A Democrat will almost certainly win in Pennsylvania’s 12th District, so the current Democratic primaries will probably determine our House representative for the next two years. Representative Summer Lee, the incumbent, won by less than one percent of the primary vote in 2022, when she was first elected to the position. (She won the general election with 56.2 percent.) You wouldn’t know that if you attended the recent not-a-debate hosted at Carnegie Mellon: Representative Lee received most of the cheers (and her opponents, Bhavini Patel and Laurie MacDonald, received most of the boos).
The main issue at the “forum” was Israel. Representative Lee is not a fan of Israel’s actions in Gaza, whereas the other two candidates criticize her for being too critical. Patel brought up how Lee falsely accused Israel of bombing a specific hospital in a since-deleted tweet. Much of the bad behavior at the debate was snipes between Representative Lee and Patel, often on this topic. MacDonald also publicly expresses support for Israel.
All three candidates are progressive on the majority of issues; all of them seem to support policies that would increase government spending to help people. All, for instance, say that healthcare is a human right, and that public funding of healthcare should reflect this. All support expanded public education.
On social issues they diverge more, though they all remain on the socially progressive side. All believe in the right to abortion. McDonald, as she said at the forum, thinks that the government “shouldn’t tell you what to do with your bodies, whether you want to transition, or whether you want to have an abortion, it’s not really a federal issue,” though she made the conservative statement that states — not the federal government — should be in charge of those decisions. She said that the U.S. is “a federalist republic, which means that our states make the decisions, because if you don’t let the states make the decision, then the federal government makes your decision for you. You can’t leave your country. You can leave your state if you don’t like the politics of it, and so on and so forth.”
On the other hand, Representative Lee seems to think that no amount of divergence from progressivism should be tolerated: “We can’t keep legitimizing Republican white supremacy and then wondering why they continue to grow.” Patel criticized Representative Lee for insufficient support of President Biden, saying at the forum that “because it ultimately is about protecting American democracy, making sure that President Biden gets reelected, which because it’s likely going to be a situation where it’s President Biden versus Donald Trump again, we have zero room for error.”
Lee has only been in the House for two years. During that time, she has sponsored five house resolutions, none of which have been voted on. Three of the five resolutions were entirely symbolic: One resolution recognized the tragedy of the Tree of Life shooting and condemned antisemitism. (I certainly hope that our congress doesn’t support mass shootings or antisemitism, but to me, such bills seem like a waste of time.) The “Equality in Laws Act” would make all of the nouns and pronouns in laws gender-neutral, which would be purely symbolic as the relevant language is already interpreted to be gender-neutral. (When Neil Armstrong said, “One giant leap for mankind,” did anyone really think he was referring specifically to males?) Most recently, she sponsored a bill to rename a specific VA outpatient clinic after Henry Parham, a D-Day veteran.
One resolution aimed to provide “hazardous duty compensation to eligible health care workers for work performed during the period of an emergency or disaster in cases” up to $13 per hour and $25,000 per worker per year. (Eligible workers are those who cannot do their healthcare work remotely.) This could entail the government paying a very significant portion of the salaries of many privately-employed people. To me, by far the most interesting of the resolutions was the “Abandoned Well Remediation Research and Development Act,” which aims to find and plug or repurpose abandoned oil and gas wells, which can leak methane.
The most progressive candidate is Representative Lee. The most typical Democrat is Patel. The most moderate is probably MacDonald. If you are a citizen, live in Pittsburgh, and want to vote in this primary, voter registration is open until April 8.
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