The congressman from the 2nd District is Mike Simpson, a Republican first elected in 1998. Simpson grew up in Blackfoot, became a dentist, and joined his father’s dental practice. He was elected to the City Council in 1980 and to the state House in 1984. He didn’t declare himself as a Republican until then, and was opposed by the local Republican party. In 1993, he became speaker of the Idaho House, but he kept up his dental practice as well. In the legislature, he was known as a moderate in a predominately conservative chamber, affable and able to get differing sides together. When Republican Gov. Phil Batt announced he would retire in 1998, Simpson wanted to run, but GOP Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s decision to seek the office closed that option. GOP Rep. Mike Crapo decided to run for Kempthorne’s Senate seat, thus opening up the House race for Simpson. Read More

The congressman from the 2nd District is Mike Simpson, a Republican first elected in 1998. Simpson grew up in Blackfoot, became a dentist, and joined his father’s dental practice. He was elected to the City Council in 1980 and to the state House in 1984. He didn’t declare himself as a Republican until then, and was opposed by the local Republican party. In 1993, he became speaker of the Idaho House, but he kept up his dental practice as well. In the legislature, he was known as a moderate in a predominately conservative chamber, affable and able to get differing sides together. When Republican Gov. Phil Batt announced he would retire in 1998, Simpson wanted to run, but GOP Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s decision to seek the office closed that option. GOP Rep. Mike Crapo decided to run for Kempthorne’s Senate seat, thus opening up the House race for Simpson.

The seat was hotly contested. In the Republican primary, state Rep. Mark Stubbs called for lower payroll taxes. He had opposed nuclear programs at the INL, while Simpson wanted more work at the facility. But the big issue was term limits. Simpson refused to take a pledge to serve only three terms, while the other candidates did. Term-limit advocates spent large sums against Simpson. Angry at the ads, Batt endorsed Simpson five days before the election. Simpson ran ads against “out-of-state folk” interfering with Idaho’s elections. Simpson beat Stubbs 47%-41%.

The Democratic nominee was Richard Stallings, a former history professor elected to the U.S. House in 1984 and re-elected three times. In 1992, he ran against Kempthorne for the Senate and lost 57%-43%. Stallings emphasized his conservative voting record in the House, called for more education spending, and said he would act to fix falling farm commodity prices. Simpson called for a smaller federal role in education. He favored tax cuts and the creation of personal investment accounts in Social Security. Simpson won 53%-45%, losing the most well-known parts of the district—Pocatello, Sun Valley, Boise—but carrying just about everything else.

In the House, Simpson built a moderate record, particularly for a Western Republican. He has reached out to Democrats on economic and social issues, and he helped establish a bipartisan caucus to talk about the trade-related needs of farmers and ranchers. Simpson voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005 because of its potential impact on Idaho’s sugar beet industry. “When I came to Congress, I was a free-trader. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and I’ve come to understand that more and more. I’m starting to become one of those people I disagreed with a few years ago,” he said in 2007. He once joined the American Civil Liberties Union because he wanted to learn more about the left-leaning group. In 2010, he refused to take the state Republican Party’s oath endorsing the party platform. His open-mindedness led Esquire magazine to call him one of the 10 best members of Congress in 2008, saying he “lives by the philosophy that democratic representation is a matter of finding not advantageous positions but common ground.”

In 2003, Simpson showed his skills as a party insider when he got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, a post he has used to secure funding for the Idaho National Laboratory, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Simpson became a leading defender of appropriations earmarks; he opposed restricting earmarks but supported greater transparency in the process. After Democrats took control of the House in 2007, Simpson called incoming Appropriations Chairman David Obey, a Wisconsin liberal, one of Congress’ most honest members. When Simpson lost his seat on the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees nuclear energy spending, he pleaded with Obey, and Obey obliged by adding one Democratic and one Republican seat—Simpson’s—to the subcommittee. Obey said of Simpson, “He works with people on both sides and he’s a good, solid legislator.”

In 2008, Simpson was the only member of the Idaho congressional delegation to support the $700 billion bailout of the financial markets. “We got into this mess because of failure of government oversight,” he said. “Consequently, I think there’s a role for government to play in trying to get us out of this, as much as I don’t like it.” When President Obama took office, he supported Democratic bills to rein in credit card companies and predatory housing lenders. But he stuck with his party on most major fiscal legislation. He unsuccessfully sought in the Appropriations Committee to impose pay-as-you-go rules requiring offsets for spending in the economic stimulus bill. In reaction to the Democrats’ restricted rules on offering floor amendments to spending bills, he introduced a resolution in July 2009 calling for regular order on the bills; all but six Democrats voted to table his measure.

Simpson has said he would “die trying” to create a Boulder-White Cloud Management Area and he has spent years negotiating the plan with opposing constituencies. In 2006, he came up with a plan to preserve 312,000 acres in the central Idaho mountains and to transfer federal land in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a winter range for elk, to the city of Stanley and to Custer County to bolster their tax bases. To placate motorized-recreation advocates, he included a new 960-acre motorized park south of the Boise airport. To woo environmental groups, which were divided over the plan, Simpson added 630 acres of state land along the Salmon River and proposed to turn over federal land in eastern Idaho for a new state park. Simpson got his bill added to a sure-to-pass tax-cut bill in 2006, and secured a promise from Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican who opposed it, not to stand in the way. But the bill was dropped in last-minute tinkering by congressional leaders, and Simpson has continued to push versions of it since without success. In the 111th Congress (2009-10), he could not overcome opposition from two influential fellow Republicans—Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and Sen. James Risch.

Simpson won re-election three times with better than 2-to-1 ratios, but his lead slipped to 62%-34% in 2006, when he faced former Democratic state Rep. Jim Hansen, the son of former Republican Rep. Orval Hansen, who represented the district from 1969 to 1975. Simpson was back on his game in 2008, winning re-election with 71% of the vote. In 2010, however, his support for the Wall Street bailout and his other independent stances drew two primary opponents, state Rep. Russ Mathews and tea party-backed Chick Heileson, a retired heating contractor. They held Simpson to 58%, his worst primary showing since 1998. He received 69% in the general election against Democrat Mike Crawford.