The congressman from the 5th District is Steve King, a Republican who first 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 cut and a national right-to-work law. Read More

The congressman from the 5th District is Steve King, a Republican who first 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 cut 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. 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 hyper-partisan views, and gets a fair amount of national press for controversial remarks. Together with Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, who has called King her best friend in Congress, he is one of the most vilified conservatives among liberals. He also makes some Republicans uneasy. When King said in June 2010 that President Obama “has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person,” Colorado GOP congressional candidate Cory Gardner canceled a fundraiser at which the congressman was to speak.

King 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, Iowa Daily Times Herald columnist who assembled some of King’s quotes into a book, King Kong Krazy, calls him “maniacally nationalistic.” King makes no apologies for his style. “We’ve got to shoot from the hip sometimes,” he said of himself and Bachmann. “It’s not always ‘Ready, aim, fire.’ Sometimes it’s just time to fire. And you’d better have good instincts so that you can shoot, and it might look later like you didn’t shoot from the hip but you took careful aim.”

In 2007, King became the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, which put him in the middle of the high profile debate. He built a model fence on the House floor to show how simple it would be to construct a 2,000-mile fence on the border, and criticized Democrats who voted for the fence 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. As soon as Republicans formally took control of the House in 2011, King introduced a bill to end birthright citizenship, a controversial idea that had gained currency in conservative circles the previous year but was widely unpopular among Hispanics. “Steve King is positioning our party for disaster,” the Latino group Somos Republicans said in a statement. With Republicans in the majority, King was positioned to rise from ranking member to chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, but the gavel went instead to the less bombastic Elton Gallegly of California. King blamed Speaker John Boehner, whom he said “isn’t very aggressive on immigration.”

King got an amendment passed and attached to the 2012 Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration appropriations bill to prevent funding for Mifepristone, a drug that can be used to help end early pregnancies. During the battle over whether to raise the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, King suggested that President Obama could be impeached if he blocked debt payments. King later bucked the Republican leadership by voting against the deal raising the debt ceiling on grounds that the spending cuts were too small.

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. His constituents haven’t minded his boisterousness, continuing to re-elect him comfortably. He briefly considered a bid for Iowa governor in 2010.

King’s endorsement in the Iowa Caucuses was actively sought by 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls. Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas. and former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. went on pheasant hunts with King. And many political observers assumed he'd support Bachmann, given their work together in Congress. However, in the end, King decided to stay out of the race and withhold his endorsement. King may have his own political future to think about as well. His district was eliminated and he will be forced to run in a newly-drawn and less conservative 4th District. And King could have a formidable and well-funded opponent in 2012: Democrat Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture secretary and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, will challenge King in what is expected to be a closely watched House race.