Fitzpatrick, Wallace face off for U.S. House seat
1st District contest
This year’s race for the 1st Pennsylvania District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives pits Republican Brian Fitzpatrick against Democrat Scott Wallace.
Technically, it’s a new district formed with this year’s court-ordered redistricting, but the district in Bucks County and part of Montgomery County includes a lot of the same area as the former 8th District, where Fitzpatrick is the incumbent.
Each of the candidates was emailed a questionnaire asking about what has prepared them for this position, why they are running and where people can get informa- tion on their can- didacy.
They were also asked two policy questions:
What is your position on Social Security/Medicare? If changes advocated, what are the changes and how would they be funded?
What is your position on term limits? What limits, if any, would you like to see?
Brian Fitzpatrick
“As a nearly 40-year resident
of Bucks County, I am uniquely qualified to reform our government and put the American Dream back on track,” Fitzpatrick said.
He was an FBI agent for almost a decade and a half, he said.
“As an FBI agent, I had the opportunity to serve our country in Operation Iraqi Freedom and also served as the national director for the FBI’s Campaign Finance and Election Crimes Enforcement Program and as a national supervisor for the FBI’s Political Corruption Unit,” he said.
As a special assistant United States attorney, he prosecuted violent drug and gun offenders, he said.
“Throughout my entire professional career, I have worked in teams to get the job done on behalf of the American people and to keep the country safe,” Fitzpatrick said. “These experiences enable me to be an effective fighter for the people of Bucks and Montgomery counties and [a] consensus builder in Washington.”
He said he is running because, “I am not done with my fight to fix a broken Washington and make a difference for our communities.”
“Despite the Washington gridlock and extreme partisanship, I have worked across the aisle to deliver results,” Fitzpatrick said.
Examples of that include
the INTERDICT Act, which provides additional resources to secure the border and stop the flow of drugs; the Right to Try Act, giving persons with terminal disease access to potentially life-saving treatments; and The Children of Fallen Heroes Scholarship Act for children of fallen law enforcement officers and first responders who died in the line of duty, he said.
“Compromise and working with others should not be considered a sign of weakness,” Fitzpatrick said. “We need to work to- gether on a bipartisan basis to achieve meaningful results.”
He said he opposes any benefit cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
“I want to continue to strengthen and protect Medicare and Social Security. That’s why I support the Senior Citizens Tax Elimination Act, which would eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits,” Fitzpatrick said. “I will always stand to protect the benefits our seniors are owed. Make no mistake, it’s your money, and I am absolutely committed to protecting the benefits you earned.”
Term limits are the single most important thing to fight political corruption, he said.
“For 14 years, serving as an FBI agent — most of that time in political corruption units throughout the country — there was one commonality I saw most often; an unmistakable correlation
between the length of time in office and incidents of corruption. Instituting term limits addresses one of the root causes of our nation’s political corruption problems,” Fitzpatrick said.
A bipartisan group of freshman congressmen, including himself, introduced a plan for congressional term limits, he said.
“The proposal would limit senators to serving two terms and representatives to serving six terms, for a total of 12 years each,” Fitzpatrick said.
Scott Wallace
“I was born and raised in Bucks County and actually live in the same house I grew up in,” Wallace said.
His experience includes two years as a law clerk in federal court in Philadelphia; counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee under former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Spector, where he helped devise the Missing Children’s Assistance Act and other legislation; and general counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, investigating and writing legislation on issues including disability compensation for exposure to Agent Orange, he said.
“Then, as legislative counsel for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association,
I managed numerous projects for the U.S. Department of Justice, researching ways that all the components of the criminal justice system — prosecutors, judges, public defenders and social service providers — can work together to address an offender’s underlying problems, like drug abuse or mental illness, to reduce recidivism and improve public safety. I successfully put together grassroots coalitions to enact federal legislation like the Innocence Protection Act and student loan forgiveness for low-paying public-service careers like prosecutor and public defender,” Wallace said. “And for the last 15 years, my wife and I ran a global charitable foundation that works to empower women, protect reproductive rights, protect the right to vote, fight climate change and create clean energy jobs.”
He said he is running because of concerns about two recent trends in the country.
“One is substantive: Washington has abandoned everyday working people and sold out to corporations and the top 1 percent,” Wallace said.
“The other is moral: I am deeply troubled by values emanating from the White House — intolerance, lying, contempt for the pillars of our democracy such as a free press and the rule of law, disdain for our allies accompanied by affection for tyrants and division along racial, religious
and gender lines — values which threaten to pollute our civic discourse and our children’s thinking far into the future,” he said. “I am concerned that we have a president with no shame, empowered by a Congress with no spine. I’m running to restore some decency, common sense and common purpose to Washington and to be check on the Trump Administration.”
He said he is not accepting corporate political action committee or lobbyist funding and would donate his congressional salary within the district.
He said he would work to protect and expand Medicare and Social Security.
“I will fight the current explicit plans by Republican leaders in both houses of Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare to pay for the trillions of dollars of debt they created by giving tax cuts to corporations and billionaires,” Wallace said. “The longterm solvency of Social Security can be ensured without cutting benefits or reducing eligibility, simply by raising or eliminating completely the income cap that prevents the rich from paying their fair share into the Social Security Trust Fund. I will also work to increase benefits, strengthen the formula for cost-of-living increases and adamantly oppose efforts to ‘privatize’ Social Security or Medicare or cut billions from Medicaid by ‘block granting’ it to the states. I support offering Medicare as a public option for more people to buy into under the Affordable Care Act.
“On related health issues, I will protect Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive right, and fight to make sure insurance companies can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions or women or sell cheap, useless, junk plans that raise premiums for everyone else,” he said. “And I will stand with the people against the pharmaceutical industry to allow negotiation for lower prescription drug prices.”
He said he understands the public sentiment for term limits and he would not serve more than three terms but thinks term limits are anti-voter.
“If voters are sincerely happy with their representatives, they should be able to keep them. If not, vote them out,” Wallace said. “The real problem that drives the term limits movement is money. Special interest money flows disproportionately to incumbents, to buy their votes. And, yes, this is fundamentally corrupt. But the way to curb it is not by expelling legislators at some arbitrary time limit but to sharply limit special interest money, especially corporate money, in politics.”