By Marc Stier, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Policy Center
While our organization does not endorse candidates, we do have our favorite elected officials. Bob Casey has always been on that list—so we are sad to lose him as our senior senator.
I want to say a few words about why the Senator has been a truly wonderful representative of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Senator Casey has been a progressive champion of so many issues on which Pennsylvania Policy Center and our allies have worked. Unlike many legislators, he truly understands the importance of working with advocacy groups. He gets that building up our profile and influence enables us to help him accomplish his legislative goals. That, plus his commitment to progressive public policy, is why he is the legislator on whom we’ve most relied, whether it was around a relatively small effort such as our recent work to get Pennsylvania signed up for IRS Direct File or whether it was moving some of the most important legislation in history through the Senate, such as the Affordable Care Act.
And it’s not just Senator Casey himself who we’ve relied on. He has always had a staff that reflects him—approachable, decent, humble, smart, well-prepared, and effective.
I’ve done twenty or so events in person recently on Zoom with the Senator over the years starting with the fight for the ACA. Each one reflected all the qualities above.
Here are two quick stories about those experiences.
Some of you may remember that an issue that came up during the fight for the ACA was whether federal money could be used to pay for insurance coverage that would pay for abortions. An amendment by Representative Bart Stupak prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for an insurance plan that covers any abortion except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.
Senator Casey had long been an opponent of abortion. So, I knew he would vote for the Stupak amendment in the Senate. While I very much disagreed with his position, I understood it was based not on political convenience but his religious beliefs. But I wasn’t that concerned about his vote on the amendment because we thought we could get a final bill to the floor of the House and Senate that did not include it. The only question was whether he would vote for a health care reform bill without the Stupak amendment.
I traveled with a group of twenty Pennsylvanians, mostly women, to meet with him to discuss the issue. It was a long meeting, and Senator Casey said that he understood that someone of us might not support him in the future because of his support for the Stupak amendment. He patiently explained that this was a matter of principle for him.
As the meeting came to a close, I spoke up for the first time and asked him two questions. The first was whether he would vote for the ACA without the Stupak amendment. He said he would— that health care was a right—and he would not allow the abortion issue to stand in the way of meeting his long-held goal of providing quality and affordable health insurance to everyone.
Then I asked him if he would say that publicly, because I was pretty sure that if he said yes, he would give cover to three Catholic, pro-life Democratic members of the House from Pennsylvania to do so as well: Paul Kanjorski and Chris Carney from NEPA and Kathy Dahlkemper from Erie. The three members of Congress were getting hammered by the Roman Catholic Church and many of their Catholic constituents on the issue. And their votes were absolutely critical to passing the ACA (which ultimately passed in the House the first time by a three-vote margin).
Casey immediately said yes, and he followed through. I thought he seemed a little relieved that I asked those questions so he could give this group, which was pretty frustrated with his answers, something positive to take from the meeting.
While many of those who attended the meeting left disappointed, Senator Casey had given us what I thought we needed to lock down three critical votes for what became the ACA. I left the meeting and, before getting back on the train, took the long walk over to the House side of the Capitol to talk to Representative Kanjorski’s legislative person on health. I told her what Casey said. And she told me that if “Casey says he is a yes vote on the ACA even without the Stupak amendment, then so is Representative Kanjorski.” Representatives Carney and Dahlkemper were as well.
Without Senator Casey’s leadership on the issue, the ACA would not have passed.
Of course, more recently, after the Dobbs v. JWHO case’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Casey has come around on the abortion issue, reconciling his personal views with his public responsibility in the way Mario Cuomo once did, more or less. As far as we know, before Roe was overturned his stance against abortion never had any practical consequence in denying women an abortion.
Here’s one more quick story. At one point during the fight for the ACA, I got a call from his legislative person on health care. She said, “We’re getting overwhelmed by calls against the bill. Calls from your side have really dropped off.” At the time, we had been doing a massive amount of volunteer patch-through phone banking, mostly to the five Democrats in the House whose votes were uncertain. I said to her, “We know the Senator is on our side, so we haven’t been as focused on him lately.” She said, “I know, but Senator Casey has been saying in committee and on the floor, and wants to continue saying, that his constituents are demanding action on health care. He’s not really comfortable doing that if the calls are against the ACA.”
So, we made an agreement. We turned up the calls to his office and he agreed to do another state-wide tele-town hall with us (the second or third he had done on the issue), which helped us build our list of supporters of health care reform, which, in turn, we used to generate more calls to him and other members of Congress.
(Remember this story if anyone ever tells you that calling your legislator is a waste of time—it is not.)
Senator Casey helped enact the ACA through many other events we did with him. And he did much the same for many other critical legislative issues.
His defeat in the November election costs not just Pennsylvanians but the entire country the leadership of this decent, humble, and effective political leader.
