Pennsylvania State Rep. Republican Ryan Mackenzie and U.S. Congresswoman Democrat Susan Wild appeared on Business Matters, a production of the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, hosted by Chamber CEO and President Tony Ianelli Sept. 23. The debate was prerecorded at WFMZ-TV studios in Salisbury Township Sept. 6.

Ianelli asked questions presented here in bold font.

Comments in brackets [] represent either additional context or fact checking.

Roe V. Wade?

Mackenzie: I do not support a federal ban on abortion, and I have always supported exceptions for rape and life of the mother. We need to make sure we are supporting and protecting women throughout childbearing and after that. I have demanded coverage for contraception. So what we need to do is make sure we are protecting women. At the same time, my opponent has a radical extremist record on this. She’s for taxpayer funded abortions.

Wild: Taxpayer funds are not to be used for abortion and my opponent lies about his voting record in the state house. What is clear is that my opponent does not trust women to make decisions about their own bodies. The government and politicians have absolutely no place in the doctor’s office. That is exactly what my opponent believes should happen. When he says he would not support a national abortion ban, I assume he is talking about the Dobbs decision, where states have that right, to make decisions. The problem is, you’ve got a lot of states that have legislators like Ryan Mackenzie; if given the opportunity [they]would impose a ban in their states. He has voted consistently for extreme abortion bans including in the case of rape and incest.

Mackenzie did not address any of Wild’s comments, but claimed Wild was engaging in deception and was misleading voters. He said Wild is an extremist.

Mackenzie said Wild gave thousands of dollars to and was the keynote speaker at an organization called Population Connection, which, according to Mackenzie, supports population control through abortion.

[Brian Dixon, a senior vice president with Population Connection, said in an interview with the Press that Wild has never been a keynote speaker with the organization, and he didn’t believe Wild had given “thousands of dollars” to Population Connection. A review by this reporter of the organization’s website showed no indication that it supports population control through abortion.]

Wild: The only people making decisions about having children or not having children should be the mothers, their medical providers and their partners. Nobody else belongs in that decision-making process. Every decision in this medical process should come down to the woman and her medical provider and includes such things as if she was raped, if there was incest or a life-threatening problem with the baby. There are all kinds of things, but it is a medical decision, not a political decision.

Mackenzie: What we just heard is the radical fringe position. She would support taxpayer funded abortions. She didn’t deny that. She will support absolutely no restrictions on abortions. She doesn’t deny that. So that is a radical fringe position.

Because I have a bipartisan track record, I voted in favor of legislation on reproductive rights in the legislature in the bipartisan majority every single time, and I have been a leader on maternal health, so much so that I was the only Republican invited to a signing ceremony with Governor Josh Shapiro on this issue recently.

Working

with a new

administration

Wild: Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump are going to be our next president. My job as the representative for this area is to work with whomever our president is. I have worked with Donald Trump in the past. He has signed bills of mine into law. My job is not to pick winners and losers at that level. My job as the representative is to make sure that I am finding common ground with the president and working on issues that are so important to everybody in this community.

It’s safe to say that you [Mackenzie] have been in support of the former president. Are you still all in?

Mackenzie: That’s correct. Susan Wild is in lock-step with the Biden-Harris administration. Wild has voted 100 percent of the time with the administration. That’s not a bipartisan record. That is a very partisan record and not the type of leadership that we need here in our community, which is a very evenly divided community.

Wild: I voted for laws that President Trump also supported. By the way, I have not voted 100 percent of the time with President Biden. In fact, I have defied my own party on a number of occasions. I defied Nancy Pelosi on billions of dollars of COVID funding under a bill during the pandemic and I took a fair amount of heat for that. I believe that you have to represent the district that you have. Our district is bipartisan. We have Democrats and Republicans almost in equal number. We have a lot of Independents and your job as the representative is to represent your district, not to represent your party.

Mackenzie: We can find it on Five Thirty Eight, and I’m glad you brought up Nancy Pelosi, because she voted with Nancy Pelosi 98 percent of the time.”

[Mackenzie was referring to a polling website, FiveThirtyEight.com, associated with ABC News.]

Ethics

Mackenzie: Look, we have three branches of government separate and equal. They should also be governing themselves. There’s a code of ethics for all attorneys that should apply to them as well.

Wild: As a ranking member of the Ethics Committee in Congress, where I served since the minute I got there, I think ethics and government in every branch of government is extremely important. The executive branch, the legislative branch have codes of ethics that could be enforced against them. The Supreme Court absolutely needs a code of ethics that is enforceable.

Energy and fracking

Mackenzie: I would have supported Keystone XL pipeline, and I do support fracking here in Pennsylvania. When it comes to a clean environment, natural gas is the single biggest and fracking is the single biggest innovative development which has reduced carbon emissions and that’s a good thing. There is [sic] three times more natural gas being used in solar and all those other things combined, and so we do want to promote that. Susan Wild wrote to me in a letter saying that we should have a $300 million a year tax on fracking here in Pennsylvania on top of the impact fee that would have driven up prices for people right here in our community and would have actually probably killed that industry at that time.

[Pennsylvania is the largest U.S. natural gas producer that does not impose a severance tax on natural gas, though is does levy a per well impact fee, according to the NCSL Foundation for State Legislatures. Keyston Research Center, a source of independent analysis of Pennsylvania’s economy and public policy, reports “Legislative inaction on a natural gas drilling tax has cost Pennsylvania $300 million in lost revenue.”].

Wild: I believe that fracking is an essential part of a diverse energy plan and strategy. We are producing more energy here in the United States [with] many different things, not just fossil fuels but with many other forms of energy. That’s something that GOP conveniently ignores. Fracking can be part of this, but we also have to always be looking at alternative forms of energy. There’s fusion energy; there’s hydrogen energy; there’s nuclear energy. These should all be part of the picture. I have worked on this issue. I have worked to make sure that we are advancing, that we should not be reliant on other countries. The more we expand our sources of energy right here in the United States, the better off we will be.

Mackenzie: Energy independence is key not only for our economy, but also for national security.

[Forbes.com clarifies this issue: “U.S. refineries are well-suited to process heavy, sour crude oils. But the oil produced from the shale oil boom is primarily lighter and sweeter. Thus, U.S. oil producers can export this oil, while refiners can import the heavy, sour crude that they prefer. The second reason is that we may simply import crude oil to process it and export the finished products. In that scenario, we aren’t importing oil because we need it, but rather because it is financially lucrative to do so.]

Thoughts on the Republican Party candidates

Mackenzie: I think we have a strong track record and a strong ticket. They’re both businesspeople. They have been in office. Donald Trump, we can see during his administration, the economy was going very strong, going very well. We didn’t have this kind of inflation which is killing people right now. And unemployment was at record lows for every group across the board and so we need to get back to those policies. What we saw during Joe Biden and Susan Wild’s administration was radical inflation because massive amounts of spending in Washington and that’s a problem because people are really struggling in our local communities. I met a young person recently. She is now paying over 40 percent of her salary for housing. I mean [that’s] just simply unsustainable. Seniors are struggling. Working families. I’ve put forward proposals to reduce taxes on those working families in Pennsylvania, and I’m glad to say that one of those last year was included in the budget for child care tax credit.

[While Mackenzie attributed inflation to “massive amounts of spending in Washington,” an analysis by the Brookings Institute offers a more complex explanation. “In fact, most of the rise in inflation in 2021 and 2022 was driven by developments that directly raised prices rather than wages, including sharp increases in global commodity prices and sectoral price spikes driven by a combination of pandemic-induced kinks in supply chains and a huge shift in demand during the pandemic to goods from services. According to the current City of Bethlehem housing study, “ … many Bethlehem residents are “cost burdened” by their housing expenses (i.e., they pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing).]

Wild: I have worked since I got to Congress to think [how] I possibly can bring down costs for everyday Americans, and my opponent is living in the past here. He’s not talking about a future with President Trump, who cannot even articulate what his policy would be on child care. He was just asked today about it and had absolutely no response, rambled. I don’t even know what his positions are on those things right now. But let me just say the things that I have been working on. I came to Congress with a mission to reduce prescription drug prices and guess what. We have. Not across the board, but we are getting there. We made the first inroads we have ever made in this country against big pharma and [we are] getting the prices of insulin down to $35 a month and inhalers are down to $35 a month and right now there are 10 more lifesaving extremely expensive drugs that are being negotiated by Medicare. Never happened before.

Mackenzie: She has failed. When it comes to prescription drugs, she’s right that she didn’t do enough. We like the things where you were tackling pharma. At the same time it should have been for every drug. In the Pennsylvania state legislature, I worked in a bipartisan fashion and [Gov.] Josh Shapiro just signed into law legislation that would tackle prices on prescription drugs across the board, all of them. That’s transparency for our pharmacy benefit managers and what happens when Susan Wild put caps on only some things but not others? Those pharma companies just shift that cost to something else. We see premiums skyrocketing right now. They’re set to explode in September for seniors. They’ve been messing with Medicare and seniors are paying the price. They know that. They are seeing it their bills.

Wild: It wasn’t me that stopped all prescription drug prices. It was the GOP that insisted. This year Medicare is negotiating 10 of the highest priced prescription drugs and next year it will be more, assuming that all the Democrats take back the House of Representatives, and that we have a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate because the GOP will roll back those provisions.”

Mackenzie: That should have been on everything. If you have the votes to take on pharma in the case of 10 drugs, you would have had the votes to take off all the cases of drugs. He failed on that front and people are paying the price, seeing the prices of their prescription drugs going up and the price of their premiums on insurance going up. Medicare is set to skyrocket. That is a documented fact, and so to sit here and try to gaslight us like this, it’s just not realistic. It’s not believable.

[While McKenzie said that “Medicare is set to skyrocket,” the U.S. Department of Human Services sets a more moderate tone: “Thanks to the President’s lower cost prescription drug law, the Inflation Reduction Act, millions of people with Medicare Part D will see even lower costs next year. Your out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs will be limited to no more than $2,000, keeping more of your money in your pocket,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. “In addition to improving the Part D drug benefit, we are updating payments to Medicare managed care plans for people who rely on these plans.]

Social Security

and Medicare

Wild: I was the author and the primary sponsor of the Dignity in Aging Act which was signed into law by President Trump. I have been a steadfast supporter of Social Security [and] Medicare, and I consider both of those programs to be a promise to the American worker that was made by the U.S. Government. We cannot cut back on those programs. What we need to do is make sure that they are properly funded. One of the ways we properly fund them is by negotiating prescription drug prices under Medicare, which adds revenue so that Medicare programs [are funded]. It’s by making sure that the one percent is being properly taxed. Warren Buffett pays less as a percentage of his income into Social Security than his secretary.

Mackenzie: We absolutely need to protect Social Security and Medicare. We need to do everything to make sure that those programs are solvent and the benefits are maintained for those that have paid into them and on them and deserve them. What I hear is a lot of talk. What I hear is Susan Wild’s messing with Medicare and premiums are skyrocketing. It’s a fact. We see it in the newspaper. Everybody is getting ready to see it in September, and the Biden administration is about to give big handout to insurance companies to keep premiums down. That is not the way to do this. We should be making sure any savings are passed on to the seniors because they are struggling with all the inflation that Susan Wild and Joe Biden have brought on people. People are struggling, and it’s not just one area. If you’re looking at the panoply of things whether it’s housing, energy, food, health care, everything is up across the board. So when you come along and say that you are providing help for people, people aren’t seeing it because they’re struggling to make ends meet.

Wild: My opponent favors a form of budgeting that would put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block every single year.

Mackenzie: That’s not true. They are mandatory spending and you should know that as a congresswoman. You can’t put them on the chopping block every single year. They are mandatory spending, and I would fully support them.

Wild: The party you are part of puts them up every single year.

Mackenzie: I am the one running for office, not my party, and I will support Social Security and Medicare for our seniors every single day.

On the Military’s spending and its future

McKenzie: We have a military that has been depleted during the Biden administration. We see all kinds of problems in addressing multiple conflicts around the world. We see our stockpiles of ammunition is depleted because they’re going to other countries, and the supply chain is just not in place to actually rebuild that. So we need to rebuild our military and our supply chains for the military. That is not happening. We are not ready for major conflicts around the world if they’re about to impede on American interests. So that is something that we need to do a better job of.

Wild: And that would be news to the industry, which is doing very well. They like [that] money has been going to them and they have been building new initiatives because those weapons that go to other countries are our older stock. Our weapons manufacturers actually have thrived since Ukraine war. We are absolutely not drawing down to the point that the United States is unable to defend itself or unable to take action as it needs to in the world. It’s a complete fallacy.

Strength of military

Wild: I am extremely proud of our military. I think we have the finest military in the entire world. I think we need to make sure that we are supporting our troops, and I include making sure that they have fair wages. We have troops that literally are dependent on food stamps and that’s unconscionable to me. We’ve got to make sure that our entire military is supported.

Mackenzie: I love our veterans and our military, and I do a lot to support them in our office. I was proud to pass the legislation that went through the legislature in a bipartisan fashion. When they return from service, they can now start businesses right here in Pennsylvania without any startup filing fees. Ten thousand veterans have taken advantage of that program since it was created. At the same time a local VFW recently invited the two of us for a candidate forum. Susan Wild didn’t even respond.

Wild: I’m unaware of that. Unfortunately, I don’t take care of scheduling. I apologize to that VFW. My support for veterans is unparalleled. I was a huge supporter of the PACT Act, the law that [expanded benefits] to veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange to get all kinds of benefits that they had never gotten. I wanted to make sure that our veterans were protected. I also hired and in my official office had a full-time military affairs fellow, a Gold Star daughter, who worked on nothing but military and veterans.

Mackenzie: The congresswoman has not provided the services that they deserve and that they need. I heard [that] on the campaign trail all the time and again.

How can you do

better for the

Lehigh Valley?

Mackenzie: We have a great community. I was born and raised here. My wife and I are starting our family. We have a five-month-old baby boy at home so we love our community. It’s not without its challenges. I’ve been proud to work as state representative with all of our local elected officials to make sure that they have the resources that they need and what we can do from the state level. And you need to work in a bipartisan fashion. That’s what I’ve done during the years in office, and I look forward to hopefully doing that at the federal level in a larger way. Our volunteer fire companies are in desperate need of resources, and I would like to be able to do a lot more with the resources from the federal level.

Closing Comments

Wild: This is a great community. It’s my chosen community and my children were born and raised here. They went to 12 years of public schools which, by the way, my opponent doesn’t support. I have to tell you this is a great place to live, but we can always improve. There are things we need to do to make life a little bit better. My number one priority is to make sure that we are improving our child care system. That we are making sure that parents go to work that we have universal preschool, which is absolutely essential in order to relieve some of these parents. You know this is not 1960 anymore. Most families are two working parents. We absolutely have never done anything systematic that would support the children and the families of this country.

McKenzie: That’s [Wild’s claim that McKenzie doesn’t support public schools] just simply not true. Again, I mean, I went all the way through the Parkland school system. I got a great education there. I always love going back to visit and supporting them just like I do all the public schools in my local community. We support all of our schools though, and school choice is important. We want to make sure again those are all part of our public schools and public education. Charter cyber, charter, traditional schools. I support all of the above because we need to find the right opportunities for students. I would just say this, you know when it comes to child care, my wife and I are intimately aware of the challenges and the cost of child care here in the Commonwealth. And so that’s why again that I authored, and it was included in last year’s budget, legislation which expanded the child care tax credit. That’s a good thing and that’s more of the type of thing we need to do.

Wild: You know [in] this election the choices could not be starker. You’ve got a congresswoman who believes that a woman can make decisions about her own body, and she’s the only one that should do them along with her medical provider as opposed to a red state representative who would roll back Pennsylvania’s laws so that we had abortion bans in effect. You have a congresswoman who is a firm believer in public education. I’m on the House Education Committee and my opponent voted to take $100 million away from public schools and give it to vouchers and private schools instead. That’s a stark choice. You also have a very stark choice when it comes to democracy. I believe in our elections. I believe in our system of democracy. My opponent signed on to a letter to repeal the certification of Pennsylvania in the 2020 election, the same election. by the way, that delivered him to his sixth term in the statehouse. Twelve years now he’s served.

Mackenzie: As a ninth generation of the Lehigh Valley and somebody that is raising now the tenth generation, I’m very concerned about the direction of our country. As much as I’m happy with our local community, we have problems that are brought to us by Washington, D.C. politicians like Susan Wild. We have a wide-open southern border which is in chaos. We have inflation which is making it very difficult to make ends meet. We have chaos around the world with conflicts and more raging all over the world. Susan Wild has a lot of failed policy proposals which are not actually helping the American people. As a bipartisan state legislator during my time in office, I’ve passed things to help our veterans to eliminate taxes on small businesses, to help improve maternal health care right here in our Commonwealth on all of these things. I hope to know a lot more elected congressmen, and I’m kindly asking for your vote. Thank you.