News Room: We met Scott Cleveland last week, and he is "Not Mike Simpson" (ID-2)
Mike Simpson (R-ID) has represented Idaho in the US Congress for 25 years. This time around he faces a primary challenge from Scott Cleveland. Decide for yourself if a change is needed.
Idahoans are looking forward to a key event in their state's political calendar, next Tuesday, May 21st: Idaho's primary election for 2024. Included on the ballot is the Republican primary for the 2nd Congressional District.
The district covers a large part of the state and includes the capital city of Boise. This year's election is set to be an interesting contest, with several heterodox candidates vying for the chance to represent the district in the U.S. House of Representatives in D.C.
The Republican primary features three candidates competing for the party's nomination:
Mike Simpson (Incumbent) has been in Congress since 1999 and is seeking re-election once more. Armed with a war chest befitting an incumbent and a history of supporting neoconservative policies, he’s known for his support for the energy industry and environmental technology.
Scott Cleveland is a relative newcomer to the political scene but is gaining attention for his strong America First conservative stance. He has been campaigning to reduce government spending, protect individual freedoms, and support President Trump's policies.
Sean Higgins, another newcomer, is also running to the right of the incumbent. He too has been critical of Simpson's record in Congress and is positioning himself as a candidate who will bring fresh ideas and a new approach to Washington.
Running against the winner of this contested Republican primary is Democrat David Roth, the sole Democratic Party candidate, so he’ll be their nominee. The Libertarian Party has fielded a single candidate, Todd Corsetti. Other minor party candidates are not deemed to be a factor in this year’s contest.
A Fed-up Newcomer
Earlier in the week, (aka “AM”) twice met with Republican candidate Scott Cleveland. AM writer Mike Melo and CFO and X Spaces Host Patrick Rafferty sat with Scott Cleveland to discuss his candidacy. Later, he dropped by The Octagon, an AM X Space held weekly on Tuesday evenings, hosted by America Mission’s CEO Jennifer Lawrence, COO Kimberly C., and guest co-host AssembleX Idaho, to discuss further.
Scott is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, living in the Boise suburbs. In his own words, Scott and his family are patriotic, pro-2nd Amendment people. He’s unabashedly pro-MAGA and pro-Trump.
Scott is the Ada County GOP treasurer and co-founded the Treasure Valley Council of Patriots (TV COP). Scott knew that forming a little political action committee could make a difference, instead of just sitting around complaining. This group meets to discuss issues impacting their lives and America broadly including local and national politics, candidates, and activism in their area, among other topics. TV COP has met every Tuesday night for several years now and was part of the reason Scott decided to enter this race.
The Issues
The Swamp
Scott’s entry into politics began about four years ago, after the 2020 election. After that, Scott spoke to his friends, family, and clients, worried that something wasn’t right. Scott didn’t mince words, he doesn’t believe that Biden is a legitimately elected president. He views his opponent, incumbent Republican Michael K. Simpson, as a swamp monster stuck in DC for years.
Scott noted an influx of people from out of state flocking to Idaho over the past few years. His candidacy was born out of that revelation two years ago, even though he’s a lifelong Republican.
Two years ago, Scott ran against a career politician, Senator Mike Crapo, as an independent strictly out of strategy, so he could be on the November general election ballot. He gained a lot of good contacts in all 44 counties of Idaho, and more importantly, gained valuable experience from running.
So, why is Scott running for this seat? Well, he wants Mike Simpson, who he regards as the worst of his four members of Congress by far, out ASAP. Scott wants competent, willing people to step up and try to do what they can to turn things around because the current politicians suck and do a horrible job. Scott mentioned he admires President Trump and his fortitude against the deep state’s lawfare.
Scott is 63 and uninterested in a 30-year political career in Washington, DC. He shares what the framers had in mind: a citizen legislature.
You know, I'm gonna go serve a term or two and see how it goes.
If the voters like me, I'll serve a term or two and then go get on with my life. My wife Kathy and I, we have a lot of things on our to-do list and I'm not interested in being in the good old Boys’ Club and, you know, the “inner circle”, the cocktail party circuit in Washington DC.
I already have a great life, but I am willing to go serve and that's a part of my reason for running.
Scott doesn't trust anyone but his wife, because he plans to go to the DC swamp. They don’t drink, so they’ll skip the Congressional holiday parties and cocktail parties. Scott wants to work with the Freedom Caucus instead of the uniparty establishment.
Scott believes American politics broke down into largely grassroots liberty candidates versus the establishment. Scott likes to refer to establishment RINO Republicans as “Blue Republicans, Fractional Republicans, and Trans Republicans.”
Scott’s biggest challenge will be building his Congressional infrastructure, like staffing his congressional office. A prepper at heart, Scott believes that he will have to have high levels of security in his personal space, phone, office, places, and people he meets.
Well, first off, you have to have a very strong sense of security, both operationally and personally. Nobody is your friend in Washington, DC. They're not gonna be your friends. I don't need any new friends. They're not acting in anybody's interest except their own. The lobbyists and special interest groups.
Scott is the current Vice chairman of the Ada County GOP, with 197 precinct committee men and women. He worked in a Fortune 100 company for over 20 years, so he’s used to big bureaucracies and hierarchies. Further, Scott has been a self-employed investment advisor for 35 years and still owns his company, so he’s used to hiring and firing people.
The border
Scott’s top issue is almost certainly the invasion down at our southern border.
Let me start by saying, first off, that's not an accident. It is a deliberate attempt by the Biden administration and their ilk to flood this country with future voters. That, if you're getting handouts, you're gonna vote for the party that's continuing your handouts, right?
It's not more complicated than that and what a lot of people don't understand about immigration, is the United States allows in over 1.1 million legal immigrants every single year into this country, far more than any country in the world. So, it's not that we don't have a system or don't allow people to come here. We have a very good system. It might be a little slow, but it's there and these people want to subvert that and flood us with, you know, entire states’ full of populations.
Idaho only has 2 million people in the whole state. That's about six months’ worth of invaders during the Biden administration, so they like to distort the issue, and needless to say, it has a devastating impact and these people are landing in all 50 states.
They're not just going to border states, they land them right here in Nampa, Idaho at the dollar store. They land them up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Falls. They are everywhere and you know, I get frustrated when I hear some say, ‘Business are key and well, we need the labor force.
Well, you don't need 10 million of them and if you need the labor force, why aren't they dropping them at your door? They're not. They're just kicking them out, wherever they happen to land, and each community has to suffer the consequences.
It's not right, but here's the good news that that self-inflicted wound to our country is reversible, but it's not going to be reversed, if Joe Biden is sitting in the White House. It might be reversed, if Trump gets in the White House and I'm praying that that happens.
There's only really going to get, you know, permanently or semi-permanently addressed if Trump is in the office and has enough backup in Congress to legislate the solution or legislate the US. You know, assure that he has the legislative support to make these things permanent cause this world of endless executive orders is not what the founders had in mind.
J6
J6 is high on Scott’s priority list. Scott believes that the J6ers were attacked by Capitol Hill police while exercising their basic rights. He lamented how migrants down at the porous border are treated better than our very own fellow Americans.
Scott believes that it was one of our time's greatest civil rights violations, thanks to a two-tier justice system led by Biden and Garland. Compared to BLM and Antifa’s “summer of love”, J6 was much tamer, yet J6 defendants were labeled as terrorists and hauled off to the American gulag in horrible conditions. Scott would threaten the budget of the DOJ and trust that Trump will and should pardon the J6ers.
I see the January 6th prisoners of Biden…
I see that as a civil rights violation of our time, the people that were rounded up while they were exercising their First Amendment rights to bring their grievances and assemble and their freedom of speech, to the steps of Congress.
They were attacked by the capital police. 100,000 people there and their civil rights were violated without warning, without due process. And yes, some knuckleheads got in the capital, they caused a little bit of damage, a couple $1,000,000 worth of windows, but no police officers died that day, but five or six Americans have died as a result of that, namely Ashley Babbitt and so on.
So, I'm very familiar with J6 and what's happened since then. It is what you described as: a 2-tiered justice system. If you're a conservative and the Department of Justice has been weaponized to go after you, there are still arresting Americans today and their civil rights, both the 6th and 8th Amendments to the Bill of Rights. They're being violated: the right to a speedy trial and the right to no harsh or cruel and unusual punishment.
Some of the conditions that these prisoners are still in today, 2, 3, 4 years after the fact, is absolutely despicable and need to be reversed. Another reason to get Trump in office, he needs to pardon people. Now, anybody that broke the law should get the same level.
The punishment that your BLM and Antifa people that were rioting just the summer before all that happened, but that's not what's happened here and the way you clean out the bureaucrats that are having this two-tiered justice system. The only thing they listen to in Washington is budgets.
So you say to the Department of Justice, I'll use them as an example, ‘If you're gonna keep running a 2-tiered system in America, we're gonna cut your budget 50%.’ And the members of the House of Representatives, who have that power? The Republicans have it right now by a slim majority, and they do nothing with it. They're a bunch of weak squishy leaders, and we deserve better than that.
You have to cut these agencies budgets or they do nothing but shake their head and nod and say, ‘Well, we'll just, we'll just outlast you and wait till the next guy sitting in the seat.’
It's disgusting what they've done to Americans, and Trump should pardon every one of those people the minute he gets in office.
Cannabis
Scott is not pro-cannabis legalization and called out his hometown of Albuquerque for being so. He would help keep it illegal in Idaho.
Schooling
Despite attending them, Scott no longer trusts public schools. He has a deep distaste for government schooling and hopes parents don’t send their kids anymore.
Government spending
Scott’s financial background has made him incredibly fiscally conservative and willing to hold Congress accountable.
At the end of the day, the legislation is either good for the American people or it's not. It's either fiscally responsible or it's not.
And like I said, I'm not there to win a popularity contest and I'm not trying to get reelected for 30 or 40 years. I'm not afraid to dig in my heels with the Freedom Caucus members. We need more people with a backbone and I don't wanna hear about bipartisanship. I only hear that from Republicans when they're about to cave in to whatever the Democrats want.
There's an old saying where I come from: unity is overrated. I know you're not going to get 100% of what you want in politics, but when they're offering up something that has a bill that has something that is really bad for Americans in that bill, I don't care if it's 95% good and 5% bad.
Scott promised to wield the power of the Congressional purse against the government and criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson for standing down to Chuck Schumer and the House Democrats. Scott promised he’d not vote in favor of new bills adding to the federal deficit, citing the current $35 million plus federal debt. Scott wants to threaten deep budget cuts against the deep state’s three letter agencies.
Scott condemns Congress because “never-ending reckless spending by our government is putting our nation at real risk”. He laments that “as long as there's still food on grocery store shelves and sports ball on TV, people are living in their own little world.”
Given Scott’s background in accounting, seeing the massive amounts of deficit spending and this year’s proposed budget of 7.3 trillion coming out of D.C. makes his blood boil. He will not vote for a budget that increases the deficit. According to him, it's gonna take a full decade to stop the deficit from going up, so he’s a big fan of a balanced budget amendment.
When my opponent, Mike Simpson took office, we were only $5 trillion in debt, and later this year we're gonna easily top 35 trillion. The interest on that debt is gonna be a trillion dollars for the first time in U.S. history. It's unsustainable, but until people feel a little pain in their daily lives like grocery stores being half empty.
The price of gas, a gallon of gas could be 10 bucks by then. Until they see that, they kind of just got their heads in the sand. So it takes strong leadership in and like minded people.
Scott believes that we’re aiming our money at the wrong places. Entitlement reform is where Scott plans to fix the problem and get things turned around. Instead of taking care of Americans first, like our homeless veteran population, or the needy, or seniors, or whatever the group that really, truly deserves help, Congress keeps sending tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to people who don't care and don't deserve it.
America is spending money on illegal aliens. Billions and billions of dollars for their housing, their health care, their food stamps, and so on. In his estimation, keep it going in the right direction for about 10 years, and we'll be OK.
Scott would cut entitlement programs to protect productive members of society and taxpayers. That's the place we start cutting. Scott is adamant about calling them entitlement programs because “these people think they're entitled to these benefits just because they jumped over a fence or swam across the river.” That's exactly where the cuts need to start, in his mind. Healthcare certainly has lots of room for reform as well. Washington has lied to the American people about practically everything, and that's why Scott believes almost all of them need to be voted out of office.
Government shutdowns
First off, you could not shut down the federal government if you tried, the world would keep turning.
But, there's this…there's also a safety issue. So, let's say you draw the line and you get a bunch of strong-willed Freedom Caucus Member Republican conservatives to dig in their heels and say, ‘Hey, we're not gonna spend that.’
We're not going to do deficit spending if that budget is $1.00 over what we bring in, we're not going to sign it. I mean, obviously, there's important things that you can't neglect, American citizens that paid into the Social Security system. You can't stop sending their checks; that would be disastrous. That would be rioting in the streets. So, you can't bankrupt Social Security similarly, you can't. Let's say, we can't shut down the Federal Aviation Administration and have airplanes falling out of the sky in the mid-afternoon.
The United States military is another example where OK, we need, we need to keep our one running because there's lots of people in the world that wanna do Americans harm. But all of these other programs, these ridiculous, wasteful spending programs, and especially entitlement programs for people that don't deserve it, you could stop doing that right away.
And the world would keep turning, and maybe some of these people, when they're not getting handouts for their every single living need, maybe they go back to the country that they came from.
Speaker Johnson
I can't begin to tell you how disappointed I am in the new speaker, Mike Johnson. You know, he's not even in his seat for 60 days and he caves in to Chuck Schumer and that band of crooks and gives them everything that they want for Ukraine, a little bit for Israel, and how much for the border wall?
Globalism
Scott is not a fan of any of this globalist nonsense. To him, international organizations like the UN and the WEF are trying to take over the United States of America. They view America as a problem to be solved, not a nation to work with. They’re not focused on bettering the American way of life, but view it as a problem to be solved, to match up with their globalist agenda.
Americans should not be giving up their rights, their liberties, their freedoms, their sovereignty to the Klaus Schwabs of the world and the Rothschilds, and any leader, whether it's a state legislature, a member of Congress, even certainly in the executive branch, any leader that goes down that path needs to be removed from office.
These people do not have our best interests in mind. They're the gun grabbers and the only thing that's stopping them from fully implementing their agenda is the fact that we have the Second Amendment here and Americans will protect their rights, and freedoms, and liberties under the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 10 Commandments. You name it. We're not giving up any of those things and that's where I stand on the globalists.
Article V: The Convention of States
Well, in my mind, the purpose of it, the true purpose, the original purpose was it's a safety valve in case the federal government becomes overbearing to its citizens and the states. Let's not forget that the states created the federal government, not the other way around. Our framers were brilliant for putting that in there.
Now, it's misdescribed because we're certainly getting to the point where the federal government is so intrusive and overreaching in all of our lives. I would like to see the states call back a little bit of that power if necessary, but the detractors always say this: ‘We can't support a convention of states because it requires a 2/3 majority of whatever number of states you have to call the Convention in place, and Congress has only role in that to just is to dictate the time and the place and nothing else.’ It's not the judicial branch. It's not the executive branch.
The states can call that convention, but currently that requirement would be 34 states. Now, what is the likelihood that that is going to happen when only 19 of them have signed on to it? So far, it's not going to happen.
So, all the hand-wringing that goes along with the Convention of States is kind of a waste of time and energy because we're not going to go from 19 states to 34 anytime soon.
In my mind, unless the grocery stores are empty like I described earlier, but if it did get that bad, think it through guys, would it be 34 red states or 34 blue states? It can't be 34 blue states because there aren't 34 blue states.
There are maybe 34 red states, so if and when a convention was called, it would only be by Republicans. So, supposing that that happens, which again is unlikely, let's amend the Constitution. I'll just pick term limits for members of Congress. There are about three of them that they wanna push through, but I'll just pick term limits.
Each state gets one vote at that convention, so it's not being dominated by large population states. They get one vote whether they send 35 delegates or 3500 delegates. That's how it's supposed to work, so it's even in balance now the standard to pass an amendment goes up from 66% to 70%, which is currently 38 states.
Again, I asked the question: ‘Are there 38 blue states in America?’ No chance. Are there 38 red state red states? Well, there could be before long, but we're so far away from any of that happening again.”
Tribal rights
Scott believes that native tribes are using Idaho’s dams as a wedge issue. He’s concerned they’re taking advantage of their relationship with the federal government to dominate the salmon fishing industry by restricting their fellow Idahoans’ property rights.
The fight rages on
The winners of each primary will then face off in the general election on November 5th. This election and many more are opportunities for the MAGA movement to shake up D.C. politics and restore American exceptionalism. Stay tuned to America Mission for more.
I’m Mike Melo & I made America my mission this past year.
I sincerely hope you choose to join me & so many others who have made America their mission.
Editor’s note: Corrected typos about Ada County and Coeur d'Alene.