Transparency

Rep. John Joyce, who eked out a victory with 22% of the vote in a grueling eight-candidate “jungle primary” in 2018, did not run on a transparency platform. He was anointed by his long-entrenched predecessor, Bill Shuster, with the enthusiastic support of an extensive network of corporate lobbyists accustomed to private conversations. Joyce’s son, Sean Joyce, was a long-time Shuster campaign operative and a lobbyist with various DC firms, including Podesta, representing an array of powerful corporate forces, many of them championing things like China outsourcing and easy labor imports.

It was reasonable to expect that the seat would remain mired in the swamp, under heavy corporate influence, and that we wouldn’t hear much from Joyce except in election ads every two years. Thankfully, it hasn’t turned out that way. Joyce is not only way more open and accessible than his predecessor, he also has a genuine and well-considered conservative agenda of his own, one that’s at least as important as the corporate campaign money. That’s a marked improvement.

It’s true that Joyce has delivered at least one favor to Shuster’s traditional benefactors in the transport industry — crafting nullification of California’s Clean Air Act waiver for its zero-emission-vehicle mandate (H.J.Res. 88, one of two Joyce-sponsored bills that have become law). Joyce sits on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, where he served for a time as vice chair. He’s now chair of its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, with direct jurisdiction over federal auto policy.

While PushBack PA would certainly oppose any zero-emission mandate, and it is always nice to stick it to the libs, this law was hardly a priority for Joyce’s Pennsylvania constituency. It reflects the interests of particular corporate sectors, not ordinary Joyce voters. And it isn’t particularly conservative, either. In practice, it’s the federal government overriding a state’s choice to regulate itself more strictly than federal law requires. Genuine limited-government conservatism would leave that choice to California, which then owns the success or failure — not hand more power to DC. Joyce’s law creates the opposite: federal supremacy squeezing state sovereignty. Conservatives are right to resist any government imposition of technology by the federal government or the states, but that does not warrant erasure of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.

Nonetheless, Joyce has also disappointed lobbyists, unexpectedly throwing his weight behind the public interest on more than one occasion. That’s a very welcome change.

Most notable is his vote for an amendment to the 2026 Farm Bill, which would have barred SNAP benefits from being used to buy soda. Joyce voted yes, in the public interest, and against the interests of Big Soda and the National Confectioners Association’s CandyPAC, which actively supported his campaign in 2018. The amendment failed 186-238, with 55 Republicans voting with the Dems. His predecessor would certainly have been one of them, were he still in office.

Joyce has offered valuable opposition to omnibus packages and continuing resolutions that move through Congress with almost no public review — bills built, by design, to evade scrutiny before they are rammed through. In November 2023, he voted against Speaker Johnson’s own first continuing resolution (H.R. 6363), one of 93 House Republicans to break with leadership, citing deficit, inflation, and border spending in his own floor statement. This speaks to a sense of fiscal integrity we never saw in Shuster.

Joyce has also backed efforts to impose transparency on the multi-billion-dollar Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, a Biden-era initiative created by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As an original cosponsor of the Broadband Buildout Accountability Act (H.R. 5173), he sought to apply the Freedom of Information Act to a program that is currently immune to public-records requests. The bill has not passed, but reflects a meaningful attempt to strip secrecy from a program the telecom industry would rather keep dark.

Joyce’s campaign financing is mostly PAC money, which drags down his transparency grade a bit. He has raised $1.4 million in PAC cash — 68.7% of everything he’s brought in, from 352 unique PAC contributors. Joyce’s PAC share ranks No. 2 among Pennsylvania’s 17-member congressional delegation. PAC influence is usually opaque, but can quietly crowd out influence from ordinary voting constituents.

More than half of that PAC money — 54.8% — comes from the health sector alone, led by specialty physician groups such as the Community Oncology Alliance, the American Academy of Dermatology, and the American Academy of Family Physicians. That’s natural enough for a dermatologist, and his healthcare legislation has been pretty good.

PAC money ultimately means more valuable congressional time and attention for lobbyists. Voters found out the hard way that Shuster spent much of his official time comfortably fraternizing with lobbyists, sometimes crafting legislation to accommodate them. Joyce is not required to keep records of his lobbyist meetings, and virtually no congressman does. Nonetheless, it is what conservative voters want. An occasional lobbyist report in Joyce’s weekly newsletter would push up his grade considerably.