2 weeks Ago
In their only scheduled debate, Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District candidates Scott Perry and Janelle Stelson locked horns Tuesday night over the existential question - for this campaign - of who better reflects the judgement and temperament of the voters of south central Pennsylvania. Is it Perry, the incumbent Republican who is one of the most fiscally-conservative Republicans in the entire Congress who argues he’s been actively trying to drain the swamp in Washington since before “draining the swamp” became a mantra of former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign? Or could it be Democratic challenger Stelson, the former television news anchor who spent large sections of Tuesday’s debate building a case that she, a one-time Republican, is much more in step with a type of moderate politics that represent swing-state Pennsylvania.
The sharpest fighting words of the night came in the very last sentences of the debate, when Stelson put Perry on blast for his efforts to aid Trump in his unprecedented efforts to cling to power despite an obvious defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. in her closing statement Stelson contended Perry was so nervous about his actions that “he asked for a pardon. You don’t ask for a pardon if you haven’t done anything wrong.
” That was a reference to headline-grabbing 2022 Congressional testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former assistant to then-Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, that Perry made an inquiry to Meadows’ office about receiving a prospective pardon from Trump before he left office. Perry has strenuously disputed Hutchinson’s statements, and he broadly defended his actions Tuesday night, telling viewers that the information that’s come forward in court fights over the August 2022 seizure of his cellphone merely reflects the work of a vigilant representative responding to the legitimate concerns he was hearing from his constituents. “After the 2020 election I got literally thousands of phone calls, emails, texts, people coming up to me about the things they saw, the things they head about, and they wanted an investigation.
It’s your job as a representative to be their voice...
so I called for an investigation,” Perry said. In fact, Perry, as Congressional and U.S.
Department of Justice investigations have borne out, at various points in the interim between Election Day and Biden’s inauguration: Pushed for appointment of a new Attorney General who was prepared to send letters to legislative leaders in six swing states — including Pennsylvania - urging them to call special sessions to review baseless election fraud allegations and consider direct appointment of alternate Electoral College slates that would award votes to Trump instead of Biden, as the popular votes dictated. Advocated for a last-ditch plan to get direct testimony from Trump allies about vote fraud allegations before Congress on Jan. 6th, 2021 -—the date of the final certification of Biden’s electoral college win.
Perry and other Trump allies hoped to do that, some of Perry’s own texts have revealed, by trying to coax then-Vice President Mike Pence to convene the Congress as a committee-of-the-whole before the electoral count was held. Badgered Pennsylvania’s legislators to try to decertify his home state’s results, which came in as an 81,000-vote Biden win, including advocacy for: A legislative audit of the vote; a legislative hearing - ultimately never held - where representatives of Dominion Voting Systems could be questioned about the integrity of their voting machine systems; and consideration of resolution, which GOP leaders in Harrisburg never actually brought up for a vote, declaring the Pennsylvania results to be “in dispute.” For all that, Perry on Tuesday flatly declared that he is not a target of any of the criminal investigations swirling around Trump, and he said his appointment to the House Intelligence Committee earlier this year should prove that.
“So that is a lie. That is a propogation by my opponents on the left that is often parroted by the mainstream media,” Perry said. Finally, despite the January 6th, 2021 probes that he considers slanted to get to a pre-ordained outcome, Perry said the sad truth is that the questions that many voters have about the integrity of their elections remains.
“So I would just tell you, use the system that’s in place. Let’s make sure our voices are heard. Let’s make sure that we vote,” Perry said.
Stelson, a one-time registered Republican with no public political history to speak of prior to this race, spent large chunks of the debate running to the middle, where she hopes to find enough moderate Republicans and independent support to flip the seat. On immigration, for example, agreed with a suggestion that the Biden Administration was too slow to respond to the record surges of illegal entries in the first half of its term, and she sounded very Trump-like in calling for deportation of many undocumented immigrants. “I’d like to secure our border and make sure they don’t get into the country,” Stelson said.
“The ones who are here, we need to find out where they are and they need to be sent home. Absolutely.” But she also blasted Perry and his Congressional Republican colleagues for sinking a bipartisan border security bill last winter that would have added 2,000 border patrol agents to help stop illegal crossings and fentanyl deliveries.
Stelson did not set out any parameters for what kind of deportation program she would support, and she did not attend a briefing after the debate where reporters covering could ask follow-up questions. But later Tuesday night, a Stelson campaign spokeswoman said the Democrat’s reference was to more recent migrants who are here illegally. The campaign indicated that Stelson was not talking about the so-called “dreamers” who arrived as children and have, in many cases, now begun their own families and careers in America.
On another point, Stelson declined to pledge support for Harris’s proposal to give $25,000 to first-time home-buyers; and she vowed to not be a blank check for government spending. And the Democrat left virtually no daylight between herself and Perry when both were questioned about their commitment to supporting the state of Israel. Stelson also worked throughout the debate to portray Perry as the extremist in the race, someone so blinded by his political philosophies that he can’t see clear to support bills like the 2022 extension of Veterans Administration benefits to veterans exposed to toxins from burn pits in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Perry countered that that was a perfect example of his unwillingness to play the Washington game, because the burn pits bill became so bloated beyond its initial purpose that, he believes, it’s actually causing some deserving veterans to have to wait longer for medical care. “I wholeheartedly support care for Veterans impacted by burn pits – or anything else,” Perry said in an email to PennLive Monday night on the burn pits issue. “But this legislation was far too broad and covered service members who weren’t directly impacted, or weren’t even in a theater of operations that had burn pits.
As a result, it has caused even more backlog in caring for veterans, while also draining the VA of resources for our veterans in need.” It’s emblematic, he said, of the watch dog role he has promised to play for the 10th’s constituents. More of that is needed if the Congress is to ever help American families win their battles against higher prices, and Perry said that’s a war voters can’t trust Stelson or the Democrats to fight properly.
“People say well the prices at the grocery store, my electricity bill, day care, education. I can’t afford it. The reason you can’t afford it is because we are spending and printing and creating so much money at the federal level that is flooding into the economy,” Perry said.
“That’s the reason that we have the inflation that we do. So I’m looking out for them by trying to curb that inflation and making sure that the things we spend money on are the things that are important to them like our roads and bridges.” On the larger theme - that he has spent much of his career as an obstructionist, Perry argued that he is a principled fighter for spending his constituents tax dollars carefully at a time when most in Washington are not.
Perry cited his work at the center of what he called one of the biggest Congressional negotiations in the last 40 years when he bartered for reforms to strengthen the voice of rank-and-file representatives during the election of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in January 2023. McCarthy did not live up to all of his promises, Perry noted, and that’s why he is not holding the office any longer. The candidates also disagreed sharply on: Abortion rights: Stelson affirmed her position that abortion protections enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision should be codified in a new federal law, after which government can stop making women’s health care choices for them. Perry said he opposes abortion expect in cases where a pregnancy is the result of rape, incest, or carrying the baby to term would jeopardize the health of the mother. Continued U.
S. military aid for Ukraine: Stelson said she will support continued aid for Ukraine as long as the Ukrainians are committed to the fight, because she sees it as that important to work toward the defeat of Russian President Vladimir Putin for the good of the whole world order and to ease global inflationary pressures. Perry, who voted against the major Ukraine aid bill this spring, said he also supports the Ukrainian cause, but that there have to be limits on American support.
“We can’t afford the problems we have in our own country. We’ve got a hurricane bearing down on Florida right now, and we’ve got people in North Carolina that have no homes, have no vehicles, have no food, and there’s no money for it because we sent it overseas,” Perry claimed. Federal entitlements: Stelson said she would work to protect the current Social Security system; and said she believed that a realignment of the federal tax code that uncaps the tax for higher-income wage earners, for example, could do a lot to resolve the system’s projected long-term insolvency.
Perry did not make that same commitment to the program as is. He said he continues to believe that serious talks about preserving the Social Security program for the long-term are going to have to include talks about raising the qualifying age for full benefits. Pennsylvania’s 10th District comprises all of Dauphin County, most of Cumberland County, and roughly the northern half of York County.
In the 2020 presidential vote, Trump defeated Biden in the district by 4.1 percentage points. But it is also a district Gov.
Josh Shapiro scored a double-digit percentage point win in in 2022, which has made it a tantalizing play for Democrats since a Pa. Supreme Court-ordered redistricting in 2018. Democrats widely see it as their top Congressional pick-up opportunity in Pennsylvania this year, but with majority control of the U.
S. House up for grabs, Republicans are working just as hard to keep it in their column..
