Alan Simpson: Laugh and Cringe

Although based on a Milton Berle Show character from the 1960s, Muppet balcony dweller Statler would’ve easily passed as doppelganger to the late Senator Alan Simpson. Lanky, arched eyebrows, perennial scowl and tufted sidewalls on a bald palette. The similarities were uncanny and easy fodder for liberal political cartoonists everywhere.

The comparisons didn’t stop there for Simpson was every bit the chronically dispeptic Statler, seemingly finding a cloud in every rainbow and a fool in every argument.

Simpson’s death March 14 at age 93 bookends a time when conservatives weren’t so foolish, and knew they had something worth conserving — something more substantial (and constitutional) than favor with a despotic executive branch. Senate Republicans during Simpson’s three terms (1979-1997) were indeed staunch in supporting their party’s presidents, but not every floor vote was a modern day crucible for presidential obedience. It’s a distinction Simpson made early in Trump’s first term.

If Alan Kooi Simpson came across as a tough guy, it’s because he was. Born in Denver and raised in Wyoming, he spoke often about a hellraising childhood that extended into his early 20s: Recurring vandalism, fighting cops and misdemeanor gun incidents despite his father’s very public political career and his mother’s high profile work with the Red Cross. Asked about those days Simpson described himself as a “monster.”

Still, the lifelong Republican completed high school, married, earned college and law degrees, served in the U.S. Army and excelled in collegiate sports. After a decade working in a law firm, in 1964 Simpson ran for and won a seat in the Wyoming House where he would remain until elected to the U.S. Senate.

Over the course of his senate career, Simpson served as majority, then minority whip. He sponsored 338 bills and co-sponsored over 2,000 more. He chaired key Senate committees and subcommittees in the areas of veterans’ affairs, immigration and refugee status, nuclear regulation, Social Security, aging and environmentalism. Simpson was no backbencher.

But Simpson is best remembered not for the the quantity of his work, but it’s scope and practicality on the issues of the day. He kept strong ties with Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and the Bushes, yet voted nay on some of their most critical pieces of legislation.

Simpson opposed strict abortion bans, corporate personhood, no-parole sentencing for adjudicated juveniles and legislation limiting rights for LGBTQ+ persons. Little wonder that while Simpson’s quick temper and endless stream of quotables made for good press, GOP operatives (Cheney in particular) found them less entertaining when pointed their way.

When mulling over a fourth term, Simpson took all this in and decided the rising external and internal rancor wasn’t worth it anymore. He told an interviewer the fire in the belly was gone.

In his early post-senate years Simpson appeared to be leaning more to the left. The lecturing and writing showed a major shift, often laced with criticism for a GOP he could barely recognize.

Still, Simpson’s overall public service should not be assessed without a dose of Republican reality. He was brutally inappropriate with his questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, only grudgingly remorseful across the years. He was a deficit and fiscal hawk, more than willing to close the gaps by eviscerating programs for disadvantaged children and their caregivers. And Simpson was obsessed before and after the Senate with ridding the country of the Social Security program, calling it a “milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Simpson’s stock rose by bounds in his later years, especially with the Left. In a CBS interview from June 2022, he famously called Trump a “spoiled brat … so full of himself that he would overturn every kind of rule of law or constitutional process because of his own ego, which is twisted.” The interview immediately went viral.

A month later Joe Biden bestowed his old Senate foil with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognizing his contributions to our greater good.

As with other political nonconformists, there’s plenty of room to decide Al Simpson’s ultimate contributions. The record is there, complete with footage and interviews sure to make us laugh and cringe. But perhaps the best final word on Alan Simpson came from Simpson himself: ”I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I’m an Alan Simpson Republican.”

Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio.

Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.