U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a York County Republican who has always practiced his politics without a net, has doubled down at the dawn of his fifth term.
So far, he’s positioned himself in the vanguard of those Republican Congressmen who wanted to invalidate Pennsylvania’s presidential vote. Their objections were based on alleged irregularities and overreaches with election administration that no one has yet shown would have had a game-changing effect on President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s 80,000-vote win.
As we all know now, that last-gasp effort egged on by President Donald Trump became the fulcrum for the violent, mob attack on the House and Senate that interrupted the Jan. 6 electoral vote certification process and ultimately has been blamed for five deaths.
For that, the editorial board of The York Dispatch called last week for Perry’s immediate resignation:
“Perry has taken a step too far. He cannot be trusted to represent the people of the 10th District, the people whose votes he was so willing to cast aside in the service of a demagogue of a president who just hours earlier had incited a mob to force their way into the U.S. Capitol building,” the newspaper wrote in part..
“He is a disgrace to Pennsylvania and our democracy, and he has to go.”
Perry’s office released a one-word response: “No.”
In the week since, amid strong bipartisan calls for unity, Perry has been seen in supporting roles in two other stories that reflect the divisions still roiling America.
As scores of House members waited out the Capitol attack in an undisclosed, secure location on Jan. 6, Perry was captured on a cellphone video with some colleagues refusing the offer of a face mask from Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester. The attending House physician later advised members to be tested for coronavirus because of the length of time they were crowded in the safe space. Three members have since announced positive tests, though it’s not known where they were exposed.
Perry told PennLive he didn’t accept the mask because he already had one. It was not clear from his response how long, or if, he wore the mask during the lockdown.
This week, reporters identified Perry as among a group of House members who skirted around new metal detectors set up at a members’ entrance to the House floor.
Perry called the metal detectors a political stunt that “would have done absolutely nothing to protect House members or the public during the incursion... The events of last week show that the Speaker and Senate Leadership - who ultimately are responsible for the security at the Capitol - failed to secure us, and that members need to be more proactive about their own protection.”
Perry capped it all Wednesday with a floor speech, opposing President Donald Trump’s impeachment, that appeared to equate the Capitol mobs with protesters who took to the streets to call for racial justice after the death of George Floyd at the hand of Minneapolis police.
Is the Carroll Township Republican finally pushing things too far for his own good?
It depends on who you talk to.
The events of the past week surely have been noticed by Perry’s political opponents.
Outgoing Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, who unsuccessfully challenged Perry in the 2020 election, tweeted this on Jan. 7, the day after the riot:
Your actions last night on the House floor objecting to a free and fair election were an attempt to overthrow an election. I’m embarrassed @RepScottPerry that you represent us in PA 10 and I’m sorry to the people of this district and the nation that I didn’t beat you.
— Eugene DePasquale (@DePasqualePA) January 7, 2021
In a press call with reporters Tuesday, DePasquale further explained his rage.
“For the congressman to cast a vote to overthrow the election after that (the Capitol riot) is simply shocking to its core,” DePasquale said, noting Republican Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler dropped her objection of the election, “knowing it was going to further divide America. Scott Perry could have cared less.
“To me, anyone that’s behaving this way over the past week, with political calculations in mind, there’s a cold place in hell for them,” DePasquale said.
And the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which targeted Perry’s seat in 2020, is already eyeing the 10th District again in 2022.
“This was a close race last year and Congressman Perry has already put himself in a precarious position for reelection,” said committee spokeswoman Brooke Goren. “Pennsylvanians won’t forget Perry’s refusal to hold President Trump accountable for the five Americans killed - including a Capitol Police officer - at the hands of the QAnon mob he helped incite at the U.S. Capitol.”
But the bigger issue may be where the Republican Party heads in the next couple of years, and how well it holds together.
“I can certainly imagine that any number of Democrats in Pennsylvania 10 who are thinking about a challenge to Perry two years from now are absolutely archiving that (video) footage to use it in campaign ads, to put on direct mail pieces,” said Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College. “Because I think that story (that Scott Perry is more extreme than the average voter) will probably be the story again when Perry has to run two years from now.”
But, Niebler added, “Democrats have always been opposed to Trump. They’ve been opposed to the Trump agenda. They’ve been opposed to the contestation of the election results for the last two months.
“So when we’re talking about change in public opinion after January 6, what we’re really talking about is whether that change is happening among Republicans.”
There are anecdotal signs that some Republicans dropped their Republican Party voter registration in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riots. But it’s way too early to know whether some folks’ current disgust with Trump will ultimately give way to a broader movement that reshapes the party.
Early polling isn’t clear.
An Axios-Ipsos poll released Thursday showed a majority of self-described Republicans support the president’s recent behavior and say he should be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. But there are large variances between those who described themselves as “traditional Republicans” — 56 percent — and people who said Trump is their main attraction to the GOP.
Other polling suggests that 70 percent of self-identified Republicans saw the Congressmen who tried to stop the certification of Biden’s win as “protecting democracy.”
Perry, a 58-year-old small businessman who recently retired as a brigadier general in the National Guard, clearly has been betting on the Trump wing, said Daniel Mallinson, a public policy professor at Penn State Harrisburg.
“The folks that Trump has brought into the party aren’t just going to go away, and so I think his (Perry’s) actions only benefit him in a primary,” Mallinson said. “And in terms of the general? Perry was able to win in a year (2018) where the wind was behind Democrats, and so I question whether it’s going to really threaten his position in the district.”
Perry has strongly condemned the violence at the Capitol.
But he makes no apologies for his actions in the run-up to it, which he said were part of a larger fight to ensure election integrity. He also told PennLive in emailed responses to questions this week that it’s patently unfair to blame the Republican objectors for the riots.
“If you don’t like what I said or how I voted and you wish to voice your opposition or protest, I accept that – that’s the American way,” Perry said.
“What no one should accept, however, is the bizarre narrative and partisan double standard being applied for political paybacks and partisanship, which takes personal responsibility of criminal actors out of the hands of individual perpetrators and places it on a select group of leaders.”
Perry said no one has ever argued that Democratic leaders — after four years of calling for total resistance against Trump — should be held accountable for Black Lives Matter or other protests that devolved into violence, “but that standard apparently doesn’t apply to Republicans who raised our concerns over election integrity.”
A couple things to note here.
While his staunch conservative leanings and his blunt defenses of those positions routinely drive Democrats crazy, and he has been vigorous in his complaints about the Pennsylvania vote, Perry has not been named among a small circle of Republican House members who some Democrats have accused of more direct involvement in the Jan. 6 rally.
Nor, he says, did he or his campaign committee charter any busses to bring constituents into the protest.
Perry stressed that he accepts that Biden is legitimately taking office. “I fully intend, however, to continue to work with my colleagues at the state and federal levels to strengthen election integrity to ensure that these constitutional abuses never happen again.”
Cumberland County Commissioner Gary Eichelberger co-sponsored a fundraiser for Perry last year. But he said Thursday he was “disappointed” in Perry’s speech on the House floor in support of the election objections, given his own rock-solid belief in the accuracy and validity of the vote count.
It is true, Eichelberger said, that lawmakers need to firm up language governing issues such as the use of drop boxes and whether mail-in ballots that are not fully signed and dated should be counted.
Perry spoke sometimes this fall on the basis of bad information, Eichelberger believes. But in the end, he is certain Perry’s main goal has been to ensure the election was “free and fair.”
Now, he said, elected officials will have to work together and cool their rhetoric to get those fixes.
“I would really like to see Scott and everyone else really put their energies into those things where the need is, and get through this current crisis because we can’t dwell here,” Eichelberger said. “All leaders need to be much more careful about the words they choose, and that’s just as true of the Democrats when it comes to these issues as it is of Scott and the Republicans.”
Most observers reached for this story said it’s too early to tell what kind of a lasting mark this month’s events have left on the region’s politics, and Perry in particular.
in the just-completed election, Trump beat Biden in the 10th District, 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent. Perry, meanwhile, won his race by a slightly wider margin over Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent.
Much depends, observers said, on who challenges Perry in 2022, and the effects of redistricting.
“If PA 10 stayed exactly as it is for the foreseeable future, yes, I would say that I think the more extreme views that Perry is taking could come back to harm him, particularly as the Harrisburg area and the Harrisburg suburbs maybe get a little more younger, a little bit more diverse,” DIckinson’s Niebler said.
The 10th consists of Dauphin County, and portions of Cumberland and York.
Democrats have overtaken Republicans in voter registration in Dauphin County, and the Democratic Party has slowly chipped away at the Republican edge in the Cumberland County portion of the district, which runs east from Carlisle.
But there is a scenario where Perry gets helped by redistricting, and it goes like this:
Most population experts see Pennsylvania losing a seat in the U.S. House, starting with the 2022 election cycle, because of the state’s slow population growth.
Going from 18 to 17 districts statewide would add about 50,000 people to the current 10th District. If that pushes the district lines south into York County, further west into Cumberland County, or both - which would be the neatest way to grow the 10th without creating more county splits - the seat becomes more safely Republican.
There are other major variables, too.
Will the region’s Democrats — after seeing Perry crush York County-based Democrats in the York vote — align behind a candidate from Dauphin or Cumberland counties to try to grow a little more of a hometown bounce in 2022?
And what will the nation’s politics look like two years into the Biden Administration?
Eichelberger said he’s not breaking with Perry and, “I’m not sure that Scott’s choices on this will necessarily cost him politically.
“I still feel that Scott brings a lot of benefit to this district. He is very reflective of the principles of his constituents. That’s probably the most important component.... I still have great faith that Scott’s going to be an enormously positive influence for us as a county and a region with his role in the Congress.”
As for Perry?
He’s going to keep being Scott Perry. Even if it means more fights ahead.
“It’s absolutely fine to hold me to a standard — but never a double standard,” Perry wrote to PennLive. “We have an incoming president who boasted that he’d like to ‘take (Trump) behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,’ and the left cheers him on, while I get told that I’m responsible for criminal actions for voicing the concerns of my constituents through Constitutional means? Wrong.
“In America, you’re free to think what you want and do what you want, as long as it doesn’t take away the rights of others to do the same. Let’s unite around that – the idea that we may not have unity of faith or ideas, but because of the Constitution and the many faces and voices who are protected by and defended it, we will always have a unity of love for our nation.”