Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, who represents Pennsylvania’s 5th Congressional District in Washington, visited Swarthmore on April 10 to deliver a lecture on Law and Leadership in the U.S. Congress. Scanlon is a Swarthmore borough resident, and she was endorsed by SwatDems, a student political organization, in the 2018 special election through which she ultimately secured her seat in Congress.
Before entering federal politics, Scanlon served as pro bono counsel at Ballard Spahr, an attorney at the Education Law Center, president of the Swarthmore-Rutledge school board, and co-chair of the Voting Rights Task Force of the Association of Pro Bono Counsel. Scanlon currently serves on the House Committee on Rules, the House Judiciary Committee, and as Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. She chairs the House Caucuses on Access to Legal Aid, Youth Mentoring, and Foster Youth.
On April 10, Scanlon sat down with The Phoenix for an interview about higher education, legislating under Trump, and the current political moment. A transcript of that conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, can be found below.
Daniel Perrin: Thanks for speaking with me today, Representative Scanlon. I want to start by discussing your visit to Swarthmore and the questions it brings up. President Trump’s administration has targeted institutions of higher education, though some of the liberal arts colleges in your district, including Swarthmore, have been more insulated from his impact, both because of their independence from federal research funding and because of initiatives like the coalition of small colleges that got together in the summer to lobby against Trump’s endowment tax. From your perspective in Congress, what do you think about the changing national politics of higher education, given Trump’s approach and some of the public’s growing distrust of schools like Swarthmore?
Mary Gay Scanlon: I think a lot of it stems from the Trump administration’s widespread attempts to sow division among different groups of Americans, whether it’s religious or scholarly or rural versus urban. Certainly targeting of so-called elites or elite institutions is pretty much part of the playbook of people trying to implement authoritarian regimes. A piece of what we’re seeing across a lot of issues — and particularly the one that I’ve been focused on — is attacks on the pillars of civil society, something that we didn’t used to have to think a lot about.
The first time I heard a lot of discussion about civil society was when I did a trip to the countries in the Northern Triangle in 2019, when there was a surge of immigration there. We had a CODEL congressional delegation trip to see why everyone was coming here and what was happening to folks as they reached our border under the first Trump administration. We heard a lot of conversation in Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador about the authoritarian leaders attacking universities, attacking judges, the impact of corruption and how that was undermining democracy and civil society.
So from the start of this second Trump administration, we’ve seen direct attacks on law firms, on legacy media, on universities, on all the groups that traditionally have stood up. We have seen some of them buckle and really fail to stand up — the law firms that immediately caved, as opposed to suing and winning — some of the universities that just caved, the media groups, particularly those that are owned by corporate conglomerates and therefore are settling completely frivolous lawsuits for millions of dollars, or buckling and giving in to administration demands when there’s no legal basis to do so. It is part of a very broad attempt to silence dissent from places where they might expect to hear it. So I do think it has to be viewed in that broader context.
DP: What’s your relationship with Swarthmore been like from both before your time in Congress and during and since you’ve entered it?
MGS: I’ve lived a couple blocks from campus for over 30 years now. Many of my neighbors are professors or affiliated with the college in some way. So there’s been a long-standing relationship. I was on the school board for a period of time, so of course, there’s relationships that form there. I’ve had more reason to interact with students since I got elected than in the past because they’re constituents, and it has been a big focus of my office to engage with students and younger constituents across the district. When I started, I think there were 16 institutions of higher education in the district. I think we’ve lost two because of the pressures on smaller, less prestigious colleges and universities. But it’s really important that particularly young people know how much their votes count and are engaged despite the chaos and the very understandable urge to say a pox on all your houses. Because anyone who’s in college now has seen a decade of complete chaos, and I don’t want to say it can be excused, but it’s understandable why they might not want to engage.
I think it’s really important to try to spend as much time on all of the campuses as I can, because those viewpoints need to be heard. There are more people in the under-30 generation than there are in the over-60 generation, but the over-60 generation votes in a way that the under-30 doesn’t. Until younger voters start actually voting, we’re going to hear a lot more in Congress about senior benefits and Social Security and Medicaid or Medicare than we are about the environment and other things that folks care about. I actually do think our government can work, but it does require participation.
DP: It’s no secret that the Trump era is challenging a lot of the political conventions that many had taken for granted, and forcing local and state governments to jump in and protect their constituents where the federal government hasn’t been. How has this current political moment changed your vision of how the different levels of power should see their responsibilities? How should local and state governments jump in with new ideas right now, both to fill in where the federal government is lacking and to come up with their own responses?
MGS: Well, it’s a combination of the federal government lacking and also actually attacking folks. If you have a vision of government that is that government should help all people succeed as opposed to just a narrow economic minority at the top succeed, then that gives you a different version of what should happen. You can encapsulate it in what the President said last week about how we don’t have money for childcare and Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps; we have to go wage wars. That’s not where I come from. I think it’s not where most public servants come from, but I do think we have a federal government right now that is uniquely oriented towards those who can pay to play — it is the Apples and the Googles and the Zuckerbergs, and whatever, who literally are paying this government off to drop lawsuits against them, enforce actions to give them access to data, that kind of thing.
That’s not the form of government that I think Americans want and that I am happy to be part of. At the very tense moment of the covid crisis, we were able to actually implement some policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit, which, for the first time funneled money to the families that needed it most, and as a result, reduced childhood poverty by 40%. It was a really bad time, but it exposed some of these incredible disparities in ways that people hadn’t seen before, and we were able to start targeting solutions there.
We’ve got concerns in Norristown and southwest Philadelphia, which are both part of my district, yeah. Providing a level playing field isn’t the right thing, but a playing field where everyone has the opportunity to succeed, I think, is where the government should be focused. That plays out both in what the federal government should be investing in, which is people as opposed to profits, and then the benefits of federalism, where you have different states that can attempt different solutions. So my colleague managed to pass a law in the Oregon State Legislature that would remove private equity from hospitals, and it’s been fairly successful there. We’re trying to now replicate it on the national level. That’s the laboratory of federalism, where you try things out in different states and then take the best ideas and expand them nationally.
We are in the position right now, though, where we’ve got basically a White House that has been farmed out to a variety of interest groups while the President plays golf and tweets. You’ve got the Stephen Miller Project 2025 group that has a very disturbing, crazy, white, Christian nationalist view of the world that they’re trying to implement through mass deportations, restrictions on reproductive rights, attacks on the LGBTQ community. You’ve got the tech Bros and the crypto bros who are pursuing deregulation and profiteering in their sectors. You’ve got [influence from] oil and gas [industries], which is just undoing all the work we were able to do with respect to broad federal investments in building out sustainable energy, and going further by doing things like repealing energy standards that people are supposed to be meeting. Every single darn bill has some component that increases reliance on fossil fuels, rolling back EV subsidies, and that kind of thing.
Our state governments become a backstop in a lot of ways, and that’s one way that Pennsylvania is kind of standing out. Governor Shapiro was Attorney General during the first Trump administration, and was able to bring a number of lawsuits to protect voting rights, to protect reproductive rights. It’s a good thing that he did have that position, because we now have a Republican attorney general who is not bringing those lawsuits. The governor is bringing them instead, so this is one of the reasons why I feel much more secure about Pennsylvania’s elections than maybe some other states where there’s not going to be that kind of backstop or defense.
DP: I did want to ask about the bill to limit the power of private equity over institutions like hospitals and nursing homes that you recently proposed. Do you intend this legislation to be part of the response to a new moment in politics where leaders might finally take on the growing power of exponential wealth over daily life?
MGS: Well, that power has played out very badly in this region. [The eventual closure of Crozer Health] started in 2015 when this private equity group, Prospect, purchased what had been a nonprofit hospital system and proceeded to gut it. They basically divorced the properties from the hospital functions, took out mortgages, then forced the hospital to rent back its own former properties, and the executives at this private equity firm walked off with the money, leaving the hospital bankrupt. It happened with Prospect here, in Connecticut, and in California, so with my colleague in California, Katie Porter, and Rosa DeLauro in Connecticut, we had been trying to get investigations started against Prospect going back to 2019 and 2020. But, we were unable to get anyone to take that up under the first Trump administration. Then we were working with the FTC to try to beef up restrictions on consolidation of hospitals, because it’s not just private equity, it’s also consolidation.
I do think we have to find a way for healthcare to become a public good, a public service, and I think it should rest in the nonprofit or government sector, so that those are the priorities, rather than profit. We’re not just seeing it with hospitals and with nursing homes, but in a whole range of other places, including elsewhere in the medical sphere, where private equity groups are coming in and buying up every orthopedic practice in a region, and then squeezing them. They get buy-in from the docs, because they say, well, “You really want to be a doctor; we’ll take care of the overhead and the administrative aspects,” which sounds pretty good if you want to be a doctor. But then they start squeezing them out and saying, “You have to see this many patients per hour, and you have to do this, and you have to do that” — and they do similar things with respect to real estate – and eventually force out the doctors and just kind of dismantle the stuff and take it apart and sell it for pieces.
We’re seeing it in a variety of areas. I think the medical area is the one that we’re seeing the most incursion and the really devastating impact on people. I had a town hall last month at one of the senior living centers where a guy who had a walker and an oxygen tank said, “I’ve got heart problems, and now, if I’m having an issue, I drive down to Delaware. With the remaining hospitals in this region, I can get there in twenty minutes, but I’m going to be waiting for hours, so I drive an hour down to Delaware to go to a hospital because I’ll get seen more readily.”
DP: You mentioned some of your attempts to get investigations into Prospect in 2019, and 2020, and that they didn’t go very far, which leads into my next question. Democrats are in the minority right now in both the House and the Senate, and they don’t hold the White House, which will limit their ability to pass pretty much anything. What can Democrats do to make a tangible difference without any federal institutional power behind their backs?
MGS: There are a few limited places where we can still get things done, very few. They tend to be national security oriented, but I got a bill passed this winter into law that provides benefits for the families of firefighters and first responders who have service-related cancer. That was something we could get people on board with.
The Philadelphia shipyard is in my district. There is a broad bipartisan consensus that the U.S. needs to get back into ship building. When I got elected in 2018 our shipyard was out of ships, and one of my first meetings was with the union members there. They’d all been laid off. There were 60 people basically keeping the lights on. But it was a January night down on the docks in their trailer, and it started with a lot of guys swearing about things, but an hour later they’re crying because their families were about to lose health insurance, and people had illnesses that they need coverage for. So over the last eight years, we have been able to get government contracts in there. The shipyard started coming back to life. But because it was in decline for so long, it’s really not modern. In December 2024, a Korean company bought the shipyard. The Koreans and the Chinese are the shipbuilders around the world. We’re not very friendly with the Chinese, so the Koreans are helping us modernize the shipyard, and they’re up to 2,200 employees now. They’ve got a really robust welding apprenticeship program, where folks are starting making $50,000-$75,000 a year, which is really good in Philadelphia. So that’s something that the Biden administration was really into, and the Trump administration is really into. And we’ve had folks from both parties out there.
There are a few other things we can still get. They used to be called earmarks, but they’re now called Community Project Funding, and they’ve got a lot more guardrails around them. We have been able to get targeted things because it has to be for a municipality or a nonprofit seeking funding for something that’s already in the budget, but basically the member of Congress can give it a bump up to raise it to the top. We’ve been able to get things like a mobile mental health unit for the Delaware County Emergency Services, 911 unit. If there’s a call and it’s not about a crime, but it’s about someone with a mental health problem, you can send appropriate services rather than law enforcement services. We’ve gotten some libraries and school playgrounds, that kind of thing. The big things have been really, really hard, and especially because the House Republicans, unless the president says it’s okay to do something or that he wants something, they won’t do it, even if it’s something that’s going to benefit their constituents. That’s been the source of a lot of disagreements, whether it was the big, ugly bill that they passed last summer where Democrats were arguing that they not further try to gut the Affordable Care Act, or, more recently, when Democrats refused to provide additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the abuses and killings by federal agents that we’ve seen across the country.
DP: Outside of the halls of Congress, are there ways that you think that Democratic representatives and senators should be talking with the public in order to create both the short term pressure and long term power that they need?
MGS: That’s what we’ve been trying to do over the last year — now going on a year and a half — of politics. I feel like a late comer; running for Congress was not a plan. It was a reaction to Trump 1.0. It’s always about [considering] how you meet people where they are. How do you meet constituents or the public where they are? When I ran in 2018 I was told that in order to win this district, you need to send seven pieces of mail, which even in 2018 I thought didn’t sound quite right, but there were senior citizens who required those pamphlets in their inboxes. Because I was a new candidate that had not held office outside of the school board, I had to go on broadcast TV — that still existed. Then I did some cable, because it’s much cheaper, and we did this new thing called texting — we had high school and college students texting — much to the annoyance of some teachers. But it was novel, and people responded, and it was a great way to engage. By the time we got to 2020 and 2022, people would just forget texting; things have moved on. There’s been this evolution.
When we went into the second Trump administration and in the minority, it was really clear from the 2024 election, how much where people get their news has moved on. So given the fact that we were not going to be doing a ton of legislating this term, at least legislating initiated by us, we shifted some resources to get someone who does social media, because informing people and engaging people through social media, YouTube channel, etc, and it seems to be helpful. I think the Democratic Caucus as a whole has pivoted that way and is trying to engage with folks in more up-to-date ways.
We’re also seeing a generational shift. It’s happening across the country. But in terms of leadership, there’s both a willingness and a push for some of the leaders of the past to, gracefully or less gracefully, retire.
DP: While Trump is certainly unpopular, Democrats and their leaders are also unpopular, and it’s clear that large swaths of the public are looking across the board for new ways of fighting Trump, but also for new ideas from the Democrats as well. How do you think the party should balance those dual tasks of resisting and fighting Trump’s dangers, while also presenting an affirmative vision of a progressive politics that’s responsive to those modern changes in politics?
MGS: You have to do both, but the hard part with Trump is that he sucks all the air out of every communication. I wake up each day thinking I’m going to go here and then a tweet happens, he decides to bomb something, or just does something outrageous, and everybody follows along, or what’s left of the mainstream media follows along. The more outrageous, the more engagement. And he’s really, really, really good at that, so it’s hard for it not to be anti-Trump when so much of what he’s doing is so destructive.
But I think there is a broad push to say it’s not just anti-Trump, that there is a vision that basically, America deserves better, and Americans deserve government that is willing to address the cost of living crisis, whether it’s energy, housing, education, health care. There’s going to have to be a huge reckoning on health care. Where do we go from here? When I came in, the hope was to keep continually expanding Obamacare and repair some of the damage that had been done by the death by 1000 cuts that the Republican majorities had put in, because the public was not there yet for Medicare for all.
I think there’s broad agreement [amongst Democrats] on universal, affordable health care for everyone, but how we get there and what that looks like when you start drilling down on it, people have a gazillion different ideas. The damage that has been done to our health care system by this administration, and that is going to start escalating as the Medicaid cuts cut in or come into play throughout the next year or so, and could force the issue much more quickly. That could be a really weird, unintended consequence of this administration going after healthcare. So many of our frontline hospitals, frontline healthcare centers, were already teetering on the edge, and when you start taking away coverage for millions of Americans, that escalates the issue absolutely. Again, it’s a vision between a healthcare system where the “haves” can have more and the “have nots” get less, or one that works for everyone. That’s where Democrats have agreed we need affordable, accessible healthcare, but what that looks like has been a source of disagreement. Whether or not that starts to change as we see greater disparities, I don’t know.
DP: Any closing thoughts for the Swarthmore community?
MGS: I’m on the Judiciary Committee, because that’s where the work I’ve done throughout my career is really centered, so I’m trying to push on that. One issue that our office is leading on, is in September, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the President issued something called National Security Presidential Memo Seven, trying to implement a whole-of-government approach to “root out left wing extremism and Antifa.” Most experts agree that Antifa isn’t really an organized movement, and for decades, the Department of Justice has been clear that the primary danger in America is from right wing domestic extremism. That research, which had been available on the Department of Justice website, was erased in September of last year, at the same time that this memo came out, and the Attorney General was directed to compile a list of organizations whose members might be engaged in domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorism was being described as “anti immigration enforcement, radical gender ideology, anti Christian, anti capitalist and anti American sentiments.” Basically, the administration targeted core protected First Amendment speech in this sweeping directive to the Department of Justice and to the IRS to look at nonprofit institutions that might have any connection with what this administration defines as terrorism. So there’s some really serious First Amendment concerns that we’re trying to raise the alarm on and find out what exactly has happened. That was my questioning to Pam Bondi a couple weeks ago, but she’s no longer there.We’re starting to see and hear more about it as people start to pick up on the fact that this very wonky little memo is actually driving a lot of very concerning government activity.
