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Chester County Press

Who is Congressman Joe Pitts?

03/12/2014 02:05PM ● By Acl

Letter to the Editor:

The current Congress has the distinction of being the least productive and least popular Congress in the history of the nation.

Congress Job Approval Rating now sits at around 13 percent, which is a lower rating than cockroaches enjoy. So, how about our Congressman here in the 16th district, Joe Pitts?

Joe Pitts is a career politician who spent 24 years in the Pa. state legislature and 17 years in the U.S. Congress. He has never held a job for anything but a government entity. He draws a salary of $174,000 per year. This means that in his 17 years in Congress, Joe Pitts has personally taken over $5 million in salary and benefits. It is estimated that, if he retired now, he would receive over $1 million per year in pensions. 

Joe Pitts is rated as one of the least productive Congressmen in Washington. In 17 years, he has sponsored 95 bills, only 11 of which have made it out of committee and only 4 of which have been enacted. The most recent bill he sponsored that became law was to re-name a post office. In 2013, with the economy still struggling to recover from a recession, Joe Pitts voted to shut down the government, costing taxpayers $24 billion, and then he blamed everybody else in Washington for his actions. He voted 48 times to keep his constituents from getting health care coverage, while he has had uninterrupted taxpayer-financed healthcare since 1964. Joe Pitts recently said that the poor need to take more “personal responsibility,” yet he refuses to take responsibility for his actions while he lives off of our hard-earned tax dollars. 

We appear to have a Congressman who has grown fat off of government pay while doing nothing to help his constituents. Maybe the current Congress is so unpopular because they’ve all decided to emulate Joe Pitts. Come November, let’s show Joe the door and replace him with somebody who will work for us, not against us. 


Russell Losco

West Grove