Republican Pat Toomey is the junior senator from Pennsylvania. The onetime head of the anti-tax organization Club for Growth and a former U.S. House member, Toomey emerged on top in one of 2010’s most competitive Senate races against Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak.
Toomey grew up in Providence, R.I., the third of six children of a union worker and a part-time church secretary. He graduated from Harvard University thanks to scholarship money and earnings from part-time jobs. After college, he worked in investment banking, founding a successful international financial services consulting firm in 1990 and amassing considerable wealth. After six years on Wall Street, Toomey moved to Allentown, Pa., where he joined his brothers to start Rookies Restaurant and Sports Bar, which grew into a chain with outlets across the state. In 1994, he was elected to the Allentown Government Study Commission, where he pushed to lower taxes and to require a supermajority vote by the city council to raise taxes.
In 1998, Toomey ran for the seat of retiring 15th District Rep. Paul McHale, a Democrat. One of six candidates in the Republican primary, he called for individual Social Security investment accounts, creation of a flat tax to replace income taxes, and term limits for members of Congress. He promised to serve only six years. He won the primary with 27% of the vote to 25% for the 1996 nominee, Bob Kilbanks, and 23% for state Sen. Joseph Uliana. In the general election, he beat state Sen. Roy Afflerbach 55%-45%. In the House, Toomey worked primarily on economic issues. He pushed to limit spending and to force Congress to set aside money for debt reduction, which irked some longtime Appropriations Committee members who were not accustomed to having their earmark spending limited. He supported free-trade agreements and criticized President George W. Bush’s steel import quotas. He was re-elected 53%-47% in 2000 and 57%-43% in 2002 in a district that has voted Democratic for president since 1992.
Toomey kept his term limit pledge in 2004 and ran for the Senate seat held by then- Republican Arlen Specter. Specter was supported by Bush and by conservative colleague Sen. Rick Santorum and raised far more money. He spotlighted the projects he had obtained for the state over his 24 years in the Senate, and said that Toomey was inattentive to constituents and flip-flopped on issues. Toomey was supported by the Club for Growth and by culturally conservative groups. He criticized Specter’s voting record as too liberal and criticized his support from trial lawyers. The result was exceedingly close. Specter won 51%-49%, by 17,000 votes out of over 1 million cast. Specter carried metro Philadelphia with 57%, but Toomey carried metro Pittsburgh with 58% and, thanks to 2-1 support in his home district, came within less than 2,000 votes of leading Specter in the rest of the state.
After he lost the election, Toomey became president of the Club for Growth, a national organization with deep pockets that champions lower taxes and spends generously to support conservative candidates who share its views. It frequently supported conservative candidates in Republican primaries who were opposed by the local party establishment, and in some cases, it opposed incumbent Republicans. Toomey’s view was that the GOP was courting political disaster because it had abandoned conservative principles. In the process, Toomey made contacts around the country among conservative activists and major fundraisers.
In January 2010, Toomey said he would not run against Specter and was thinking about running for governor. But after Specter cast one of three Republican votes for the Democrats’ economic stimulus bill in February 2009, Toomey changed his mind and announced on April 13 he would run for the Senate. Two weeks later, Specter announced he was switching parties to become a Democrat, saying he did not want to put his service at the mercy of Republican primary voters. For joining the Democrats, Specter was promised support from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Gov. Ed Rendell. But unfortunately for Specter, his path to the Democratic nomination was not clear despite his backing from party heavyweights. Sestak, a retired Navy admiral, was already in the race as a challenger to Specter the Republican, and refused to drop out of the contest now that he joined the same party. Sestak also made headlines when he alleged that an unnamed high-level source in the White House offered him an administration job if he got out of Specter’s way. Sestak ran ads that revealed the opportunistic side of Specter’s party switch in which the senator was depicted saying, “My change in parties will enable me to be re-elected.” Sestak won the Democratic primary, 54%-46%, carrying all but three counties (Philadelphia and those containing Harrisburg and Scranton). Toomey won the Republican primary with 81% of the vote.
The general election presented a clear contrast on issues. Sestak had voted not only for the stimulus bill, but for the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill to limit carbon emissions and their health care overhaul. Toomey called for extending the Bush-era 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for everyone, including the wealthy, and for lower corporate and capital gains tax rates. Toomey said to the McClatchy news service, “I’ve been out of Congress for six years. Joe’s been there the last four years, voting for all the bailouts, the stimulus, all the spending, voting for all those huge deficits and debt.” He labeled Sestak a “San Francisco liberal” who voted 100% of the time with liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. For his part, Sestak said of Toomey, “I tell everybody that he isn’t a witch”—a reference to the controversial comments of Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell—“but his politics are scary.”
Toomey led in polls during most of the contest. Sestak insisted he would come from behind at the end, as he had against Specter in the Democratic primary. Indeed, his standing did get better in the last weeks, and President Obama came to Pennsylvania twice in October to campaign for him. Toomey raised and spent $17 million; Sestak spent $12 million, much of it in the primary.
In an earlier era, one would have expected Pennsylvania, especially western Pennsylvania, to go Democratic in a recession. But the state’s unemployment rate remained below the national average, and western Pennsylvania, with its aging population and contracting workforce, experienced nothing like the anguish it suffered when the domestic steel industry was dying in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Toomey beat Sestak, 51%-49%, even as Republican Tom Corbett was elected governor, 54%-46%. Toomey lost metro Philadelphia, 62%-38%, but he carried metro Pittsburgh, 53%-47%, and in the rest of the state, 59%-41%.
After the election, Toomey immediately joined Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri in signing a letter urging colleagues to abandon earmarks in appropriations bills. He said that Congress should extend unemployment benefits, but offset the cost with spending cuts. He surprised some of his supporters in late 2010 by favoring repeal of the ban on openly gay service personnel in the military. “My highest priority is to have the policy that best enables our armed services to do their job,” Toomey told the The Morning Call in Allentown. After a trip to Afghanistan, he said that he expected U.S. troops to still be there, in dramatically reduced numbers, in 2017 when his Senate term ends. The first bill he introduced in the Senate would require the U.S. Treasury to pay its debt obligations before any other spending. He said the idea was to block any default on the debt if the debt ceiling was not raised by an act of Congress, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner opposed the legislation.
Toomey used his new perch on the Senate Budget Committee to push his budget-cutting agenda. After House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. proposed a controversial deficit reduction plan that would transform Medicare into a voucher-like system, Toomey offered an alternative plan that got some attention. His proposal aimed to balance the budget in nine years through defense cuts already proposed by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and reforming Medicaid into a block grant program. However, his plan did not touch two popular entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. Still, the bill went down to defeat in May 2011 by a vote of 55-42, with no Democratic support.
Toomey insisted that any deal to raise the debt ceiling be tied to significant spending cuts. The Obama Administration and Geithner had maintained that a default could cause catastrophic damage to the global financial system. In a July 2011 floor speech, Toomey criticized Secretary Geithner for “scare tactics” over the consequences of inaction. “I think it’s irresponsible to make these suggestions because it’s entirely within the power of the administration to avoid a catastrophic default even if the debt limit is not raised,” Toomey said. The Obama Administration and Republican leaders eventually forged a deal to raise the debt ceiling and it passed the Senate by a 74-26 vote in early August. Toomey, arguing that the spending cuts were not deep enough, was one of 19 Senate Republicans to vote against the plan.
The deal to raise the debt ceiling set up a 12-member “Super Committee” to recommend an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction by a November 2011 deadline. In a nod to his influence and knowledge on budget and spending matters, Toomey was chosen as a member, despite his vote against the plan to create the Super Committee. In the weeks leading up to the deadline, Toomey angered Democrats for a proposal to add $300 billion in new revenue through tax reform in exchange for making the 2001 Bush tax cuts permanent.
As Toomey continued to raise his national profile on fiscal matters, local issues impacted him as well. In early September, Toomey, fellow Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa. sent a letter to the White House recommending longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno for a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Two months later, Penn State was ensnared in a horrific child sex abuse scandal involving a former defensive coordinator, Paterno was fired, and the Pennsylvania lawmakers rescinded the Medal of Freedom recommendation.
