U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly touts experience, understanding of policy in bid for re-election
After nearly 14 years in the House of Representatives, U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly says he still has plenty of gas in the tank.
In fact, the 76-year-old car dealer from Butler wants to spend an eighth term driving down the cost of that gas.
Kelly is running for an eighth two-year term in Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District, which includes Erie, Crawford, Mercer, Lawrence and Butler counties and the western portion of Venango County.
16th District: Preston Nouri on incumbent Rep. Mike Kelly's tenure: 'What do we have to show for it?'
The district's voter makeup heavily favors the GOP. In 2022, Kelly won nearly 60% of the vote against his Democratic opponent, Dan Pastore. Now he's facing off against another first-time political candidate in Preston Nouri, 25, of Fairview. Nouri is looking to become only the second member of Generation Z to hold a seat in the House of Representatives.
Kelly said he doesn't believe someone with no experience, including life experiences like raising a family, is ready for the job.
"I have great on-the-field experience," he said. "I've done all these things. I've had wins, I've had losses, but more than anything else, I understand how important policy is to the people we represent."
Kelly is a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which is tasked with making budget recommendations and setting tax policy.
More: See how Rep. Mike Kelly has voted
In his latest term, Kelly has pushed for more border patrol agents and resources not only at the southern border but also at the northern border between the U.S. and Canada, as border crossings have skyrocketed at both. Speaker Mike Johnson in late July tapped Kelly to serve as chairman of a special, bipartisan task force charged with investigating the security lapses that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump July 13 in Kelly's hometown of Butler.
Kelly is no stranger to voters in the 16th District. He was first elected in 2010, defeating incumbent Democrat Kathy Dahlkemper in a midterm election that swept scores of Democrats out of office on a Tea Party wave.
He's spent all but the four years of Trump's tenure under a Democratic president, first Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. Kelly has proven a staunch supporter and loyal ally of Trump. Not only did he vote against the certification of Pennsylvania's 2020 election results, the same results that won him another term, but he's also signed onto several lawsuits over Pennsylvania's election laws.
Most notably, Kelly believes that the state's no-fault absentee voting law, more commonly referred to as mail-in voting, was not properly enacted. In 2019, both Republicans and Democrats passed Act 77, the most comprehensive set of election reforms in decades. Kelly, however, has argued that the changes, including mail-in voting, required voters to approve an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution.
He recently joined other Keystone state GOP congressman in filing a lawsuit over overseas military ballots.
More: What Pa.'s US representatives, senators said when asked if they'll accept election result
Kelly has also been a lightning rod of controversy on other matters. In 2021, a stock purchase made by his wife of a company for which Kelly had been lobbying was referred to the House Committee on Ethics for possible insider trading violations. But when Republicans took over Congress in 2022, the probe into the stock purchase seemingly came to a halt. The committee has made no public statements on the probe since.
The Times-News reported in June that Kelly's wife made a nearly identical stock purchase in March to the one that resulted in the 2021 ethics investigation.
Kelly, who runs the family car dealership his late father started decades ago, has also faced criticism for advancing legislation seen as financially favorable to his business and the automotive industry, while also taking forgivable pandemic relief loans for the business while later railing against Biden's attempts to forgive billions of dollars in student loans. In another instance, Kelly Automotive received taxpayer money for a renewable energy project that was funded by Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which Kelly had slammed for being full of wasteful spending.
Rep. Mike Kelly on inflation
To address inflation, Kelly said the U.S. needs to focus on energy production and lowering the cost of energy.
"Access any area of energy that we can actually access and do it safely, do it with keeping in mind that we have a great responsibility to the environment," he said. "We have untapped energy sources."
The U.S. became energy independent in 2019 under Trump for the first time since the 1940s, according to Forbes, which credits the shale boom that began in 2005. By this definition, energy independence means that the U.S. produced more energy than it consumed, not that it stopped importing foreign energy supplies. U.S. energy independence reached an all-time high in 2023 under Biden.
But it's a supply-and-demand issue, which is why Kelly says the U.S. needs to continue to drill.
"When we were energy independent, we had the lowest cost of any country in the world when it came to using energy," he said. "We had more of it than anybody. We were one of the leading exporters of energy in the world. And that draws people to you when they learn that they can depend on the United States. But domestically, it (inflation) has driven everything off the charts."
Kelly also refers to the price of a gallon of gasoline, which has increased since Trump left office, but this has little to do with who's president and more to do with other economic factors, including supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and foreign conflicts, specifically Russia's invasion on Ukraine, according to Forbes.
As for energy exports, the U.S. exported a record 1.49 billion barrels of crude oil in 2023, a 27% increase from 2020, which was the highest year for crude exports under the Trump administration, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Crude oil is one of the main factors in the cost of gasoline.
"I wish I could say inflation's only up 2%, well it's 2% over last week," he said. "But when you go back collectively to January of 2021, and you look at where were we then and where are we now and people say, 'Geez, this is great. My gasoline was only $3.59 a gallon. And I say, 'do you remember when it was $1.79 a gallon? And they go, 'What? When was it that low?' I say, 'back in 2020, and that's because we weren't relying on anyone else in the world for energy."
Kelly's history of proposing national abortion ban
Kelly is a member of the Pro-Life Caucus in the House, and in every term he's pushed for a national ban on abortion when a physician can detect a fetal heartbeat, which is around six weeks.
When asked about those proposals, Kelly tried to reframe the debate over abortion, something many Republicans, including Trump, have attempted to do following the political fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Voters in several states, including the heavily conservative state of Kansas, have rejected attempts to ban abortion at the ballot box.
"If you are in a position of serving the public, you have to face tough decisions, and you have to make those decisions based on what is in the best interest of the people you represent," he said. "I am pro-life. Not everybody I represent is pro-life. I am always interested in what they have to say. I know my position. I don't know what the state is going to ultimately end up with, but I do know this: It is up to the state to handle this. Right now, forget about it being in the federal courts, because it's not in the courts anymore."
However, even after the court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, Kelly continued to push for a national abortion ban. Kelly reintroduced the Heartbeat Protection Act on Jan. 11, 2023.
Asked to reconcile his position with his proposed legislation, Kelly said:
"You think I'm conflicted on it? I'm not conflicted on it," he said. "I know that we can, I can propose things at that level, but it comes down to the states to make the final decision. That's what I'm saying. There's nothing I can say or do that's going to influence the state legislature."
He also said that his bills have never come up for a vote. But what if they did?
"That's hypothetical," he responded when asked how he would vote if a national abortion ban ever came up for consideration.
"What I'll stand behind is whatever the state of Pennsylvania comes up and what the Pennsylvania legislature decides is in the best interest of our Pennsylvania people," he said. "I'm always going to be a pro-life person with certain exceptions. The health of the mother is a big deal to me."
Rep. Mike Kelly on the border
Kelly has been an advocate for a return to Trump's immigration policies, which include closing the southern border and mass deportations.
He opposed a bipartisan border security bill negotiated earlier this year by conservative Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford.
"That was so butchered up by the time they were done," Kelly said. "My question is, what about the piece the House sent to them (Senate) earlier that would've fixed things? What about the policies that were in place under the Trump administration? Why are we trying to say, there was a piece that came through the Senate that Trump defeated? Trump was not the president when it was defeated. It was defeated because it didn't have the teeth in it that it needed to have to protect the American people."
Kelly said the Biden administration "left our borders wide open."
That includes the 5,500-mile northern border, the longest continuous border between any two countries.
"It's totally unwatched," said Kelly, blaming the crisis at the southern border for redirecting government resources, including manpower, to the southern border. "I understand that people want to come to America. That's how my ancestors got here. They left Ireland because they were starving. They came to America. They went to Ellis Island. The first thing they had to go through was a very stringent physical to make sure that whatever they were bringing to America wasn't just their luggage, make sure they weren't bringing any illness, any disease. You cannot have open borders. You cannot have people coming into our country anywhere they want."
The number of unauthorized immigrants entering the United States has skyrocketed over the past three years, going from 405,000 U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions and expulsions in 2020 to 1.6 million in 2021, 2.2 million in 2022, and 2 million in 2023.
Border crossings dropped to just over 900,000 through the first nine months of 2024. The fewest number of border crossings of Biden's presidency occurred in September, the third month of an effort to clamp down on asylum claims.
Rep. Mike Kelly on foreign conflicts
When asked about his feelings on America's role in the Israel-Hamas war, Kelly said "Israel is a strong independent country. It is our biggest ally in that part of the world. It's somebody we can always count on. I am going to stand with Israel in any way that we can to help them through a critical thing. This is their very existence, their ability to go forward."
Kelly, citing Hamas's horrific attack on Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, said the country has "every right to defend itself" and the U.S. "should continue to do whatever we can to help them in this greatest hour of need."
On Russia's invasion and ongoing war with Ukraine, Kelly turned his focus to the financial investment from the U.S. and the responsibility of other NATO-member countries to do more.
The Obama administration's response to Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine in 2014, which was limited to economic sanctions at the time, "set a bad message to the world." Kelly believes Trump had the right approach by insisting that all NATO members, not just factions, offer support.
"It's time for that part of the world to take a look at what their responsibility is," he said.
Kelly said the U.S. should support Ukraine and has, but "I don't want the Yanks to always be on the hook for everything."
Like his opponent, Nouri, Kelly said in early October the U.S. has needs at home that demand attention, including emergency response to hurricane-ravaged states like Florida and North Carolina.
"We have great obligations at home, and we're sending money all over the world right now, and we're looking at great parts of our country that have been virtually destroyed by these storms," Kelly said. "We have money for everybody else in the world. Unfortunately, for the American people, we don't have enough money to fund the emergency needs that they have. You can only spend a dollar once."
Matthew Rink can be reached at [email protected] or on X at @ETNRink.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: GOP's Kelly seeking eighth term in Congress against newcomer Nouri