When the new Congress convenes next year, Pittsburgh-area Rep. Summer Lee will find herself in the majority for the first time since taking office in 2023. Lee won re-election Tuesday as part of one of the largest electoral landslides in modern times, with Democrats gaining more than 40 House seats and taking control of both houses of Congress.
“I’m really excited to see what it can feel like to stop some of the worst things on Earth from happening just for a little bit of time,” the Swissvale Democrat said during an interview Thursday.
Her party’s wins set up divided government as President Donald Trump serves his last two years in office.
Pittsburgh’s Public Source talked to Lee, one of Congress’ most progressive members, about what comes next in Washington and for her district, which includes the city as well as some Allegheny County suburbs and part of Westmoreland County.
The following Q&A was lightly edited for brevity.
Q: What crossed your mind first when you learned Democrats would control Congress next year?
A: With the Trump trifecta [in control of the federal government], I can’t think of many demographics of people in our country who have not been affected … I think about people in my life who will lose Medicaid benefits, I think about the cost of things.
Stopping Republicans from being able to advance legislation that hurts people was of the utmost importance. That was first.
Moving into that, great responsibility for putting forth an affirmative vision and setting the course for what we want the country to look like. We won’t get full agreement on that but this is as good a chance as any to set that standard.
Q: What’s at the top of your list of things for Congress to get done next year?
A: Whatever [Trump] plans to do, I would like us to put up forceful plans that center working people.
Whether they are ones that a majority of people have been calling for for a decade or more, like Medicare for All, or addressing the cost of childhood, the cost of education, [or] the fact that everything is getting more expensive and we haven’t raised the minimum wage since 2007. The policies that will create the vision that we will be able to organize around for the next decade, especially the next two years.
… You saw in Allegheny County that we have parental leave. That should be nationwide.
Q: How can the next Congress use the power of the federal budget to set policy, without holding the White House?
A: I just left a meeting at Magee Women’s [Research] Institute … They were talking about how impacted women’s health research had been by the NIH cuts. We were in the vanguard in Pittsburgh of some real breakthroughs in medicine and those cuts brought them to a screeching halt … Think about programs that were cut when Republicans took over … environmental policies, all cut, screeching halt. Those are things that we are able to redirect.
Q: The president said on Tuesday he wants to work with Democrats and doesn’t want to spend two years vetoing everything. What’s your reaction to that?
A: You take everything he says with a grain of salt. In more normal times, in more sane times in our country’s history, you would expect the president to work with whatever government he gets. That he would have to state that is a sign of the times and a sign of how much he has damaged the presidency … It says something that people can’t trust the president to work with the Congress to advance the needs of the American people.
He’s a lame duck president … If he were a political strategist, which he’s never been, he would have to think of ways he can regain ground coming into the presidential year with a new person on top of the ticket for both sides. I don’t know if he’s thinking that far. I think that right now we should send him all of our top priorities.
Q: Will this election change your ability to secure funding for projects in the district?
A: I’m optimistic that there’ll be changes in the guidelines in [federal funding for] community projects. People think of it as pork barrel whatever you call it. Really it’s a chance for us to cut through bureaucratic red tape and go directly to our stakeholders with the understanding that we know best what the needs are in our district … Affordable housing, environmental projects, infrastructure projects, and if we bring back the eligibility of nonprofits [for federal earmarks], it would open up a new world of community interests.
Every Congress has different priorities. There has been an intentional moving away from things like community centers. Violence interruption has taken a huge hit … Those are opportunities for us to redirect money to those types of efforts that have been cut or have never been able to scale up.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
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