Evaluating Pat Toomey

After waking up to news that the Senate had passed its tax bill, I began thinking about Pat Toomey, a Senator representing me in Pennsylvania.  I took some time this morning to sort through my thoughts, and since this is one of the few venues I have I hope you will bear with me as I express them here.

Pat Toomey has presented himself as a champion of small-government, fighting for such principles as a balanced budget. In his role as “policy expert,” he was largely responsible for crafting the recent tax bill, (which actually adds over $1 trillion to the federal deficit). Although he will not say so directly, it seems likely that he supports plans to slash valuable social services to presumably make up this deficit.

Although these positions are bad enough on their own, his positions got even more problematic during the final day of debate on the bill. He introduced amendments to the tax bill to benefit one private college in Michigan, a college that has defined its idea of conservativism by declining to protect women from sexual assault, crafting admissions policies catering to white students, and calling gay marriage “evil.” His amendment was defeated, leaving him to explain to Pennsylvania voters why he voted to raise taxes on universities and students within his own state but sought breaks for this one university hundreds of miles away.

Elsewhere in the debate, Toomey opposed amendments that would make tax cuts for the middle-class permanent (and thereby mitigate the fact that the bill is essentially crafted to benefit the wealthiest Americans), because it would have “unknown budgetary effects”, a remarkable claim given his support for fast-tracking debate to an unprecedented level.

Ultimately, this legislation seems to clearly harm not just graduate students like myself, but millions of others far worse off than me.  I encourage Pennsylvanians (and all voters) to examine these issues and hypocrisies as they prepare for the next round of federal elections, and hope they vote for candidates supporting legislation that will not actively hurt other Americans.

I’ll return on Monday to examine our penultimate book that I expect to be particularly relevant to this brief essay, Nancy MacLean’s Democracy In Chains.