PITTSBURGH — Pat Toomey, the trailblazing conservative insurgent who took on the Republican Party establishment in 2004 when he challenged and nearly beat the late Arlen Specter in a primary for his U.S. Senate seat, surprised many in the national media on Monday when he said that he would not seek a third term in the Senate or run for governor in 2022. In an extensive interview with the Washington Examiner, he explained why.
The announcement, the 58-year-old senator said, had nothing to do with a decision to endorse Joe Biden or a dissatisfaction with President Trump. Instead, he said it was just time for him and his young family to do something different.
“I have no idea what that something different looks like — my focus is on the next two years in the Senate. I will worry about that when I leave office,” said the father of three. His older children, Bridget and Patrick, are in college, while his son, Duncan, was born right before the 2010 midterm elections.
While the Republican Party has changed drastically since he first ran for office in 1998 for a swing congressional seat in the Lehigh Valley, Toomey has mostly remained the same small-government conservative he was when he began his public service. To tell the story of Toomey is to begin with his brash move of running against Specter long before challenging incumbents in primaries became a thing.
The native Rhode Islander, grandson of Irish and Portuguese immigrants, and former Wall Street banker voluntarily left his House seat in 2004 — fulfilling his pledge to serve only for three terms. His decision to challenge Specter for the U.S. Senate that spring wasn’t just some quixotic quest.
“I just have always felt strongly that the Republican Party should be a conservative party and that its purpose is to provide a political vehicle for conservative people who believe in limited government and all the ideals that we associate with conservatives,” said Toomey. “Sen. Specter was clearly not by anyone’s idea of a conservative.”
He went on: “He was way to the left of the Republican consensus, and he might have even been even slightly to the left of the overall political consensus. I felt that given the opportunity to govern, it was really important that our party govern as a conservative party, and he was an obstacle to that. And so, that’s why I ran.”
Though primary challenges to incumbents have since become relatively common, that was not the case back in 2004, when political parties were more powerful and those running for reelection typically had their nominations all but rubber-stamped. Specter was backed not only by fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, but also by President George W. Bush, who was still riding his post-Sept. 11 era popularity wave with Republican voters.
Toomey was universally expected to get about 30% of the vote at the time, explained Charlie Gerow, a Harrisburg-based Republican strategist who also bucked convention and supported Toomey. “He was outspent massively, had the entire institutional party against him, and completely underfunded,” Gerow said. “But he still got very, very close, and I think that did suggest that he must have been hitting a chord with people.”
He added, “Toomey was ahead of the curve. He was the Tea Party before there was the Tea Party.”
Following that loss, Toomey took over the Club for Growth, the small-government organization that has sought to make the Republican Party more conservative. In the middle of his tenure, the Republicans lost control of the U.S. Senate, House, and the White House, and the small-government Tea Party emerged as a dominant brake pedal to a rush of big-government legislation under Democratic control.
By 2009, Toomey said he didn’t initially plan on running for Senate.
“I was actually thinking about a run for governor, but I hadn’t pulled the trigger when Specter was talking about supporting Obamacare and he voted for the giant stimulus bill that was extremely unpopular with Republicans,” he explained. “I think it was the stimulus bill that kind of was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I announced I would run against him again. This was six years after I had run against him the first time. Within two weeks, he announced that he was switching parties, and he was asked at a press conference, why are you doing this? And he said, ‘I’m doing this so that I can get reelected.’” It was a fateful line Joe Sestak would eventually successfully use against Specter in a Democratic primary a year later.
Toomey said his tight win against Sestak in the general election was a hard-fought race, and he took nothing for granted, “He was a very aggressive and very competent candidate, so we knew it was going to be a close race. Sestak had served in the House. He very, very prominently reminded voters of his military background, which he had a distinguished career in the Navy. So, that was quite a battle. We ended up winning narrowly.”
Toomey entered a divided Congress with a raucous Republican House that had just handed the Democrats a historic pummeling in a wave election, but a presidency and Senate still controlled by Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell then appointed him to the supercommittee that was supposed to come up with an agreement to tackle the deficit to avoid automatic cuts to military and social welfare spending.
“At the time, remember we were trying to deal with these periodic impasses that we Republicans would have with President Obama,” Toomey said. “We had a new energy with fiscal conservatives who wanted us to get on a sustainable fiscal path. Mitch McConnell very much wanted to have a successful outcome.”
He recalled, “McConnell wanted a bipartisan agreement that would restore fiscal sustainability in a way that would be pro-growth. He realized that in order to actually get across the goal line, we would need to have somebody with strong conservative credentials and credibility to be a part of and be supportive of the product.”
He said, “I’ll tell you what. He grilled me at least on three separate occasions for extended periods of time because he wanted to be convinced that I was willing to get to yes and understood that that meant it wouldn’t be the bill I would write if I were king. But he wanted an outcome there if at all possible.”
Toomey said it was a real honor for him to be a part of that. “Obviously, we were not successful in the end, but I did come up with a framework that would have met the criteria, the goal. It would have, I think, been very constructive. We had a little bit of traction for a little while, but it never came together.”
Toomey’s counterpart in the Senate representing Pennsylvania was Scranton Democrat Bob Casey. When he entered the Senate, Casey was in the majority. In personality, the two are strikingly similar: calm, deliberate, and the last to rush to do a cable news segment bashing the other one.
Some even call both of them boring.
Casey laughed but did not necessarily disagree with the assessment in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I’m going to call Kris Toomey when this phone call is over and ask her if she thinks her husband is boring,” he said.
He went on to say, “I think both of us recognized a couple of things, a couple of fundamental truths, or at least considerations when you’re in the Senate and you have a colleague of a different party. No. 1 is you either believe or you don’t believe that it’s important that you work together and people see you working together where you can. Some people don’t believe that. They have a different approach. But I think both of us basically believed that.”
He explained, “It’s been, I think, a relationship that’s emblematic of how you can work in the Senate together, even when you have big disagreements. We had obviously, a big disagreement over the 2017 tax bill. We had a disagreement over the Affordable Care Act. So, big issues where we disagreed, but I think if you want to move forward in getting district court judges especially, confirmed in your state, and you’ve got a split delegation so to speak, Democrat, Republican, then you’ve got to figure out a way to work together.”
Since 2011, both men have had their turn in the majority and have maintained, no matter who was in the catbird seat, a bipartisan commitment and process to fill vacancies on the federal bench.
“We’ve now added, recommended, and confirmed 29 federal district court judges, which is a big number. Only two other states, New York and Texas, both of which do not have a split bench, have confirmed more,” Casey said of their efforts together.
Toomey said he is optimistic that Trump and Senate Republicans will be successful this November and insisted the last thing he will do is mail it in for the next two years.
“I’m going to continue to be the policy wonk that I’ve been,” he said. “I’m going to focus on the economic policies. We’ve got the best tax reform in many decades, but it has provisions that expire start to expire pretty soon. One of the things we should do over the next two years is negotiate an extension. Hopefully, the permanence of those provisions so that we can ensure a strong recovery and strong economic growth.”
If the Republicans hold the majority in the Senate, Toomey will be the chairman of the banking committee.
“We still have the great unfinished work from the financial crisis, which is to reform the government’s sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he said. “They are in conservatorship. They’ve been nationalized essentially. We should privatize them and have a robust competitive market for residential and commercial mortgages. That’s a big project.”
Despite his skepticism of the president’s conservative credentials when Trump ran in 2016, Toomey said the important untold story of the president is just how conservatively he has governed.
“That’s a really important topic, because the president, in terms of actual policy, his first term has been remarkably successful,” said Toomey. “I mean, before COVID hit, we had the best economy of my lifetime. That’s not even disputable. The unemployment rate was at a record low. The economy was booming. There were more job openings than there were people looking for work, and the wage gap between the rich and the poor was narrowing. Wages were growing at an accelerating pace. I mean, it was truly the best economy of my entire life, and it was because he pursued conventional Republican orthodoxy, and that’s one of the things that, I think, has been interesting about his administration.”
He continued, “Trump’s biggest successes were conventional conservative policy. What conservatives have not advocated for lower marginal tax rates in a simplified tax code? Now, to his credit, he probably made it possible for us to go further than a lot of other Republicans would have. I’m not sure we would have gotten to a 21% corporate rate under most other possible Republican presidents.”
He noted, “He’s also been more bold in foreign policy in ways that I agree completely.”
Speaking of the Iran deal, he said, “A lot of other presidents might have said, ‘Even if you don’t like the JCPOA, we’ve got it now. It’s in force, better not to pull out.’ Well, he was having none of that. Having pulled out of the JCPOA, it was part of a broader message that we’re not going to acquiesce to Iranian hegemony in the Middle East the way President Obama wanted to. They are not our friends. They are dangerous. We are going to support our friends like Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and we’re going to have their back, and I think that contributed to creating an environment where these peace agreements became possible, and I would add moving our embassy to Jerusalem and the kind of terms that they were talking about for dealing with the Israel-Palestinian conflict — all of those things made this breakthrough possible.”
After 10 years, two presidential elections, and three wave midterm elections, it goes without saying that there have been high points and low points during these tumultuous times for the country — and for Toomey, as he looks back, a couple of things stand out to him immediately.
“I would say the two disappointments were the failure of the supercommittee to come up with the major reforms of our entitlement program so that we would be on a sustainable fiscal path; the other one was the inability to pass some version of the Manchin-Toomey legislation,” he said of the gun control measure after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
His high points were his efforts to draw the nation’s attention to organ transplant rules for children and his appeal to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to allow children under 12 the opportunity to be considered for an adult lung transplant if it was medically substantiated that an adult transplant could be viable.
“I was in the Senate for a little over two years, and she was a 10-year-old girl from Newtown Square who had cystic fibrosis, and she desperately needed a lung transplant but because of this crazy rule should have died,” he said.
Toomey said there was no legislative solution, “But what I knew was that as the senator from Pennsylvania, I could put a spotlight on this problem. I could make a lot of noise. I could bring attention to it. And what we did, really, was we forced the governing body that makes the rules to convene, to have an emergency meeting, and to change their rules.”
The other high point is a testament to his wonky side, the Jobs Act. “There were six bills cobbled together, three of them were mine, and they were all about facilitating capital raising, making it easier to go public, allowing, providing more opportunities for small investors. It was all just creating more flexibility in the capital markets,” he said of the free market side of him that first inspired him to run for Congress.
