PITTSBURGH — This was a bad idea, Susan Doyle told her husband.
It was 1994, and Mike Doyle had gotten it in his head to run for Congress.
His timing was terrible. He'd switched his registration to Democratic from Republican just two years earlier, so he figured there was no way he'd get the party's endorsement in the primary. And if he somehow squeaked through, he'd face national political headwinds strongly favorable to the Republican Party — so much so, in fact, that they would later sweep the GOP into power in the U.S. House for the first time in a generation.
Why not just go back into the insurance business, Susan Doyle asked her husband. He'd spent the last 16 years as the top aide to a state senator but hadn't run for anything more than borough council.
The two went back and forth. He couldn't use their money to prop up his campaign, she said. OK, he said. If he lost, that was it — the Doyles of Swissvale were out of politics, she said. He agreed.
"Finally, she said, 'Look, why don't you get this out of your system," Doyle said in an wide-ranging interview recently with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
It took 28 years, but it's finally out.
Months after he and his wife shook hands over their deal, he eked out a win with 20% of the vote in a seven-way primary, then went on to flip the seat vacated by conservative firebrand Rick Santorum, defying national political headwinds and kicking off one of the longest U.S. House careers in state history.
Five presidents. Two attacks on the Capitol. The most—sweeping health care law in generations. Millions upon millions of federal dollars that laid the foundation for the region's post-industrial renaissance. On Tuesday, the congressional career of U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle comes to a close.
His departure is part of a pivotal moment in the Democratic Party's history, as its leaders for the last generation — Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to be speaker; Steny Hoyer, the caucus leader and longest-serving Democrat in Congress; and James Clyburn, the Democrats' third-ranking congressman and longtime South Carolina power broker — step aside to make room for a younger class.
"Three octogenarians — who are deeply respected and iconic in our party, and who nobody would move against — came to the realization that it was time to pass the torch," Doyle said.
As did he.
Doyle announced his retirement in fall 2021, opening a seat that would be captured by another political newcomer, Summer Lee, the first Black woman elected to the House from Pennsylvania. Lee, who won her state House seat in an upset victory in 2018 with the help of the Democratic Socialists of America, represents another key part of the party's transformation as its ascendant progressive wing asserts ever more influence over Democratic politics.
"I don't necessarily disagree with a lot of what they push for. I disagree with how they want to implement it," said Doyle, 69, the son and grandson of steelworkers whose decades in Washington haven't sanded down his yinzer accent.
Universal health care? He says everyone should have basic benefits from birth — but thinks private insurance and premiums help keep a lid on health care costs. Wiping out student loans? "I believe in paying your debts," but he doesn't think government-backed loans should charge interest. Phasing out fossil fuels? Sure, but not without getting industry workers into "jobs that they can feed their families with."
"If you just sit down and explain this [stuff] to people — normal people — they'll get behind it and they'll support it," Doyle said.
That compromise-driven approach to politics long dictated the plodding pace and incremental progress of lawmaking, but in recent years has been increasingly overshadowed by more ideological legislators who can build their own nationwide base of supporters through deft use of social media.
It's a world Doyle does not embrace. He said his staff made him create Twitter and Facebook accounts [22,800 and 2,700 followers, respectively], but he didn't monitor them. Aides would run posts past him and he'd approve or reject them, but that was extent of it, he said. The only other time he'd hear about his social media presence was when someone asked, "Hey, did you hear what someone said about you on Facebook?
"No, and I really don't give a [crap]."
He didn't have to. Doyle represented a safe Democratic district his entire career. His first victory, when he won the general election by 10 points despite flipping it from Republican control, was his closest race. After his first couple of terms, more established Democrats stopped trying to knock him off in primary elections, clearing his path back to Washington for 14 terms.
"I didn't have to fight for my life every two years and raise millions of dollars and go through some of these terrible races that a number of members have to do," Doyle said. "That really allowed me to be a legislator ... and I tried to take full advantage of that."
Free from the pressure of shifting political winds, and lacking any desire to make waves on cable shows and social media circles, Doyle quietly became a key asset when the party's most powerful figures needed someone who could negotiate behind the scenes and didn't run to the cameras afterward.
One of those times: March 2010, when the fate of President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was in dire jeopardy. Seven pro-life House Democrats — including Doyle's Washington roommate, Bart Supak, D-Mich. — were under intense pressure to sink the bill.
"Basically, the pro-life lobby said anyone who voted for the Affordable Care Act would no longer be considered pro-life — which, you know, I thought was a load of crap," Doyle said.
In a secluded room in the Cannon House Office Building across the street from the Capitol, Doyle met with the seven holdouts in an effort to salvage the bill, a central promise of Obama's history-making campaign.
"We finally figured out a way to bring those people on board. We called the White House and it involved the president doing an executive order" reinforcing an existing law that prohibited using taxpayer money to fund abortions, Doyle said.
On March 21, a Sunday, two announcements roiled Washington: One, from the White House, announced Obama would sign the executive order the holdouts had wanted, and the other, from Stupak, who spoke for the small group, saying, "We have a deal."
The news sparked celebrations from the bill's supporters, denunciations from its opponents and wall-to-wall media coverage of its renewed prospects. The name missing from all of it: Mike Doyle.
It would be months before word of the pivotal meeting began to seep out, and Stupak would eventually include the tale in a book about the law's passage, but Doyle still shied away from even acknowledging his role. When a couple of Washington-based journalists approached him about a year after the law passed and said they wanted to write about the deal he'd helped broker, he said thanks but no thanks.
"It wouldn't have gotten done in public. If we were negotiating with those seven guys in front of the press, or if I was saying I'm trying to get these seven votes, it'd never have happened," Doyle said.
And if he tried to get public credit for the part he'd played, Democratic leadership wouldn't come to him on sensitive matters in the future — and might not owe him a favor when he sought more federal dollars for Pittsburgh.
Perhaps more than anything else, that ability to cut through the legislative process and wring funding from Washington is what marks Doyle's time in office, said Jerry Shuster, a professor of political communications at the University of Pittsburgh.
"That guy had a pair of scissors second to none in D.C.," Shuster said. By avoiding high-profile partisan fights, Doyle made few enemies, Shuster said.
"He supported the right people on both sides of the fence who could assist him when needed. He knew how to stay out of the fray."
The result: when he needed something, few if any in Congress stood in his way to settle an old political score.
Nowhere was that more apparent than after the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in late January, Shuster said. Just days after the span's failure sent a city bus and several cars plummeting into a snowy ravine, PennDOT announced $25.3 million in federal funding to rebuild it.
"A lot of people were after the same money, and [Doyle] managed to get it," Shuster said.
The new bridge reopened Dec. 21, less than a year after the collapse, a timeline that astonished many experts accustomed to interminable delays in both the federal bureaucracy and infrastructure projects in general.
"Where else could you get a bridge done in less than a year?" Shuster said.
The bridge money was the latest in a stream of federal dollars Doyle steered into the region, starting early in his career with expensive projects that cleaned up the sites of shuttered steel mills where he and his grandfather once worked. That made massive redevelopment efforts, including The Waterfront in Homestead and Munhall, possible. At the same time, seed funding from Washington laid the groundwork for what's become a thriving technology industry in the heart of the Rust Belt.
Those driverless cars being tested in the Strip District? Doyle draws a straight line to federal spending decades ago that propped up nascent research collaboratives such as Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab. Those programs attracted aspiring engineers who grew into a critical mass of skilled workers that, eventually, drew the attention and investment of some of the world's largest companies.
CMU recently hosted an event marking Doyle's retirement, crediting him for, among other things, being a key player in the creation of the school's National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville, the largest of its kind in the world.
"The reason Google has a presence here, the reason all these tech companies have a presence here — and one that's growing — is because of the talent pool that exists and was attracted to Pittsburgh because of the funding that we provided, that we fought for, that we earmarked to this region," Doyle said. "The people down in Washington, D.C. didn't just decide, 'Hey, let's throw all this money at Pittsburgh and see what happens.'"
The result: young people, who once fled the region in wave after wave, now have the ability to stay — including all four of Doyle's children, he said.
"My grandkids live in Cranberry. That's the farthest away I have to travel to see my kids. There's a lot of parents from the old economy that aren't able to say that. That's always been my dream," Doyle said.
In fact, the family member who works farthest from his Forest Hills home is Doyle himself. For most of his 47 years of marriage, his work desk has been about 240 miles farther away than it would've been if he'd just gone back into the insurance business, like his wife had wanted all those years ago.
That gulf never felt more vast than on a clear September morning in 2001. He'd just finished breakfast with close friend John Baldacci, then a fellow representative and future governor of Maine. He returned to his office just in time to see live footage of United Airlines Flight 175 exploding through the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Barely 30 minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon across the Potomac River less than 3 miles away.
"I thought a bomb went off on Capitol Hill. The whole building reverberated," Doyle said.
Doyle soon heard about another plane going down over Pittsburgh, but didn't know where it crashed and couldn't call home because the phone networks were overwhelmed.
"My family's back in Pittsburgh, I'm in D.C. I can't reach them, they can't reach me," Doyle said.
Flight 93 had crashed in Somerset County, just 20 minutes' flying time from the Capitol, the terrorists' most likely target. It was the first time Doyle witnessed an attack on the seat of U.S. democracy, but it wouldn't be the last.
"The one on Jan. 6 (2021) was even more disgusting in my mind than what happened on 9/11. Both were acts of terrorism — one foreign and one domestic," Doyle said.
His office in the Cannon House Office Building offered a commanding view of the Capitol, just across Independence Avenue. "Took me 20 years to get that office, but I got a good one," he said.
As lawmakers on the House floor debated whether to accept Arizona's election results, Doyle watched in growing alarm and then horror as a pro-Donald Trump mob gathered on the Capitol grounds, stormed the police lines and beat the officers charged with protecting him and his colleagues.
"You could see it happening," Doyle said. "Those guys, that was a living hell they went through."
While Trump watched on television from the White House, rejecting pleas to call off the attack, Doyle watched the president's supporters batter down doors and smash through windows, doing something he had believed was impossible: "I never thought anybody could breach the Capitol."
Hours later, after the rioters dispersed and darkness fell, he and his colleagues made their way through vandalized hallways that hadn't seen an assault so destructive since the War of 1812. Workers had cleaned up as best they could, but the glass shards in windows and smashed wooden doors and signs testified to the violence that had ripped through the marble corridors.
"It was disgraceful how that building was defiled by these people," Doyle said.
After the attack, Trump's supporters in Congress dropped their objections to the results in every remaining state but one: Pennsylvania, something that sparked a rare flash of anger in Doyle against Republicans from his state.
"We pretty much get along in that delegation — not everyone, but pretty much. And to see them there after what happened ..."
As the dean of the Pennsylvania delegation, its longest-serving member, Doyle spoke first, reminding his GOP colleagues that they won their offices in the very same election they were trying to invalidate — but none of them claimed they had won illegitimately.
"We were all on the same piece of paper," Doyle said, still sounding exasperated nearly two years later.
The man whose victory they certified the morning after the attack recently hosted Doyle one last time at an annual White House party for members of Congress.
More than 20 years earlier, as the Twin Towers burned on 9/11, Doyle and then-Sen. Joe Biden huddled with other members of Congress in a secure meeting place where lawmakers could get news of the unfolding attacks. It was Biden, Doyle recalled, who delivered an expletive-laden message to the room about returning to the Capitol: "We're going back in that building, and we're going back in session."
Now, with Biden in the White House and Doyle in the waning days of his career, the First Couple smiled for photos with the couple from Forest Hills.
"And Joe very kindly said to the photographer, 'I want to get a picture with just Mike,'" Doyle said. "And he wished me well."
As he and his wife walked into the hallway, they found the House speaker waiting for them. Pelosi greeted Susan Doyle, gave Rep. Doyle a hug and "just thank[ed] me for my years," he said.
"I'm going to be 70 years old. I always promised my wife I wasn't going to be one of those politicians that served into their 70s and 80s. We would take some time for each other," Doyle said. "I'll leave with no regrets."
