Report: Toomey won’t defend seat in Senate
Republican will also decline governor run
WASHINGTON — Sen. Pat Toomey, a staunchly conservative Republican who has represented Pennsylvania in the upper chamber of Congress since 2011, is reportedly preparing to step away from politics.
Mr. Toomey is planning to announce at a Monday news conference that he will not run for reelection in 2022 and will leave
Capitol Hill when his term expires, according to a report published Sunday in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Mr. Toomey, who was widely seen by political pundits as a favorite to campaign for Pennsylvania governor in 2022, is also expected to decline a gubernatorial run, the newspaper reported.
A spokesperson for Mr. Toomey declined to comment on the report when reached Sunday by the Pittsburgh PostGazette.
Mr. Toomey, from the Allentown area in Eastern Pennsylvania, was first elected to the Senate in 2010, defeating
Democratic candidate Joe Sestak by two percentage points amid widespread Republican wins in Congress in a midterm election year.
He won re- election in 2016 by just over one percentage point, defeating Democrat Katie McGinty, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s former chief of staff.
Over his two terms, Mr. Toomey has specialized in finance and budget policy and led a high- profile push for background checks on gun purchases that has come up short.
He has served as a member of a powerful trio of congressional panels: the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Budget Committee. A former Wall Street banker, Mr. Toomey served from 2005 to 2009 as president of the Club for Growth, an advocacy group focused on low taxes, small government, free trade and other conservative principles.
He also served as a Pennsylvania member of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005, stepping down after three terms.
The senator’s views have often put him at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration on trade and economic issues.
Mr. Toomey has opposed Mr. Trump’s trade war with China and his tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. The senator introduced legislation that empowers Congress to approve any move by a president to impose tariffs for national security purposes. That legislation has not come up for a vote.
“It was the steel and aluminum tariffs and trade war with China that began the deceleration of what had been extremely strong growth,” Mr. Toomey told U. S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during a hearing in June, noting that Pennsylvania had lost manufacturing jobs during Mr. Trump’s time in office, even before the COVID- 19 pandemic struck.
“Far more people [ are] in the business of using steel and aluminum to produce things than [ there are] people who actually make steel and aluminum,” Mr. Toomey said. ( Mr. Lighthizer responded that he agreed to disagree.)
Last year, after Mr. Trump announced the details of the United StatesMexico- Canada Agreement — which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with a bipartisan vote of approval in a divided Congress — Mr. Toomey invited reporters to his office so he could rail against the renegotiated deal.
Mr. Toomey — the only Republican to state his opposition to USMCA during a Senate Finance Committee hearing last year — said keeping the 1993 NAFTA deal would have been preferable. One provision on intellectual property rights on biologic medicines, he added, was “complete capitulation” to win Democrats’ support in the House.
He has defended Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell against Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks, calling the president’s threat to remove the head of the central bank a “very, very bad idea.”
And Mr. Toomey has pressed the Trump administration to take more of a hawkish approach with hostile powers.
The senator worked with Sens. Rob Portman, R- Ohio; Sherrod Brown, D- Ohio; and Chris Van Hollen, D- Md., on legislation that pressed the administration to tighten sanctions on North Korea after the death of Ohio college student Otto Warmbier. The bill took direct aim at Mr. Trump’s desire to strike a cozy relationship with Kim Jong Un and to believe the North Korean dictator’s claims that the hermit kingdom had nothing to do with Warmbier’s death while being held in prison.
This year, Mr. Toomey teamed up again with Mr. Van Hollen on a bill that calls for the Trump administration to impose secondary banking sanctions on China for its incursions in Hong Kong. Mr. Toomey was sanctioned by Chinese officials in August.
For the past eight years, Mr. Toomey has advocated for federal background checks on gun purchases as a wave of gun violence and mass shootings roiled the country.
In September 2019, Mr. Toomey, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D- W. Va., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D- Conn., spoke with Mr. Trump about supporting the measure but were unable to convince the president, who soon thereafter faced an impeachment inquiry in the House.
Mr. Toomey has expressed frustration at the Senate as a whole for failing to devote enough time to considering legislation, an implicit criticism of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R- Ky. Mr. Toomey’s demand for floor time last fall almost sank a popular bill aimed at expanding retirement benefits.
Mr. Toomey, who rarely raises his voice and often delves into fine policy details, has watched as the Senate — considered a prestigious and deliberative body that remains impervious to the political whims of the country — fell into the gridlock of partisan rancor that consumes most matters in Washington today.
By and large, Mr. Toomey has backed the president’s agenda, playing a major role in writing the 2017 GOP bill that cut taxes and rewrote key pieces of the tax code. That year, he cast a vote in support of three measures that would have rolled back the Affordable Care Act.
He has supported Mr. Trump’s judicial nominees and appointments to his administration.
Mr. Toomey supported Senate Republicans’ refusal to consider then- President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in early 2016. But this year, he supports Mr. McConnell’s plan to hold a vote before Election Day on Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s nominee to the high court to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, likely cementing a conservative court for years to come.
Progressive activists have regularly protested outside Mr. Toomey’s state offices for years, criticizing his record and a lack of town hall meetings.
The group called Tuesdays With Toomey tweeted Sunday that Mr. Toomey had a “history of ignoring his constituents and breaking his promises.”
“But we know Sen. Toomey has a habit of changing his mind at the last minute,” the group tweeted. “So we will be with him until his very last day in office.”