth a time or two,” he wrote in a 2010 apology for an email that suggested Social Security and other entitlement programs had turned the country into “a milk cow with 310 million (teats).” An outspoken advocate for reining in entitlement spending, he often had harsh words for AARP and other senior-advocacy groups.

“Al has poured more gasoline on himself than a Buddhist monk in the center of Saigon,” William Cohen, his Republican colleague from Maine, said at a black-tie dinner honoring Simpson on his Senate retirement in 1996.

Among detractors as well as admirers, Simpson was considered one of the most original characters in memory to pass through the nation’s capital.

“Simpson turns out to be one of those refreshing breezes that occasionally gentles their way through the congressional pomp and fustian to remind that all is not lost,” the Washington Post reported after the senator’s first year on Capitol Hill.

Simpson’s standing did not rest on solely his down-home persona – or his imposing physical presence. At 6-foot-7, he ranked as the tallest senator in modern history. (He lost the title in 2017 to 6-foot-9 Luther Strange of Alabama.)

Simpson earned bipartisan respect for his mastery of the nitty-gritty of legislating and his willingness to break from party orthodoxy. The late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, a longtime Democratic Senate leader, once called him “one of the most accomplished legislative craftsman to ever to grace” the Capitol.

Simpson was conservative on fiscal issues, the use of natural resources and the scope of government. He referred to opponents on the left as “bug-eyed zealots” and to environmentalists as “super-greenies.” But he was no ideologue.

He supported abortion rights, a position he attributed in part to the experience of a pregnant student in his high school in Cody, Wyoming, who nearly died in “one of those back-alley jobs.” He also supported gay rights and, contrary to his party’s platform on taxes, accepted the need for revenue increases along with spending reductions to control the deficit.

“You have to learn how to compromise on an issue without compromising yourself,” he said, and he brought that approach to his second act in national politics – as co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s 2010 deficit-reduction commission. The other co-chairman was Erskine Bowles, who had served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.

A majority of the 18-member panel endorsed a far-reaching mix of spending cuts, tax increases and reforms. The plan, which came to be known as Simpson-Bowles or Bowles-Simpson, received high marks as a clear-eyed prescription for stabilizing federal finances. But it contained bitter pills – including raising the Social Security retirement age and the federal gasoline tax – that drew stiff opposition.

Neither Congress nor Obama embraced the proposal, but the co-chairmen refused to let it die. They traveled the country together warning of a budgetary cancer “that will destroy the country from within.”

The son of a former Wyoming governor and U.S. senator, Simpson honed his inherited political skills during 13 years in the state legislature. In 1984, he used them to win the post of GOP Senate whip, or deputy leader, a considerable achievement for a member just finishing his first term.

He held the position until 1994, when Trent Lott of Mississippi challenged him and won the secret-ballot contest by a single vote – an outcome widely viewed as a reflection of the party’s move to the right on social issues.

It was Simpson’s only political defeat, and a painful one. Although he attributed his decision not to seek a fourth term in 1996 to a general loss of “fire in the belly,” his ouster from leadership was a factor. “I’d been to the mountaintop, and I knew I’d be hanging on in the foothills if I stayed,” he told a reporter.

Immigration, the issue with which Simpson was closely associated, came to him by chance. Wyoming had a small immigrant population, and Simpson had little interest in the matter when he was first elected. But in 1979, the Senate leadership needed a Republican for a national commission on immigration policy and tapped the Judiciary Committee’s junior member, the lanky newcomer from Wyoming.

Simpson threw himself into the subject and concluded that something had to be done to stem the influx of undocumented immigrants. In 1981, as chairman of a newly formed Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, he began working on legislation with his House counterpart, Rep. Romano Mazzoli (D-Kentucky).

The resulting Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, best known as Simpson-Mazzoli, had three key provisions: amnesty for undocumented immigrants who arrived before 1982; penalties for employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants; and increased funding for immigration enforcement.

Simpson was widely praised for pushing the highly fraught package across the finish line. The law, however, fell short of expectations.

Instead of declining, the number of illegal immigrants more than tripled over the succeeding 20 years, according to government estimates. Simpson blamed the lack of a secure identification mechanism for job applicants. He had favored a national identity card but agreed to drop the idea to gain more votes.

Immigration was not the only factious matter in which Simpson had a noticeable presence.

In 1991, his aggressive defense of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment charge of law professor Anita Hill drew widespread attention, much of it unfavorable, especially from women’s groups.

Hill, who had worked for Thomas at two federal agencies, alleged that he made lewd sexual comments to her; Thomas denied her account and denounced the televised hearings and media frenzy surrounding them as “a high-tech lynching.” The confrontation brought new prominence to the issue of workplace sexual harassment.

Simpson suggested without specifics that Hill had her own skeletons and made clear that he did not believe her testimony. Noting that she continued to have contact with Thomas after she no longer worked for him, he asked, “If what you say this man said to you occurred … why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?”

“That’s a very good question, and I’m sure that I cannot answer that to your satisfaction,” Hill replied. She cited fear of retaliation and damage to her career and said her response was not atypical of harassment victims.

Simpson later conceded that he had gone too far, telling a reporter, “I was ugly.”

Although the quotable Simpson received generally positive coverage from the news media, he was a harsh critic of journalists, contending that they were, for the most part, arrogant, lazy and fixated on the sensational. He detailed his grievances in a 1997 book, “Right in the Old Gazoo: A Lifetime of Scrapping with the Press.”

Son of politician

Alan Kooi Simpson was born in Denver on Sept. 2, 1931; his middle name was the surname of his maternal grandfather, a Dutch immigrant. He grew up in Cody in a family firmly rooted in Wyoming and the Republican Party. His father, Milward, was governor from 1955 to 1959 and a U.S. senator from 1962 to 1967. His older brother Peter was a state legislator and the GOP’s unsuccessful 1986 gubernatorial candidate.

Simpson graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1954 and, after two years in the Army, received a law degree from the university in 1958. He married the former Ann Schroll in 1954. Other survivors include their children, William Simpson, Colin Simpson and Susan Simpson Gallagher. Colin served in the Wyoming House from 1999 to 2011.

After leaving the Senate, Simpson taught at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and directed the school’s Institute of Politics. In 2000, he returned to Wyoming and practiced law with his sons while remaining active in civic, cultural and charitable organizations in Wyoming and Washington. In 2022, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honors, from President Joe Biden.

In December 2018, Simpson was one of four eulogists at the state funeral for his close friend, former president George H.W. Bush. Simpson’s lanky 87-year-old frame had become noticeably more stooped, but his way with words was well intact. Praising Bush for unfailing courage, loyalty, decency and “great humility,” Simpson added as an aside, “Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic” – a line that brought a roar of laughter from Washington National Cathedral audience.

Summing up the former president’s character, Simpson used the same words he once suggested as a fitting epitaph for himself: “You would have wanted him on your side.”