‘I pick my battles’: Wild favors smaller, achievable goals
U.S. Rep. Susan Wild came to Congress in 2018 in a special-election win of a Republican-held seat, pledging to improve health care for all and economic conditions for struggling families.
On Capitol Hill, the Lehigh Valley Democrat found a divided government, where gaining momentum for even the most agreed-upon issue was difficult, and soon was navigating a series of national crises, from an impeachment fight to a global pandemic.
Wild’s approach has been, as she puts it, to pick her battles. She steered clear of the impeachment drama until late in that saga. She’s called for action on climate change, but declined to back the Green New Deal. She’s most often voted with leadership, but was among 14 House Democrats to reject the party’s follow-up coronavirus package, saying it lacked bipartisan support.
“What I’ve been looking for, and in many cases have worked on, are smaller things. Obviously in this Congress, at this moment in time, we’re not going to do a comprehensive overall of the ACA and make it everything that it needs to be,” Wild said, referring to the 2010 Affordable Care Act health care law. “So what I’ve tried to do is look for those areas where I can at least make some lives better and easier.”
She cobbled together bipartisan support for an amendment to block the administration from making regulatory changes that would cause health care premiums to rise, though that measure — like many others approved by the Democratic-controlled House — stalled in the Senate. A similar fate awaited her proposal to fix a loophole that locked some families out of the affordability protections in the ACA.
Another proposal that did make it across the finish line — the massive coronavirus relief bill signed by President Donald Trump — included her measure to improve meal delivery for seniors during the public health crisis.
The most exhilarating moment of her short tenure, she says, was presenting $9.8 million from that bill to the Allentown School District.
“It was a great feeling, knowing this was actual funding for people who actually needed it. That’s where I get my thrills,” Wild said, during a phone interview in September.
The former litigator from South Whitehall Township is the first woman to represent the Lehigh Valley in Congress, joining a record number of female House members who helped bring a Democratic majority to the chamber after the 2018 election. That freshman class of lawmakers showed the ideological range that winning a majority typically brings: some from safe Democratic seats who were pushing for more progressive policies, and others from moderate areas like Wild’s 7th District, which includes all of Lehigh and Northampton counties and part of Monroe County.
The district was divided almost evenly in the presidential race in 2016, favoring Hillary Clinton by 1 percentage point over Trump. Wild won by 10 points in November 2018, when she also prevailed in the special election to replace Republican Charlie Dent, who had retired early after 14 years in Congress.
Her current Republican challenger, businesswoman and former Lehigh County Commissioner Lisa Scheller, has called Wild “Socialist Susan,” blasting her as in lock-step with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the so-called “squad” of young, progressive Democratic lawmakers.
As Wild attempted to chart a middle-of-the-road approach, she also faced pressure from her more liberal constituents. Early on, some urged her to adopt the bolder policy stances of lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
At Wild’s first town hall at a Nazareth brewery, several attendees pushed her to not only support but to advocate for a single-payer health care program. Wild said at the time that focusing solely on that would be “short-sighted,” because it was unlikely to advance in the current Congress. Instead, she chose to work on proposals to expand health care access and lower costs, such as by allowing those over 50 to buy into Medicare or creating a public option for government-funded insurance.
Later that same month, Wild signed on to the “Medicare for All” legislation that one of her colleagues introduced. For Emmaus resident Lark Kurtz, who had urged Wild during that Nazareth event to push harder for such proposals, her decision to co-sponsor the bill was a positive sign.
Kurtz said in a recent interview that while she’d still like Wild to be bolder on some issues, particularly on climate change, she’s been happier than she expected to be with Wild’s performance, citing her stances on economic issues like equal pay and support for a wide-ranging election reform bill.
“I do think she responds to people,” Kurtz said, referring to Wild signing on to the Medicare for All bill. But she added that those policies won’t gain momentum until Wild and others are willing to push ever harder for them.
Wild says her aim has been to find policies that aren’t just good ideas, but ones where she believes she can build enough support.
“I pick my battles and my issues very carefully, not only to make sure they are things important to the people in Pennsylvania 7, but also to make sure I can get traction,” Wild said.
“You can have all the great ideas in the world, and if you can’t get it passed, or if you can’t get any bipartisan support for it, it never goes anywhere in the Senate,” she added.
Political analysts say that’s a wise approach in a district like the 7th. National groups like the Cook Political Report rate Wild’s district as one that “leans Democratic,” with her incumbency and the recent success for Democrats locally tilting projections slightly in her favor. A Morning Call/Muhlenberg College poll released Thursday shows her with a 13-point lead over Scheller.
“If she had pushed far to the left, like some had wanted her to do, it probably would have put her in a more precarious place as she seeks reelection,” said Chris Borick, pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg.
Wild has expressed frustration that Congress hasn’t been able to reach agreement on another coronavirus relief package, and says she would like to see the chamber voting on more small bills, rather than stacking proposals together into larger, more politically precarious packages. A proposal she put forward earlier this summer to aid struggling restaurants has stalled, as those establishments are scrambling to keep their doors open and employees on payrolls.
Asked about criticism from Scheller that she and House Democrats haven’t done enough during the pandemic to help small businesses, Wild points to a bill she put forward with Republicans proposing a second round of Paycheck Protection Program loans that would expand the ways businesses would be allowed to use that money. That measure was introduced in late July and has not moved forward.
Wild has been among those urging Democratic leadership to hold a vote on another relief bill before Congress adjourns for the final sprint of campaigning. She viewed the $3.4 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act approved by the House in May as too massive and doomed to fail, and she didn’t back it. But Wild describes the narrower approaches put forward by Senate Republicans (and blocked by Democrats in that chamber) as “emaciated.”
She wants to see “something in between” those two approaches. Whether that comes to fruition will be clear in the limited session days left, just as some 7th District voters receive their ballots in the mail.