U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick talks term limits, tariffs and Trump

U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick has quickly found his groove in the chamber, where he’s already introduced a slate of bills seeking to tackle some of Pennsylvania’s most pressing issues.

McCormick recently spoke with City & State about his first few months in Washington, his top priorities in the U.S. Senate and President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration and the economy. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What are your biggest legislative priorities?

The thing I was really proud of about the campaign was that I tried to run on a set of substantive policy proposals. There were six big speeches I gave as part of a “Keystone Renewal” agenda. These were very specific policies. I wrote op-eds around every one of them, and I had those published on the website, and it was all summarized in a “Top 10” set of promises. 

The promises were around the things that you’re seeing in the legislation now: unlocking energy; stopping the flow of fentanyl across our border; bringing opportunity to Pennsylvania through a set of economic policies that would make it easier to have children; make it easier to create new jobs; deregulation; and a set of policies around the progressive ideology in our institutions, combined with the need to shake up Washington. The “Shake Up Washington” one, for example, had term limits as part of those promises. 

I’ve got those 10 promises on a whiteboard, and I’m chipping away at legislation that delivers on those promises. That, to me, is sort of the “job one”: “Here’s what I ran on, here’s what I promised, and I’m going to go try to do my best to deliver on those legislatively.” Then there are some other things that are consistent with what I think the government should be doing, consistent with the role that I believe the United States should play in the world, where I’m also opportunistically looking to support legislation that makes sense. 

On the topic of term limits, why is that a needed reform at the federal level? What attracted you to that issue?

If you go back to, spiritually, what the founders envisioned when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, and then the Constitution, was the notion of citizens who would serve in elected office and this would not be their vocation. They would be farmers and blacksmiths and lawyers and doctors who would serve the public good. Over time, that’s become less and less the case, and essentially, you have a system here that’s self-reinforcing: Once you get to Washington, you become part of the system. You get the lobbying support. Incumbents, particularly on the Senate side, are very hard to displace. Like 93% of the time, incumbents win. It becomes self-perpetuating. 

Part of it is that if you want new blood, new ideas, you have to create a mechanism, whether it’s a company or the Congress, where you get new people coming in. … If you had term limits, that would also make it a younger person’s game, which I think is also consistent with the vision of our founders. I think when Thomas Jefferson signed the Constitution, he was 31; I think Alexander Hamilton was 24 or 25. These were young people who created our country; I think that kind of energy and fresh ideas is something we need to introduce into our system. That’s the purpose of the legislation.

What parts of the Trump administration’s agenda are you throwing your support behind?

The one thing that was the energizing issue in the campaign – certainly in Pennsylvania, it was the No. 1 issue, maybe the No. 2 issue, but it was the top of the heap – was the border. The border crisis, which, depending on whose numbers you look at, has seen somewhere between 10 and 20 million illegal immigrants enter the country during the Biden administration. There are 13 sanctuary cities or counties in Pennsylvania. This contributed to a dramatic up-spike in the fentanyl crisis, where we lost 4,000 Pennsylvanians last year – 100,000 Americans. We had … at least hundreds that were on the terrorist watch list enter the country. We had the cartels infiltrating our borders. This was scary stuff, and I think President Trump has done a remarkable job of addressing that crisis. And it shows the bankruptcy of what the Biden administration was saying, honestly, because they said the problem was that we didn’t have the right legislation, the president didn’t have the authority. Almost overnight, using the authorities the president had, beefing up law enforcement, standing behind the Border Patrol, negotiating new arrangements with Mexico and Canada. I think the last numbers I saw, the number of illegal immigrants is down 95% and the fentanyl is down pretty substantially. That’ll continue to go down dramatically. The other thing that he did, which I thought was very much in line with what I campaigned on, was declaring the cartels a terrorist organization, which allows law enforcement to be much more targeted and much more heavy-handed in dealing with the infiltration of the cartels and the deportation of cartel members. I think that is A++, and the fact that it went as quickly as it did was, I think, remarkable.

What do you make of the president’s tariff efforts?

You have to go back in time a little bit, which explains both my position and also how we got to where we are. After World War II, I think, quite appropriately, the United States gave incredibly favorable trade terms to Europe, which was rebuilding after the war, and to Japan, which was devastated by the war. Then, a couple of decades later, we gave extraordinarily favorable terms to China and a number of other developing countries, but most notably China, because we wanted China to enter the global economy and bring its society out of poverty. Now, fast-forward to where we are now, those very same arrangements have, by and large, remained in place. Very unfair trading practices that we intentionally entered into to try to help have now solidified into what is absolutely fundamental unfairness. 

There are very few countries in the world that have a fair trading relationship with the United States. By that, I mean where the level of tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and currency manipulation and intellectual property theft are not decidedly out of whack with what America does. President Trump campaigned on this, saying, “We’re going to get fair trade, and we’re going to use the idea of reciprocal tariffs to do that,” and I agree with that. I think we’ve been treated unfairly. I think it’s time to change the game. I think the notion of reciprocal tariffs, where we say, “Listen, we’re going to slap tariffs on you if you have tariffs or non-tariff barriers on us. If you lower your tariffs, we’ll lower our tariffs and that’ll be fairness.” I think that absolutely makes sense. 

There’s a second objective, which we discovered was much worse than we thought during COVID, which is that in this process of embracing unfettered, free-trade globalization, we lost a number of key industries that are critical to our national security. The entire pharmaceutical industry is essentially offshore. We’re dependent on China and India for generics. We don’t have much domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, so if you’re in a crisis, we’re deeply dependent. The second is semiconductors. What this policy is designed to do is create fairness – it’s hard to imagine many Americans would disagree with the need for fairness, which is going to create jobs and opportunity for Pennsylvanians and Americans. There are some industries that we just need to have here and, in those cases, we need to strategically decouple from China and other places and make sure that investment comes home, most notably, the high-end technology, stuff that’s really critical to our national security.

Have you been hearing any concerns from constituents about some of the funding cuts and pauses?

I’m definitely hearing concerns. The concerns fall into two categories: funding that’s actually been affected, or worries that funding will be affected. The first thing I always do is sort through, “Wait a second, has the funding actually been affected yet? Or you’re just worried about it?” Ed and meds is one of the big industries in Pennsylvania. Federal research dollars go to these big universities like Penn and Carnegie Mellon and Penn State. The administration came out with a policy to cap indirect spending at 15% in many places. It’s like 50, 60, 70% now. My view on that is, No. 1, I think it’s totally appropriate that we scrutinize every dollar of spending to make sure the taxpayers are getting their value. There should be no birthright to any of the federal spending. At the same time, I think that the spending we make in innovation and basic research is really critical to our innovation future, so I look at that very carefully. I would not cut funding in midstream. So on the NIH grants, my position, which I’ve shared with the administration and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, is that we shouldn’t stop funding midstream. We’ll lose the benefits of that valuable research; it’s very disruptive. So, sure, let’s look at all future funding commitments and ensure they’re being well constructed and that the universities are paying their fair share from endowments. But let’s not cut things in midstream. Those cuts, if they were implemented – they haven’t been implemented yet – but if they were implemented, would affect thousands of Pennsylvanians.

How would you describe your working relationship with U.S. Sen. John Fetterman?

It’s actually been great. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. He campaigned against me with Sen. Casey. They’re in the same party. They were friends. When you’re in a campaign, it can get spicy – and it did. But I went to see him soon after I was sworn in, and we had a great direct conversation. We’ve had dinner with our spouses. We co-sponsored legislation together. He was the lead co-sponsor on my fentanyl bill. We talk fairly regularly. So I like him. We disagree on a lot of stuff, as you might imagine, but I think he’s authentic. I think he’s principled. I think he's decent and I trust him. We are both committed to Pennsylvania. We come at it from very different perspectives and parties, but we’re trying to find ways to work together for the benefit of the commonwealth.