Pat Toomey joined the Senate in 2011 as a conservative but soon will depart as a moderate, despite remaining entirely consistent throughout his two terms.
A business-oriented Republican from the Lehigh Valley, Toomey narrowly was elected in the red wave 2010 midterm election. He won another close race in 2016.
In office, he kept his word from the campaign trail, advocating unfettered capitalism, business tax cuts, reduced regulations and other tenets of conservative economic policy.
But Toomey has not been an ideological flamethrower. After 20 first graders and six adults were murdered in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Toomey broke with conservative orthodoxy at significant political risk, and advocated sensible, if modest and marginal, gun safety reforms.
Then came President Donald Trump, making conservative politics and governance secondary to cult politics. Though Toomey acknowledges having voted for Trump, and massive business tax cuts in 2017 became Trump’s signature domestic policy achievement, Toomey recognized the difference between governance and sycophancy.
Following Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, Toomey refused to go along with feckless Republican members of the state congressional delegation, including Reps. Dan Meuser and Fred Keller, who supported efforts to invalidate Pennsylvanians’ votes in a reckless effort to keep Trump in power. Meuser and others endorsed a preposterous lawsuit by Texas’ attorney general to force a new election in Pennsylvania, and voted to invalidate Pennsylvania’s certified electoral votes.
That vote was on Jan. 6, 2021, even after a Trump-inspired mob attacked Congress.
Toomey stood for Pennsylvanians and constitutional government that night. On the Senate floor, he said: “We saw bloodshed, because a demagogue chose to spread falsehoods and sow distrust of his own fellow Americans.”
After the House impeached Trump for his complicity for that shameful assault, Toomey was one of seven Senate Republicans to vote for his impeachment.
Toomey will leave the Senate on his own terms. And he leaves as the same principled conservative that he was upon his arrival. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for far too many of his colleagues.
— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS
