I was asked by the editors of Red County to speak to the freshman Congressman from the Keystone State yesterday. So while I’m away (quite possibly to speak with him again in person) I’ll bring this interview to you.
Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of speaking to the Pennsylvania Congressman, who was one of just 17 Republicans in the 111th Congressional freshman class.
Obviously the initial conversation turned to Tuesday’s election results, and aside from categorizing the New York-23 race as an “outlier”, Thompson was pleased with the returns. The swing between the 2008 results favoring President Obama in those three jurisdictions presented a “message to the country (in) two bellweather states” that Americans had had enough of spending, taxing, borrowing, and intrusive government.
The Hoffman-Owens-Scozzafava race was also intriguing to Thompson as a former Republican county chairman. Part of the issue with how the race turned out was not having any voter input as to who the GOP candidate would be because of the compressed election schedule. Having a more normal timeframe to campaign may well have yielded a batter result, GT argued.
But health care was the “front and center” issue, and Thompson planned on being one of the Republicans participating in today’s rally on the Capitol steps sponsored by Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota.
As one of the seventeen freshman in the minority party, I asked him where he could be most effective. Thompson noted that the newly-minted Republicans had “stayed on message” and intended to be a “force to be contended with” as the events of the 111th Congress played out. He decried the “wedge in decision-making between physician and patient” that current Pelosicare legislation encouraged.
I also found out that a “manager’s amendment” was added to the House health care bill Tuesday, with 42 additional pages designed to buy off individual members, or, as Thompson called it, “let’s make a deal.”
Having spent nearly three decades in the healthcare field, most recently as a nursing home administrator, Thompson assumed when he was elected last year that health care and Social Security would be the predominant issues he’d face upon being sworn in. His idea to improve health care was to increase access and affordability (indeed, he voted in favor of SCHIP expansion) but instead this legislation would create a “legacy of debt” using figures that were “worse than fuzzy math.” Meanwhile, Medicare would remain “systematically underfunded” according to GT.
In other Congressional matters, Thompson was “disappointed” in the “cap and tax” legislation which would negatively impact his largely rural district, which is Pennsylvania’s largest geographically. It’s quite comparable to my home district in Maryland, so I asked Thompson about having a GOP district in a heavily Democrat state.
Perhaps, though, even his state is not so blue. Rep. Thompson pointed out that , in addition to the well-publicized win in neighboring New Jersey, Pennsylvania had a little-noticed GOP win Tuesday as Joan Orie Melvin won election to their state Supreme Court, giving the Republicans a 4-3 majority at a time when redistricting after next year’s census could end up being reviewed by that body. So the Republican brand isn’t completely out of favor as pundits thought after last year’s election of Barack Obama.
It’s these election results which cheer Thompson and present hope that he’ll be part of the majority party soon. With a relatively safe seat (no Democrat has represented the 5th District area since 1979) it’s likely that GT can stay the course provided he remains conservative enough for the voters of the district.
