Conservative legislator never lacks an opinion

– Daryl Metcalfe is no stranger to controversy.

In a decade-long career in the state House of Representatives, the Butler County Republican has managed to offend homosexuals, Muslims and Hispanics because of his stances on such hot-button issues as gay rights and illegal immigration.

But the head of one national veterans’ group says Metcalfe went a bridge too far last month when he referred to a cadre of veterans as ”traitors” because they had signed onto a national effort to call attention to the issue of global climate change.

In tradition-minded western Pennsylvania, veterans and the military are as American as ”mom and apple pie,” said Joseph DiSarro, a political science professor at Washington & Jefferson College who has tracked the career of Metcalfe, who served in the Army from 1980 to 1984 along the border between the former West and East Germany.

”Especially in the rural counties, this won’t help him,” DiSarro said of Metcalfe, who has emerged as one of the Legislature’s most vocal fiscal and social conservatives and who has built a reputation for speaking his mind during debates on the House floor.

In late October, ”Operation Free,” a coalition of veterans groups that supports the development of alternative fuels and weaning America off its dependence on foreign oil, invited Metcalfe to a stop it was making in Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reported.

In response, Metcalfe fired off an incendiary e-mail, charging that ”any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution of our great nation!”

In response, VoteVets.org, a national group that partly backed the Operation Free tour, took out ads calling for Metcalfe to resign. The feisty lawmaker refused and returned fire.

In an interview Friday, Jon Soltz, the group’s national director, made no apologies for the tour or his tactics.

Pursuing energy alternatives is a national security issue because it reduces American dependence on foreign oil, he argued.

”I’m not sure what he [Metcalfe] doesn’t understand about that,” said Soltz, who believes Metcalfe violated a ”code” between former service members.

”Vets disagree all the time with each other,” he said. ”But we don’t do things like that to each other.”

But Soltz isn’t the first person to run headlong into Metcalfe’s brashly populist approach to the issues. And he likely won’t be the last.

In person, Metcalfe is surprisingly unassuming. With his crew cut and stocky build, he carries himself with the confidence of a former service member. But he also looks something like the electronics technician he was before he entered public life in the 1990s.

And when he starts to talk, he quickly becomes animated, hitting talking points familiar to any regular listener of conservative talk radio.

”The record is mixed,” DiSarro explained. ”There are those who love him and those who consider him a yahoo. This latest outrage hurts him with his base.”

In a recent interview, Metcalfe, 47, who hails from the bustling suburb of Cranberry Township, about 25 miles from Pittsburgh, was unrepentant in the wake of radio advertisements calling for his resignation over the veterans. He also freely admitted using incendiary language to help spark a debate.

”This is another one of series of concerns that needs to be addressed as a nation, when [leaders] are overreaching the limited language the Constitution has given them,” Metcalfe said.

The way Metcalfe sees it, he’s responding to the concerns of his constituents.

Republicans count for 57,850 of the 115,894 registered voters in Butler County. And when Metcalfe ran for re-election in 2008, he beat Democrat John Olesnevich 23,951 votes to 11,762.

”I think [voters would] like to see more individuals stand up and speak the truth when they’re involved in a debate and advocate for what they know to be right,” said Metcalfe, who was elected to the House in 1998, replacing a Democrat. ”A lot of politicians put their fingers in their ears. And if something is labeled in a certain way, they won’t take the issue on.”

And according to veteran Republican consultant William J. Green of Pittsburgh, that no-nonsense approach, combined with the sheer weight of numbers, is the reason why Metcalfe will weather this latest storm.

”He has said some controversial things over the years, it has not hurt him with local voters,” Green observed. ”If they [ Democrats] want to beat him, they need a good candidate who is well-funded and has a moderate to conservative philosophy. That’s what that district requires.”

Metcalfe’s recent remarks about veterans have earned him a general election opponent. Last week, Democrat Zack Byrnes said he intended to mount a 2010 campaign for Metcalfe’s seat.

To be sure, Metcalfe hasn’t made it easy on himself.

In September, for instance, he held up action on a non-binding resolution designating October as domestic violence awareness month in Pennsylvania because he thought it advanced a ”homosexual agenda,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

At issue for Metcalfe was language in the resolution noting that ”one in six women and one in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape.” His objection sent the bill back to a House committee, where it sat for a week or two before the chamber finally approved it.

In an interview, Metcalfe claimed he wasn’t trying to single out homosexuals with his objections but was instead trying to clean up what he believed to ambiguous language in the resolution.

Rep. John Siptroth, D-Monroe, who sponsored the resolution, said he was blindsided by Metcalfe’s opposition.

”I don’t understand Daryl,” he said. ”You have to work around people like that.”

Metcalfe was equally vocal during this year’s epic, 101-day debate over the state budget. In a statement released in late September, he denounced a compromise spending plan backed by three of the four legislative caucuses as ”unsustainable,” charging that it ”[increased] the economic burden on working Pennsylvania taxpayers.”

And in 2008, he angered the state’s Muslim community with his opposition to still another non-binding resolution honoring the 60th annual convention in Harrisburg of a Muslim group, The Associated Press reported.

At the time, Metcalfe said he wouldn’t vote for the measure because Muslims ”do not recognize Jesus Christ as God.”

Asked to clarify his remarks last week, Metcalfe claimed he was again objecting to phrasing in the resolution saying the group shared the same vision as William Penn, a Christian.

”[Muslims] do not believe Jesus Christ was God. I do. William Penn did,” he said. ”The sound bite that came out of it was that I was not going to honor this Muslim group because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as God. If the resolution had been drawn up differently, I would have been able to vote for it.”

Those pronouncements, along with his support for states’ rights and a penchant for a strict construction of the state and federal constitutions, have made Metcalfe a hero to the state’s conservative movement, which sees him as a bulwark against government excess.

”In general, his votes against ever-expanding governmental interference into our lives are very predictable,” said Matthew Brouillette, president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a free-market favoring think-tank in Harrisburg. ”Daryl, like him or not, has a set of principles that you identify, and a belief that the private sector and the nonprofit sector are far more preferable than the government sector.”

An upstate New York native who moved to Pennsylvania in 1986 with wife, Elke, whom he met in Germany during his time in the military, Metcalfe makes no apologies for his outspoken views.

”Part of what I’m elected to do is be a balance of power,” he said.

john.micek@mcall.com
717-783-7305

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