Representative Robert Stump

Robert Lee Stump (April 4, 1927 – June 20, 2003) was an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative from Arizona from 1977 to 2003. Over the course of 13 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, he served first as a Democrat and later as a Republican, and became a prominent conservative voice on defense and veterans’ issues. His congressional career spanned a significant period in late twentieth-century American history, during which he consistently participated in the legislative process and represented the interests of his Arizona constituents.

Stump was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the nearby agricultural community of Tolleson. During World War II he served in the United States Navy as a combat veteran, assigned to the escort carrier USS Tulagi from 1943 to 1946. After the war he returned to Arizona, graduating from Tolleson Union High School in 1947. He went on to attend Arizona State University, from which he graduated in 1951; while there he was a member of the Delta Chi fraternity. Following his education, Stump owned and operated a cotton and grain farm in Tolleson for many years, maintaining close ties to the agricultural economy and rural life that shaped his political outlook.

Stump entered public office in state government before his election to Congress. He was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1958 and served four terms from 1959 to 1967. He then won election to the Arizona State Senate, where he served five terms from 1967 to 1976. In the State Senate he rose to a leadership position as President of the Arizona State Senate from 1975 to 1976. His legislative work at the state level, combined with his background as a farmer and veteran, helped establish him as a conservative Democrat identified with rural Arizona interests.

On November 2, 1976, Stump was elected to the 95th Congress as a Democrat from Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District, a vast district stretching from western Phoenix through Prescott to Lake Havasu City and the Grand Canyon. In that initial race he defeated state senate minority leader Fred Koory with 47 percent of the vote. At the time, he described himself as a “Pinto Democrat,” a term used for conservative Democrats from rural Arizona, and his voting record was strongly conservative, resembling that of many Southern Democrats. He supported President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, and shortly after that vote he announced that he would switch parties and become a Republican when Congress reconvened in January 1982. From 1977 to 1983 he served in Congress as a Democrat; from 1983 until the end of his tenure in 2003 he served as a Republican. Regardless of party affiliation, he rarely faced serious electoral opposition: after his initial campaign he dropped below 60 percent of the vote only once, in 1990, faced only an independent opponent in 1978, and ran completely unopposed in 1986. He briefly considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1986 after Senator Barry Goldwater announced his retirement but ultimately remained in the House.

Throughout his 26 years in Congress, Stump developed a reputation as a quiet, intensely private, and highly conservative legislator. He maintained a very small staff, was known to answer the telephone himself in his Washington, D.C., office, and often opened his own mail. He typically returned to Arizona on weekends to work his Tolleson farm. His sprawling district covered all of northwestern Arizona, but the great majority of its residents lived in the rapidly growing West Valley suburbs of Phoenix. Stump was sometimes criticized for focusing his attention primarily on the West Valley and for being relatively inaccessible to constituents in more distant parts of the district. For many years he maintained his district office in downtown Phoenix, outside the boundaries of his own district, and although he claimed his Tolleson farm as his district residence, his principal home was in another part of Phoenix. He defended this arrangement by describing the farm as his “place of business” and asserting that residency could properly be declared where one chose, a position consistent with the constitutional requirement that House members live in the state, but not necessarily in the specific district, they represent.

Stump’s committee work and voting record underscored his conservative philosophy and his focus on defense and veterans’ affairs. He became a noted member of the House Armed Services Committee, ultimately serving as its chairman from 2001 to 2003. From 1995 to 2001 he chaired the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, stepping down only because of Republican caucus-imposed term limits on committee chairs. He was one of the few House members to chair both the Armed Services and Veterans’ Affairs Committees. Stump consistently supported increased spending on the military and on veterans’ programs, and in recognition of his long-standing advocacy, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 was named the Bob Stump National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003. His broader voting record earned him a lifetime rating of 97 out of 100 from the American Conservative Union between 1976 and 2002, while he received very low ratings from organizations such as the National Council of Senior Citizens, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL–CIO, the NAACP, and the League of Conservation Voters. He sponsored legislation to make English the official language of U.S. government business and to change federal law so that children born on U.S. soil to non-citizen parents would not automatically receive citizenship. Commentators such as Amy Silverson described him as a “perpetual naysayer,” noting his frequent votes against a wide range of federal spending programs. Among his many votes, he opposed the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987, which asserted federal title to certain historic shipwrecks and transferred management authority to the states; despite his opposition, the measure was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on April 28, 1988.

Stump was also involved in several high-profile national controversies during his congressional service. In November 1997 he was one of eighteen House Republicans to co-sponsor a resolution introduced by Representative Bob Barr to initiate an impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton, a measure that did not specify particular charges and predated the public emergence of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. After that scandal broke, Stump voted on October 8, 1998, in favor of opening a formal impeachment inquiry. On December 19, 1998, he voted in favor of all four proposed articles of impeachment against President Clinton, two of which were adopted by the House. Stump also drew public attention in June 1998 when, relying on an erroneous Associated Press posting of an obituary, he announced on the House floor that entertainer Bob Hope had died; the report was quickly denied by Hope’s family and publicist, and Hope ultimately outlived Stump by five weeks, dying in 2003 at the age of 100.

Declining health led Stump to decide not to seek re-election in 2002, bringing his 13-term congressional career to a close. He endorsed his longtime chief of staff, Lisa Jackson Atkins, as his preferred successor in what was then renumbered as Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District. Atkins had been highly visible in the district, to the extent that some constituents believed she, rather than Stump, was their representative. In the Republican primary, however, she was defeated in a seven-way contest by Trent Franks, who went on to hold the seat until December 2017. Stump died in Phoenix on June 20, 2003, of myelodysplasia, a blood disorder, and was buried with full military honors at Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery in Phoenix.

In the years following his death, several public facilities and landmarks were named in Stump’s honor. In 2004 the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Prescott, Arizona, was renamed the Bob Stump Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, recognizing his long service on veterans’ issues. In 2006 Arizona State Route 303L was designated the Bob Stump Memorial Highway. Stump was not related to the later Arizona Corporation Commission member of the same name, a similarity that led to public confusion; in 2018 Stump’s widow issued a letter criticizing that state official for allegedly capitalizing on her late husband’s name, a charge that drew a sharp rebuttal from the official’s mother.