Cartwright looks back, ahead in sweeping interview

Former U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright might run again in 2026.

Cartwright, defeated in November by local businessman and now U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-8, of Dallas Twp., sat down with a reporter recently at Cooper’s Seafood House in Scranton, to look back at his tenure in Congress, a postmortem of the election and a look ahead.

Tall and jovial, Cartwright strolled comfortably down a festively decorated hall at Cooper’s, past a regal Christmas tree that competed with his height.

Sipping on a Coke, the Democrat touted his big wins – bringing in $100 million to the area as a member of the powerful U.S. House Appropriations committee, helping steer funding toward passenger train service from Scranton to New York City and helping pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Camp Lejeune Justice Act.

During the immersive conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, he also touched on plans for his newly freed-up schedule and weighing the decision whether or not to try to reclaim his Congressional seat in 2026.

Times-Tribune: You experienced your formative years during the Vietnam War, around ages 8, 9, 10. Did that influence your career path?

Matt Cartwright: No, my father got transferred to Canada with his job. But we always read TIME Magazine, and I remember learning about Dan Flood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and what he was able to do after the Agnes flood. So, I would have been 13 years old, and it’s the national sport to hate on Congress, but I was always impressed with the people that put their own lives on hold and did public service, because it’s a 16-hour-a-day job, every day. And I promise you I gave all of that for 12 years. But my father’s military service in World War II made a very profound impact on me, and also my three brothers. I finished high school in Toronto, and that was when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. And you would think, ‘Oh, here’s a guy already in Canada, he doesn’t have to worry about the Selective Service.’ Uh-uh. My older brother and I went right down to the American consulate, and we registered, because of honoring our father’s volunteering for Army duty after Pearl Harbor.

TT: You defeated an incumbent (Tim Holden) when you came into office, and then you were the incumbent who was defeated most recently. Can you talk about being on both sides of that experience?

MC: It’s better to be on the front end. (laughs)

TT: Did you work with Holden after you took his seat?

MC: It was a different time. I don’t want to disparage a former member.

TT: If you had to pick two or three, what are the shining stars of your legacy?

MC: Spearheading the passenger rail effort. Even before I won my general election, the local advocates for the rail project, Larry Malski, Dominic Keating, Bob Hay, showed up in my office and attuned me to the status of the project. Summers during college, I had been a railroad worker. I was a signalman on the railway.

TT: You actually worked on the train?

MC: I did. Not on the train, but on the tracks. I dug ditches all summer long.

TT: How old were you?

MC: 18.

TT: That’s quite a summer job.

MC: It made me study hard in school.

TT: Did it help you decide to do something different?

MC: It gave me an affinity for railroads. When I was at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I took economic history of the United States, and one of the first things you learn is, economic development follows pathways of travel. And knowing that the best thing you can do to boost a local economy is to connect it in every way possible to major centers of commerce and culture, when those three gentlemen showed up in my office, I was sold from the word ‘go.’ They needed a champion for this. And it had been hard for them because so many politicians had come and gone promising passenger rail, and it didn’t happen, so the people became jaded. And they still say, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

TT: So the passenger train project is one. Is there another one?

MC: The passage of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act. Both of those things, I had staffers asking me, ‘Are you sure you want to use your capital?’ They think of the huge opportunity cost and the amount of time that goes into those things. And what if they come up with nothing? You wasted a lot of time you could have been spending working on projects that were going to work out, but I did have that sort of “tilting at windmills” ethic.

TT: So, you were able to tilt at a windmill in these ways that had a positive outcome, because sometimes, if you tilt at a windmill, you might…

MC: Score a big victory. And we’re doing that with the rail project. We’re about to be accepted into the Corridor ID Phase 2 of the rail project. Now, this is the Service Development Plan phase where we’re going to get $5.4 million dollars for actual engineering work. There are only two lines in the country that are qualifying. Us, and the one between Dallas and Houston, Texas.

TT: That’s a big deal.

MC: It’s a really big deal. And you’re going to hear more. I have absolutely thrown myself into this rail project and, news flash, I’m going to stay engaged, because the more advocates for it, the better.

TT: What are some of the more humbling moments that you’ve experienced? Are there any that you are holding on to or working through? Anything that maybe you wish went a little bit differently than it did?

MC: I didn’t get elected. Yeah. I’m still processing that. We didn’t make any mistakes in our campaign. Everything that we did, I’m happy with, I’m proud of. We overperformed the top of the ticket immensely. The Harris-Walz ticket lost my district by over 8.6 %. That’s a staggering number to overcome when you’re down the ballot.

TT: What about legislation or something that you really hoped and tried for, but it just didn’t come through the way that you wanted?

MC: The other thing I’m proudest of is the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, and I didn’t tell you what that is. It’s pretty simple. We poisoned about 34 years of Marines and Marine families and employees at Camp Lejeune. At one point, the well water there, the VOCs, were measured at 300-400 times the maximum safe level. And we’re talking about VOCs including benzene, a known carcinogen, so these people came down with 11 kinds of cancer, and there were stillbirths. Anywhere else in the country, service members would have been able to bring what they call a Federal Tort Claims Act to case, at least to have their day in court. Because of a quirk in North Carolina law called the Statute of Repose, they were not allowed to bring a case. My bill simply waved the North Carolina Statute of Repose on behalf of the United States of America. And it took me four years to get that done.

TT: Can we talk about your thoughts on President-elect Donald Trump?

MC: I never blamed anybody for voting for Trump, it’s only natural, it’s an American thing, really. If life isn’t working out very well, and you’re dissatisfied with the way things are going, to vote for the change candidate. Barack Obama won northeastern Pennsylvania twice, and then so did Donald Trump. In fact, three times, Donald Trump now has won northeastern Pennsylvania. So, what did Obama, and Trump have in common? The only thing was that they were change candidates.

TT: It appears that NEPA is operating in a red mode right now. What can Democrats do to change that?

MC: Just wait. If you don’t like the way politics is going, just wait. The weather’s like that, too.

TT: What are your thoughts on President Joe Biden?

MC: Again, I don’t fault people for voting for Donald Trump because they want something different, and they’re hoping they can believe some of his promises. Unfortunately, they will find out that he has never meant anything that he has ever said in his life, and he certainly doesn’t care about most people in this country. As time goes on, that will become more and more clear to everyone. President Biden, people are upset with him because he’s the incumbent, because he hasn’t fixed the entire economy, they struggle with inflation. To be clear, inflation is the province of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, not the President of the United States, not the Speaker of the House, not the Senate Majority Leader. It’s the Federal Reserve chair who sets interest rates. And Mr. (Jerome H.) Powell could have acted much earlier, and should have, at the first signs of inflation as we came out of COVID. He didn’t. The problem is that most people don’t study things like the Federal Reserve. They don’t think about how it’s independent of politics.

TT: What’s it been like the past couple weeks? What’s the tone of the commentary that you’re hearing from people who are soon to be your former constituents?

MC: They’re my friends and neighbors, even the ones that are registered Republicans. These are all my people. I took the job to take care of them as best I could, and I leave full of gratitude to have been able to do this job for twelve years. Couldn’t be prouder, even of this last election. You know, my previous vote total high watermark record was 178,000 voters voted for me in 2020. This time, we had 189,000. We improved our all-time vote total record by over 11,000 votes in this cycle. So, my people didn’t abandon me, and we added to their number.

TT: You served on the House Appropriations Committee, the Commerce-Justice-Science and Financial services, and General Government subcommittee. Rob Bresnahan has been appointed to the Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, and Small Business. What are some of the major differences between the work being done in the committees that you were a part of, and the committees that he is a part of, specifically relating to Northeast Pennsylvania?

MC: It’s no secret that Appropriations is a marquee committee. It’s something that I had asked to be on my first week in Congress. They don’t give it to freshmen on the Democratic side, but I did get it at the end of my second term. The reason I wanted Appropriations was that two of the very most effective members of Congress for our area were on Appropriations — (Joe) McDade and (Dan) Flood. And so much of what they were able to do for our area, they did because of seniority on Appropriations. It’s one of the reasons that I haven’t written off running again, because I have found out that if I run again in 2026, I get all of my seniority back on Appropriations, which could be huge for this area.

TT: Will you run again?

MC: I am undecided, and I won’t make a decision for another month or so. I have taken a job. I’ve agreed to be a government professor at my alma mater, Hamilton College, in upstate New York. I’m going to teach government and politics of Congress, a seminar level course, on Monday mornings.

TT: Do you see any up and coming leaders in the Democratic party?

MC: Sure. Josh Shapiro.

TT: Is he going to run for president next term?

MC: I hope he does. He’d be a terrific president. He has a knack of figuring out how to fix problems really quickly and effectively.

TT: The health care/hospital landscape is changing quickly in NEPA. What do you see as the future of local health care here?

MC: What I do know is that private equity is really hurting the health care field. You get out of town, out-of-state owners, kind of like absentee landlords, but no commitment to our local community. And all they’ve committed to is making a buck. Even if it means paying less than they should be paying to the employees, even if it means delivering health care, that is not the best it could be. Even if it means not buying the latest equipment for our community to benefit from, they do that. It’s leading to the hollowing out of communities. Terrible.

TT: It sounds like you’re gonna have a lot of free time.

MC: (laughs) It’s gonna be weird.