The United States Senate has famously been called “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Unsurprisingly, because it is also the world’s most self-obsessed deliberative body, this is endlessly repeated by senators, perhaps most famously by the late Republican Howard H. Baker of Tennessee, who said in 1998, “But the Senate, for all its frustrations and foibles and failings, is indeed the world’s greatest deliberative body. And, by God, I love it.”
The Senate’s official website has an entire section called “The Idea of the Senate” dedicated to writings and witticisms about the Senate itself. The very first one is from the journalist William S. White’s 1956 book “Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate,” in which he wrote, “The Senate type is, speaking broadly, a man for whom the Institution is a career in itself, a life in itself and an end in itself.”
“The Senate is nothing but a complex web of relationships — one hundred men and women with different experiences, different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses, different beliefs, and different points of view,” said former Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle (also featured on the Senate’s website). The business of a senator, most famously transacted in the coatroom on the Senate side of the Capitol, is managing those relationships to achieve political goals.
It’s a role whose work is largely interior to the institution and therefore invisible to the public. Unless you’re freshman U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick.
Signature events
It’s common and easy to reduce one’s assessment of a legislator to his or her voting record. Fair enough: The primary job of a legislator is to legislate, and one legislates by taking votes.
On this analysis, McCormick is a run-of-the-mill Trump Republican. Congressional Quarterly’s “presidential support” analysis, for instance, has the commonwealth’s junior senator supporting Trump’s stated positions on legislation 100% of the time.
If that’s a deal-breaker for you, so be it. Beyond the votes, however, McCormick has behaved very differently from any senator I’ve ever witnessed. Specifically, he has recognized and deployed the leverage that comes with being a U.S. senator in a manner much more like an executive than a lawmaker: for the purpose of statewide economic development.
McCormick’s July summits are quickly becoming a hallmark of his time in office. Last year it was the Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University, where executives and financiers representing trillions of dollars in capital announced more than $90 billion in investments in Pennsylvania. This year, it was his Defense and Innovation Summit at the Army War College in Carlisle, which was a smaller gathering — the senator’s office touts $10 billion for the commonwealth this time, including major defense contracts awarded to Pittsburgh firms — but established that this kind of event can become an annual tradition.
President Donald Trump appeared at both gatherings, lending the prestige of his office to the efforts (while bringing along, to be sure, more than a little partisan baggage).
Leveraging the Senate
The concept is clear enough: McCormick and his wife, Dina, have among the most impressive rolodexes in America, with their careers spanning the highest echelons of the private and public sectors. Now he has the bully pulpit and convening power that come with being a senator.
So McCormick can drag people who don’t go anywhere without a good reason to Pennsylvania, and in the process catalyze deals, with the promise of a splashy announcement and access to top government officials. Everybody wins — including regular Pennsylvanians who benefit from the capital that beds down here.
Sure, it’s not the Schoolhouse Rock version of civics, but it’s how things actually get done in the 21st century.
Now, all these announcements don’t mean a thing if nothing happens afterward. Last year, McCormick told me that the public announcements of public companies impose real obligations to follow through. This appears to be playing out across the board, with tangible progress on the vast majority of announced projects and investments from last year’s summit.
Of particular interest in Western Pennsylvania is the massive Homer City power plant/data center campus in Indiana County, which is under construction and will produce energy beyond the complex’s needs so it can contribute to the grid; a smaller but similar project at Shippingport, Beaver County, which has expanded from a $3 billion energy play to a $13 billion data center play; and GE Vernova’s investment in tiny Charleroi, Washington County, which has expanded from $100 million to $138 million, plus another $70 million spent on a facility in Rostraver, Westmoreland County.
Selling Pennsylvania
A skeptic might ask how many of these investments were actually influenced or catalyzed by McCormick and his summits, versus how many were going to happen regardless. That’s a more difficult question to answer. Clearly some of the deals announced during the summits were already in the works, and piggybacking onto the events allowed the companies to generate buzz and McCormick to take credit.
But even so, the senator’s efforts are attracting enthusiasm and attention to Pennsylvania, allowing the state to showcase its institutional and natural resources to a wider, even global, corporate audience. He has made the commonwealth, with its comparatively passive approach to economic development, a place to make a splash that will be noticed both by the public and in Washington. It’s hard to imagine GE Vernova plowing $200 million in the Mon Valley, for instance, if McCormick hadn’t raised the region’s political profile.
You don’t have to agree with Dave McCormick’s voting record to acknowledge he has vastly expanded the role of the senator beyond the coatroom.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Author: Brandon McGinley