The congressman from the 14th District is Mike Doyle, an ardently pro-labor Democrat first elected in 1994 who was the most liberal member of Pennsylvania’s House delegation in the 111th Congress (2009-10) Read More

The congressman from the 14th District is Mike Doyle, an ardently pro-labor Democrat first elected in 1994 who was the most liberal member of Pennsylvania’s House delegation in the 111th Congress (2009-10)

Of Irish and Italian descent, Doyle grew up in the Mon Valley town of Swissvale and worked in steel mills during summers off from Penn State. He became an insurance agent and was elected to the Swissvale Borough Council in 1977, at age 24. In 1978, he became chief of staff to state Sen. Frank Pecora, a Republican. Pecora switched parties in 1992 and briefly gave Democrats control of the state Senate. In 1994, Doyle, who had just switched himself to the Democratic Party, ran for the House seat vacated by Republican Rep. Rick Santorum, who ran successfully for the Senate. Doyle was one of seven Democrats and four Republican candidates. With endorsements from labor unions and community leaders, he won the primary. In the general election, he faced John McCarty, an aide to the late Republican Sen. John Heinz. McCarty was pro-abortion rights and Doyle opposed abortion rights. Doyle also campaigned for sweeping health care changes. In a Republican year, he won 55%-45%.

In the House, Doyle had a mixed voting record, often on the right on cultural issues and on the left on economics. During the years in which his party controlled the House and emphasized the latter, he became much more of a progressive populist. As an anti-abortion Catholic, he helped broker the deal on abortion during the final days of the 2010 health care debate that brought other anti-abortion members of his party on board. Two years earlier, he was among the religious-minded lawmakers living together near the Capitol on C Street who confronted their housemate, Nevada GOP Sen. John Ensign, over his affair with the wife of an aide—a revelation that ultimately led Ensign to resign his seat in 2011.

Doyle rarely seeks attention, nor has he caused much of a ruckus. He has worked to reduce foreign imports, and he pushed a bill to create a national historic site at the former U.S. Steel facilities along the Mon River. On the Energy and Commerce Committee, his focus has been on high-tech initiatives, including increased availability of broadband services in underserved areas. He has been a leading advocate of the “Do Not Call” restrictions on telephone marketers, and won passage in 2008 a bill to make the national list permanent. During the debate over so-called cap and trade legislation, which would cap harmful carbon emissions but allow companies to trade on the right to pollute, he vigorously advocated the interests of steel and other Rust Belt industries, even as he sought to work out a compromise with environmentalists. When Republicans in 2011 voted to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate emissions, Doyle accused the GOP of “scaring American people” into wrongly believing that failure to curb EPA’s authority would cause gasoline prices to rise further.

Doyle is an avid earmarker of spending projects for his district, a practice that has become increasingly controversial with budget conservatives. In 2010 he secured more than $23 million in earmarks, a figure just slightly behind that of fellow Pennsylvania Democrat Chaka Fattah, who sits on the Appropriations Committee. One of Doyle’s favorite beneficiaries is the Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology in South Oakland, which was started in 2003 by a $1.5 federal million grant he helped secure. He also is active on funding autism research and cracking down on illegal dog-breeding called “puppy mills.”

Doyle has been politically untouchable and has little to fear from redistricting, when the state is set to lose a House seat in 2012.