Alan Simpson

Alan Simpson has died. The senator from Wyoming was a mean man. He was always a mean man. Like his friend John McCain, meanness became his currency. He will be remembered as “bipartisan” today because he embodied the Beltway desire to slash deficits by making the poor suffer, the favorite ideology of the Blob. But Alan Simpson was awful in nearly every way. Let’s remember that.

Simpson was born in Denver in 1931. He grew up in Wyoming, mostly around Cody, graduating in 1949. Interestingly, while there, as a Boy Scout, he visited the Japanese concentration camp at Heart Mountain as part of a program for Boy Scouts to visit Japanese American Scouts in the camps. It’s hard to imagine something more disgusting than imprisoning these people based on their race. Anyway, Simpson became friends with a kid in those camps. His name was Norman Mineta. They were friends for the rest of their lives, until Mineta died, and including when Mineta became Secretary of Transportation under Bill Clinton. This is more trivia than anything else, I grant you. Kinda interesting though.

Simpson was a crazy kid. He was into setting things on fire, including once, military property that if he was caught, arrested, and convicted, could have been a 20 year prison sentence. He liked guns a lot too. He and his friends had a fun game—they would steal bullets from the local stores. Then they would fire on people and see how close they could come without hitting them or getting caught. Oh what hilarious hijinks! They also liked to shoot farmers’ cows. Basically, Simpson was a little punk. He finally got it together after he got busted shooting at a road grader that led to an arrest and two years of probation. Simpson later looked back on his own childhood with some amazement and once said “I was a monster.”

After graduating from high school, Simpson went to a fancy prep school in Michigan for a year, and then came back to the University of Wyoming for college. He graduated in 1954, then stayed in Laramie to do his law degree at Wyoming, which he completed in 1958. In 1964, Simpson decided to run for the Wyoming legislature. Although this was a wave year for Democrats, Simpson won his race. He would serve six terms in the legislature. More importantly for his future than anything else is that his father, the unfortunately named Milward Simpson, was the Wyoming governor from 1954-58 and then U.S. senator from 1962-67 after he won a special election. So everything that Alan did, even when he was a total punk as a kid, was framed by the fact that his father was a powerful guy in a small, insular state and Alan would be A-OK.

In 1978, Simpson decided to run for the Senate. This was a good year for Republicans. Simpson rose pretty fast in the Senate. He was the consummate late twentieth-century insider, someone very close to Republican leadership, including Bob Dole. He became chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee in 1981, which is early to take a committee chairmanship in that hidebound old body. He then became Republican Whip in 1985 and held that role for the next ten years, working closely with Dole.

Now, Simpson had some theoretically moderate positions. He was known for believing in LGBTQ rights, particularly because he believed in privacy from the government. He wasn’t really the type of Republican who wanted the government in his bedroom. He generally was pro-abortion rights personally, though was always happy to vote for judges who would overturn Roe.

Moreover, there was no real consistency to these social issues and so his actions would counter themselves. For example, he might claim to be pro-choice and vote against some legislation that would restrict reproductive care, but then he would turn around and vote for right-wing judges and for the Hyde Amendment. He also expressed support for gay rights throughout much of his career. He was the kind of Republican who really did think the government should stay out of his bedroom but again, not enough so that he was going to do anything about it. Simpson also, much later in his career, expressed frustration and anger over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed endless donations into campaigns. He hoped for a Constitutional amendment to fix the problem. But again, Simpson voted for every justice who supported that decision.

The man simply had a huge disconnect between his desired policy outcomes on these sorts of issues and his desired partisan outcomes. He cared a lot more about the latter, that’s for sure. You can give Simpson credit for all this if you want, but he is also partly responsible for all of these problems so the more appropriate response is to roll your eyes at Republicans who make feints toward moderation but in fact vote for the worst possible people to be candidates, judges, whatever.

What Simpson really cared about was hurting the poor, especially if they were old. No one hated the Social Security system more than Simpson. He was noted for calling the elderly living on Social Security as “greedy geezers.” Now, today the average Social Security benefit is about $20,000 a year. How does receiving a basic income from the federal government that people have paid into their entire working lives make them greedy? This seems like the most basic fundamentals of keeping people living with dignity to me, but then I don’t fetishize the “free market.” Of course, Simpson’s own pension from the Senate was $87,000 a year, plus all his other money. How is Simpson any different than someone who worked a blue-collar job and now is living on Social Security? Well, there’s one difference—Simpson was more of an asshole than they were.

Basically, Simpson didn’t believe that Social Security was designed to support people in retirement. Narrowly, he’s not completely out to lunch in that view. Many New Deal policymakers saw Social Security as something to get people through the very end of their lives. But that totally ignores the context, in which people were dying young from work anyway. Initially, few people really thought Americans would live twenty or more years off the system. But there’s little reason to believe that would have bothered them and in fact we know that most had no problem with it. The idea that people in their 70s or 80s even should be working is absurd on the face of it; many if not most simply don’t have the physical or sometimes mental ability to do so. Some can and that’s great if they want to do so. But this just drove Simpson to bouts of frothing at the mouth. He was the kind of guy who would go back to the transcripts of the hearings for Social Security and note that no one ever used the precise word “retirement.” The problem was, as the journalist Michael Hiltzik said to refute Simpson, is that the word was used all the time by people such as Frances Perkins to describe what the Social Security Act was supposed to do.

But it gets worse. Simpson noted, in an email to the Older Women’s League, that Social Security was “a milk cow with 310 million tits” and then signed off with “Call when you get honest work.” What a terrible human Alan Simpson was! You can read this email at this link! And then, when Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare criticized Simpson, he responded, You do a total disservice to America with your organization…, and you know damn well what we have to do to shore up Social Security but since you make money pretty good by juicing up the troops, you’re not about to buy a bit of it.”

Basically, Simpson thought Social Security was a government plot to rip off the tax money of “good Americans” and hand it over to unworthy old people. Never mind that attempts to gut Social Security have always run into the buzzsaw of the program’s popularity that its haters try to ignore. That didn’t matter. Simpson was an extremist ideologue on this issue and his every action demonstrated it.

I have run across other instances of politicians just loathing Simpson and his big mouth. I was doing research in the Cecil Andrus papers at Boise State University. Andrus could be pretty salty in his own right, especially after he was kicked in the head by a horse on a pack trip in the Idaho backcountry. So when Simpson, who was always considered one of the Republican policy guys on nuclear issues, stated his support for turning part of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory into a nuclear dump, Andrus unloaded on Simpson in a private letter, telling him that if he loved nuclear waste so much, he was glad the senator was going to publicly volunteer to dump it all in Wyoming. It was the kind of snark you don’t get too often between politicians in the written record. I had a good laugh, which you can’t do often enough when you are sifting through old papers in libraries.

Simpson may have sucked, but for the rising far right, he was too liberal. So Trent Lott ran against Simpson for Whip in 1995 after Republicans took the Senate. The racist from Mississippi won. Simpson, not seeing much point in sticking around given that he wasn’t going to have the kind of power he was used to, decided not to run for reelection in 1996. This end to his electoral career was if anything a great move for Simpson. That’s because what it did was reinforce the bipartisan credentials that allowed him to push ever harder for his campaign to force old people like my father onto the streets. And I want to be clear here, my father could not survive without his Social Security. Like millions of Americans, my dad has some small retirement money from various places he worked and that matters too, but he is very much on a fixed income and the backbone of that is Social Security.

And yet, despite this reality for so many Americans, because the Beltway elites love the idea of fiscal conservatism and taking money away from the poor to give it over to the rich (which of course largely includes them), people such as Simpson got decades of tongue baths from the media. Because of his theoretical moderation on some issues and his hatred of liberal economics, Simpson also got tons of love from the Democratic moderates of the Bill Clinton type. Why would Barack Obama name Simpson to co-lead the National Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with Democratic hack Erskine Bowles, in 2010? The Simpson-Bowles Commission, perhaps better known on the internet as the Catfood Commission to show the contempt people had for it, was the perfect encapsulation of the neoliberalism that continued to haunt the Democratic Party in the Obama years. There was no good reason to give Simpson this kind of power. Why would we want to even consider eviscerating Social Security anyway? But the obsession with “markets” was very real among Democrats and this continued to give high-profile attention to really awful Republicans through these years. The larger issue for these types was the deficit, not Social Security per se, but that benefit program was as its center.

Well, Simpson-Bowles released a majority report later that year that had lots of Simpson’s personal policy preferences in it. Social Security’s age would be raised. Domestic spending would be cut. There were a few things that were less bad about it, including closing some tax loopholes and raising the gas tax. But mostly it was about eviscerating Social Security. It lied about the supposed upcoming funding crisis for the program, which I have heard about all my adult life and as I approach the age in which I could qualify for it, I see zero evidence that this is ever going to happen, not to mention the fact that Congress could just fix the program by pushing more money toward it if it wanted.

The Beltway just loved all of this. David Brooks wrote any number of columns over the years about the need to institute Simpson-Bowles ideas. Social services always needed slashing, the poor always needed to be forced to work more, and the rich always needed their taxes cut. This was Beltway gold and it made Simpson one of the most beloved figures of that set for decades. This stuff still has legs today. The idiots such as Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman who are desperate for a third party focused on “common sense centrism” make Simpson-Bowles their core policy platform, as if there is a constituency out there for punishing the poor who don’t already vote for Republicans.

Simpson was a very mean man. I mean, he was just a nasty human. He was known to cuss out reporters or anyone else who got on his wrong side. He would lie with impunity. Simpson was just such a jerk too. He complained incessantly that people were dumb for not being up for his Catfood Commission recommendations. And he would do it in insulting language. While being interviewed by the awful Chuck Todd (and who loved Simpson-esque Beltway poor eviscerating more than Chuck Todd!!), Simpson whined, “I always say to people before you, you know begin to drool at the mouth, and go crazy and scratch our eyeballs out, read the damn report. It was 67 pages, we put it in December 1, 2010 and people said, “What are you doing to the vulnerable?” And I said, read it. We don’t do anything to people on SSI, we don’t do anything with food stamp, we don’t do anything with people on — on unemployment. Get — get your — use your bean, instead of listening to crap all day long from the right, and the left.”

Oh shut up Alan. These prevarications are completely absurd. As Ezra Klein noted in the Washington Post in 2013, Simpson was just lying here. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities had studied the document closely and did use their beans to note that the whole thing was dependent on benefit cuts that would hurt the poor. But you think Chuck Todd was going to slap back at Simpson? Of course not! The secret to Simpson’s long staying power is that the Beltway elites turned the deficit into a fetish that could only be worshipped by cutting benefits to the poor. Simpson would frame his policy ideas as not partisan, but rather American. In other words, he would flatly say that anyone who opposed Simpson-Bowles recommendations was a partisan hack instead of a Good American. It was pretty disgusting and entirely typical and no one called him out on it who mattered. Good Americans wanted to hate the poor. Good Americans wanted the poor to die on the streets. Etc.

For some reason, President Biden, whose nostalgia for the old Senate, when men were men and told racy jokes while naked in the Senate locker room regardless of political party, gave Simpson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022. This was ridiculous. But this was Biden. The man just loved not only the bipartisan consensus of the Beltway, but anyone the media would promote as promoting how it defined “bipartisanship.” Sigh.

But then that was Alan Simpson. Despite his love of making the poor suffer, he was a fully accepted man of Beltway culture because, well because of that. Combining that with relatively moderate personal positions on social issues (while always supporting reactionaries who would vote or rule against those positions) was the perfect entry point to becoming a Beltway legend like John McCain. It was so good that even his horrible nasty personality didn’t get in the way.

Now that Simpson is gone, we are going to see a day of nostalgic longing for the old days of bipartisanship in Washington. Don’t fall for it. He was a nasty man and should not be mourned by anyone who believes in justice.