Steve King

For other people named Steve King, see Stephen King (disambiguation).

Steve King
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 5th district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2003
Preceded by	Tom Latham
Personal details
Born	May 28, 1949 (1949-05-28) Storm Lake, Iowa
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Marilyn
Children	three
Residence	Kiron, Iowa
Occupation	Construction contractor
Religion	Roman Catholic

Steven Arnold "Steve" King (born May 28, 1949) is the U.S. Representative for Iowa's 5th congressional district, serving since 2003. He is a member of the Republican Party.

The district is located in the western part of the state and includes Sioux City and Council Bluffs.

Early life, education and career

King was born on May 28, 1949 in Storm Lake, Iowa. The son of a state police dispatcher and a homemaker, King graduated from Denison Community High School in 1967. He attended Northwest Missouri State University from 1967 to 1970, taking courses toward becoming a wildlife officer. He does not have a college degree. In 1975, he founded King Construction, an earth moving company. King founded the Kiron Business Association in the 1980s. His involvement with the Iowa Land Improvement Contractors' Association led to regional and national offices in that organization and a growing interest in public policy.

Iowa Senate

From 1996 to 2002, King served as an Iowa State Senator, representing the 6th district. King worked as the Chairman of the State Government Committee and Vice Chairman of the Oversight Budget Committee. He was a part of the Appropriations Committee, Judiciary Committee, Business and Labor Committee, and the Commerce Committee. He assisted in eliminating the inheritance tax, enforcing workplace drug testing, strengthening parental rights, passing tax cuts for working residents of Iowa, and passing a law that made English the official language in Iowa.

U.S. House of Representatives

Committee assignments

• Committee on Agriculture
  • Subcommittee on Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition, and Forestry
  • Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management
  • Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry
  • Subcommittee on Nutrition and Horticulture
• Committee on the Judiciary
  • Subcommittee on the Constitution
  • Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law (Vice Chairman)
• Committee on Small Business

• Congressional Cuba Democracy Caucus
• Republican Study Committee
• Tea Party Caucus

Political positions

King is considered an outspoken fiscal and social conservative. After winning the 2002 Republican nomination, he said that he intended to use his seat in Congress to "move the political center of gravity in Congress to the right."

During the 110th Congress, King voted with the majority of the Republican Party 90.9% of the time. King has continuously voted for Iraq War legislation, and has supported surge efforts and opposed a time table for troop withdrawals.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave King a 'B' grade, based on the key veterans' legislation that came to a vote during the 110th Congress. King was the only US Representative from Iowa who did not receive an 'A' or 'A+' from IAVA. For reference, former POW John McCain received a D in the same report.

He was the only Representative from Iowa to score 100 percent on the joint Family Research Council Action/Focus on the Family Action Congressional Scorecard in the second session of the 109th Congress. In the 109th United States Congress, and again in the 110th Congress, King chairs the Conservative Opportunity Society, an organization founded by Newt Gingrich and others consisting of Republican members of Congress committed to representing the conservative agenda in the House of Representatives.

In November 2010 King endorsed Michele Bachmann for House Republican Conference Chair.

Abortion

Representative King scored a 100% rating with the National Right to Life Committee, indicating a pro-life voting record. King also voted no on allowing human embryonic stem cell research.

Gun control

King supports a broad legal latitude for individual gun ownership.

Race and gender

King opposes race based quotas and affirmative action. King has stated: “There’s been legislation that’s been brought through this House that sets aside benefits for women and minorities. The only people that it excludes are white men...Pretty soon, white men are going to notice they are the ones being excluded.”

Steve King said on the floor of the House on June 14, 2010 that racial profiling is an important component of law enforcement: "Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes. Now, I think it’s wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it’s not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying that are violating the law." As an example of profiling, King described an instance when a taxi driver would stop for him before he had to hail a cab, just because he was in a business suit.

Same sex marriage

On April 3, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution. King soon commented that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca." King, along with others, mounted a campaign against the retention of all three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled on the gay marriage case. King bought $80,000 of radio across the state calling for Iowans to vote "no" on the judges. Subsequently, all three judges were not retained.

Federal spending

King fought against Medicare and Medicaid paying for a number of medications such as Viagra, which he described as "recreational drugs". King also has voted against each stimulus bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, saying, “Our economy will not recover because government spends more. It will recover because people produce more.”

King gained prominence by being one of 11 in Congress to vote against the $52 billion Katrina Aid package citing fiscal responsibility and the government needing a comprehensive plan for spending aid money. The Sioux City Journal wrote the following about King's vote:

"In September, we took our congressman, Steve King, to task for voting against a $52 billion aid package for victims of Hurricane Katrina. King - who was just one of 11 members of Congress who voted against the package which passed both houses and was signed by President Bush - based his vote on the need for "fiscal responsibility." He said the federal government needed to develop a comprehensive plan for spending aid dollars, including input from members of Congress, before more money was appropriated. He earlier had voted for a $10.5 billion emergency aid package. Well, after reading an Associated Press story about a report that details how perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in Katrina disaster aid have been misspent, it appears we were wrong and King was right about his vote on the $52 billion."

Illegal immigration

King is against illegal immigration.^{[citation needed]}. He is considered a likely candidate to chair the House Immigration subcommittee in the Republican-majority House of Representatives.

In April 2006, conservative members of Congress proposed strengthening law enforcement against illegal immigration to the United States. When asked if "the US economy simply couldn't function without" the presence of illegal immigrants, King said that he rejected that position "categorically". He said "they", referring to the 77.5 million people between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five in the United States who are not part of the workforce, "could be put to work and we could invent machines to replace the rest."

King said that "members of Congress that vote for a guest-worker plan ... will be supporting an amnesty plan and they should be branded with the scarlet letter 'A' and pay for that amnesty in the ballot box in November [elections]".

Political lobbying

On February 26, 2010, King went to the House floor to protest the Democrats' handling of health care reform and said: "Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill ...There's a credibility there in that arena that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby, and it is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information."

Political campaigns

In 2002, after redistricting took 5th District incumbent and fellow Republican Tom Latham out of the district, King ran in a four-way Republican primary for the seat. His most prominent opponents were fellow state senator John Redwine and State House Speaker Brent Siegrest. The 5th, then as now, was so heavily Republican that it was generally thought whoever won the Republican primary was all but assured of victory in November.

King won the primary election with 30% of the vote, short of the 35 percent required by Iowa law to be named the outright winner. Subsequently, a nominating convention was held which King won on the third ballot. King easily won election in November over Council Bluffs city councilman Paul Shomshor, and he was reelected almost as handily in 2004.

In 2006, King won re-election in the 2006 general election against Democrat Schulte and Independent candidates Roy Nielsen and Cheryl Broderson with 59 percent of the vote.

2008

See also: United States House of Representatives elections in Iowa, 2008#Fifth District

In 2008, King had been seen as a possible challenger for Tom Harkin's Senate seat, but on March 7, he announced that he would run for a fourth House term. King was opposed by Democratic nominee Rob Hubler and Independent candidate Victor Vara. King won with 60 percent of the vote and for the first time won all 32 counties in his district.

2010

See also: United States House of Representatives elections in Iowa, 2010#District 5

King ran against Democratic nominee Matt Campbell and won with his highest percentage yet of 66 percent. King also won all 32 counties in the 5th District for the second election cycle in a row.

2012

Iowa lost a district as a result of the 2010 Census. King's district was renumbered as the 4th District, and pushed well to the east, absorbing Mason City and Ames in the process. This placed King and his predecessor, Latham, in the same district. Latham opted to move to the reconfigured 3rd District and challenge Democratic incumbent Leonard Boswell. While the new district closely resembles the area Latham represented for his first four terms, it is much more competitive than King's old district. The old 5th had a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+9; the new 4th has a PVI of R+4.

Soon afterward, former Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack, the wife of former Governor and current Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, announced she was moving to the new 4th to challenge King.

Remarks about Barack Obama

On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:

"I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name - whatever their religion their father might have been," I'll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror. Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world...If he were strong on national defense and said 'I'm going to go over there and we're going to fight and we're going to win, we'll come home with a victory,' that's different. But that's not what he said. They will be dancing in the streets if he's elected president. That has a chilling aspect on how difficult it will be to ever win this Global War on Terror."

Then on March 10, King defended his comments to The Associated Press, saying "(Obama will) certainly be viewed as a savior for them.... That's why you will see them supporting him, encouraging him."

Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as an individual who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage. He said, "I would hope Senator McCain would want to distance himself from that kind of inflammatory and offensive remarks." The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics…and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement."

In mid-January 2009, King acknowledged that terrorists were not dancing in the streets, and in fact "They have made statements against Obama." He also said that he found Obama’s decision to use his middle name, "Hussein", when he is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009, to be "bizarre" and “a double-standard."

Steve King said on a radio show on June 14, 2010 that President Obama's policies favor black people. On G. Gordon Liddy's radio show, King said, "The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race - on the side that favors the black person."

External links

• U.S. Congressman Steve King official U.S. House site
• Steve King for U.S. Congress official campaign site
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Voting record maintained by The Washington Post
• Biography, voting record, and interest group ratings at Project Vote Smart
• Congressional profile at GovTrack
• Congressional profile at OpenCongress
• Issue positions and quotes at On The Issues
• Financial information at OpenSecrets.org
• Staff salaries, trips and personal finance at LegiStorm.com
• Campaign finance reports and data at the Federal Election Commission
• Campaign contributions at the National Institute for Money in State Politics
• Appearances on C-SPAN programs
• Appearances at the Internet Movie Database

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by Tom Latham	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 5th congressional district 2003–Present	Succeeded by Incumbent
United States order of precedence
Preceded by Jeb Hensarling R-Texas	United States Representatives by seniority 211th	Succeeded by John Kline R-Minnesota