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Congressman Mike Doyle walks in the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 12, 2011, in downtown Pittsburgh.
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Salena Zito: Third generation steel worker Mike Doyle retires from Congress

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Salena Zito: Third generation steel worker Mike Doyle retires from Congress

PITTSBURGH — For the first time in 28 years, Mike Doyle will not make that Jan. 2 drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from his home in Forest Hills to the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., something he has done since he was first sworn in almost 30 years ago.

Along with another Democrat, the late Rep. Frank Mascara of Charleroi, in 1994 he had won a tough election to an open district, flipping the seat Republican Rick Santorum had held. Their win was seen as bittersweet for local Democrats, because they won the same day their political party lost control of the chamber for the first time in 40 years.

Yet Doyle said he never once saw that day as bittersweet: For him, it was time to do what all of the Doyles had done for generations — roll up his sleeves and get to work.

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“I grew up in a blue-collar family,” he said. “My grandfather was a mill worker at the Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, and my dad worked at Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock, and I worked two summers at J&L Steel. And they're all Mike Doyles. My grandfather was Mike Doyle, and my dad was Mike Doyle, and I'm Mike Doyle. Between the Mike Doyles of Swissvale, we had about 72 years in the mills,” he said.

“That is a long way of saying my job was to go to work for my district and not worry about whether my side had the power or not,” Doyle said in an interview earlier this year.

Nationwide, 13 Democrats were elected that year. They adapted a Marine inspired motto, he said: “The few, the proud, the freshman Democrats.”

He won that first race by 10 points and easily won every race after that. He announced in October of 2021 that he would not seek re-election. It had been “an honor and a privilege that I really never thought possible growing up in a blue-collar family in Swissvale,” he said. “But, you know, in America, all things are possible.”

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In those 28 years, Doyle has gone from the kid in the House to the esteemed “Dean” of the Pennsylvania delegation, and all the while he has remained that rare elected official in the cable news era who does not run to the microphone to jockey for attention on whatever the latest controversy is.

On the day Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana was gunned down at the congressional Republicans’ baseball practice, Doyle — who was across town with his own team — immediately led a prayer “asking God to protect the players and the staff and praying that nobody was seriously hurt.” His team then wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders and recited the Lord’s Prayer.

Doyle, a devout Catholic, has always had a reputation for getting along well with everyone in his delegation, Republican and Democrat, something he said he learned from the master of that approach, the late Rep. John Murtha of Johnstown.

One time the Republican chairman of the transportation committee asked for his help bringing a bill to a vote. “He was fighting then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich over wanting to do a big transportation bill, and Gingrich didn't want to spend the money,” Doyle recalled. A lot of Republicans who weren't going to go with him because they were budget cutters.

“I said, ‘Mr. Chairman, what do I tell the folks back in Pittsburgh?’ He said, ‘You tell the folks back in Pittsburgh that you're going to have X amount of dollars for your transportation projects.’ I said, ‘Okay, Mr. Chairman. You got a deal,’” he said.

“We got a lot of money back in the district, But every year I did this, I did it quietly,” he said.

Doyle lists the names of his Republican colleagues in the delegation he calls friends — it ends up being all nine of them: “Pennsylvania's kind of had a tradition where we try to work together as much as we can. Obviously, there's some issues were we couldn’t, but we always kept the relationship cordial — even in the most heated times so that when the state needs something we can pull it together,” he said.

“I came to Congress before social media, before the internet, before Facebook, Twitter, before cable news,” Doyle said. His mentor Jack Murtha told him to stay on the House floor and learn its procedure, because he’d need to know it to get his own bills passed.

Murtha also taught him to decide where he wanted to grow his career and not to take a committee assignment he didn’t want. “That's the committee you'll sit on forever,” Doyle said. “I wanted to be on Energy and Commerce because it's the committee with the biggest jurisdiction in Congress.”

He took Murtha’s advice and bided his time. “I got on the committee in my third term in Congress,” he said.

Doyle retired as the chairman of one of that committee’s major subcommittees, Communications and Technology. It “was such a perfect fit for Pittsburgh because of the transformation,” he said. “Our city has gone from a one-horse steel town to Eds and Meds and artificial intelligence and robotics and autonomous vehicles.”

In an interview in early 2022, Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald said this region would feel a deep loss with Doyle not representing it: “He brought home the funds for the projects, got funding when we were hit with floods; you name it, he was always there. He did it by building relationships and not being a showboat,” said Fitzgerald.

Come Jan. 3, the city of Pittsburgh — along with several Allegheny County suburbs, river towns and parts of Westmoreland County — will be represented by Summer Lee, a former state representative and native of the Mon Valley.

Unlike Doyle, Lee uses social media profusely — her Twitter profile reads: “Democrat repping #PA12 in Congress organizing, politicizing & mobilizing around racial, econ, & environ justice. She/her.”

On Dec. 8, Lee uploaded a photo of herself walking down the grand marble stairs of the Pennsylvania state capitol with her fist in the air — she had resigned her state house seat the day before — and tweeted: “I came. I saw. I pissed the just right people off. What’s up Congress?”

On Dec. 27 with no fanfare — or fist in the air — Doyle quietly released his last press release as a U.S. congressman:

“At the end of this week, I will retire from Congress after 28 years representing the people of Pittsburgh. Thank you for placing your trust in me for so many years. It's been a great honor and a privilege to serve you all. I wish you all the best!”

North Side native Salena Zito is a national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, a New York Post columnist and co-author of “The Great Revolt”: zito.salena@gmail.com.

First Published: January 1, 2023, 5:00 a.m.

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Congressman Mike Doyle walks in the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 12, 2011, in downtown Pittsburgh.  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
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