Rep. Steve King (R)

The congressman from the 5th District is Steve King, a Republican who won the seat in 2002. He was born in Storm Lake in western Iowa and attended Northwest Missouri State University, though he didn’t graduate. In 1975, he founded the King Construction Company. After building up his business, he launched his political career in 1996, at age 47, with his election to the state Senate, where he quickly gained a reputation as an ultraconservative. He opposed abortion rights, racial quotas and preferences, and same-sex marriage. He sponsored Iowa’s “God and Country” bill, which required Iowa schools to recognize that the United States “has derived its strength from biblical values,” and he was a driving force behind the state’s English-only law. On economic matters, King supported repeal of the state’s inheritance tax, and backed a 15% state income-tax reduction and a national right-to-work law.

When the U.S. House seat came open in 2002, there were four main contenders in the Republican primary. King ran as a strong conservative and as the only rural candidate, and called for limiting federal control of local schools. King led in the June primary with 30% of the vote. Because no one candidate received the required 35% of the vote, the nomination was determined by a special party convention three weeks later. The 533 voting delegates needed three ballots to select a winner. King led on each ballot and defeated House Speaker Brent Siegrist of Council Bluffs, 272-253, in the final round, marking the first time in 38 years that Iowans used a convention to select a congressional nominee. The general election outcome was never in doubt. Democrat Paul Shomshor attempted to paint King as too conservative for the district, and won the endorsement of the Omaha World-Herald, but fell far short, 62%-38%. The conservative National Review magazine heralded King as the “Great Right Hope.”

In the House, King has not been shy about sharing his strong views, and gets a fair amount of national press for controversial remarks. In 2005, the House passed his amendment to prohibit Medicare funds to reimburse for Viagra, a drug prescribed for male sexual dysfunction. He has been an outspoken proponent of tougher immigration laws. The House has twice passed his amendment to enforce a 1996 law that forbids localities from standing in the way if police officers want to report immigration information to the federal government. He advocates English as the official language of the United States. In April 2008, an Iowa district court judge ruled in favor of King’s challenge to state officials who had placed bilingual voting forms on state websites. A Carroll Daily Times Herald columnist who assembled some of King’s quotes into a book, King Kong Krazy, calls him “maniacally nationalistic.”

In 2007, King became the ranking Republican on the immigration subcommittee of Judiciary, which put him in the middle of the high-profile debate. He criticized Democrats who voted for a fence along the Mexican border while they backed lawsuits to thwart its construction. When the subcommittee passed a bill to permit foreign fashion models into the country for a photo shoot, King called it the “Ugly American Bill” because he said it implied that attractive Americans could not be found for the work. After nine Democrats voted against House passage of his resolution to recognize the importance of Christmas, he condemned their “assault on Christianity in America.” He also has been vocal in urging Republican leaders to adopt a more aggressive strategy to regain the House majority. “There’s got to be blood on the floor,” he has said. On local issues, King has called for expansion of “value-added agriculture,” including biotechnology and ethanol production, to strengthen the local economy. He successfully promoted an expanded tax credit for small ethanol and biodiesel producers as part of the 2005 energy law.

In his re-election bid in 2004, King carried all but one small county and won 63%-37% over Democrat Joyce Schulte. She ran again in 2006, accused him of “racist remarks” on immigration, and lost again, 59%-36%. King refused to debate her, saying that most voters already knew his views. After endorsing Republican Fred Thompson for president in 2008, he said in March that “radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets” if Barack Obama won. John McCain’s campaign condemned those remarks, but King declined to apologize.