{"id":152936,"date":"2026-03-31T03:37:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T03:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/152936\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:37:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T03:37:21","slug":"opinion-the-scrappy-mayor-showing-democrats-how-its-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/152936\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | The Scrappy Mayor Showing Democrats How It\u2019s Done"},"content":{"rendered":"

Representative Rob Bresnahan is in a sticky political spot. A Pennsylvania Republican, he ran for the House in 2024 on a vow to end congressional stock trading, only to spend his freshman year becoming one of Congress\u2019s most prolific traders<\/a> \u2014 fifth in terms of the number of trades, as of the end of 2025.<\/p>\n

Worse, several of his trades appear to have benefited<\/a> from some of his congressional votes.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bresnahan\u2019s go-to defense has been that impropriety is impossible because a financial adviser independently handles all his trades. Last week, Politico called attention to a 2025 radio interview<\/a> in which he mentions talking with his financial adviser about \u201cwhat different positions are coming up.\u201d A spokesman for Mr. Bresnahan, Chris Pack, told me the comment had been taken out of context and similarly assured Politico that such discussions involve \u201c30,000-foot investment strategy,\u201d not specific trades. <\/p>\n

Which brings us to possibly the stickiest problem for Mr. Bresnahan: He is running for re-election in Pennsylvania\u2019s swingy Eighth Congressional District against the Democrat Paige Cognetti.<\/p>\n

Currently in her third term as the mayor of Scranton, Ms. Cognetti knows government corruption. She has, in fact, spent the past decade working various jobs to clean up her corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, a region long known for public graft, grift and mismanagement.<\/p>\n

Notably, some of her fiercest fights have been with her own party. She first ran for mayor as an independent in 2019, to replace a Democratic incumbent who had pleaded guilty to extortion, bribery and conspiracy<\/a>. Pitching herself as a scourge of the local Democratic machine, she vowed to clean up City Hall. Her unofficial slogan became \u201cPaige against the machine,\u201d a play on the band Rage Against the Machine.<\/p>\n

Cheesy but effective. Ms. Cognetti carried the crowded field to become Scranton\u2019s first female mayor, then (mere weeks after giving birth to her first child) got to work overhauling how the city operated in areas such as contractor hiring and data tracking. Voters were impressed. She cruised to re-election in 2021 and again last November on essentially the same reform platform \u2014 the one she is now counting on to take her to Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been running this same campaign from 2019 to date,\u201d she said in a recent interview. \u201cMake government work for the people. Public service is to serve others, not yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not every Democratic candidate is fortunate enough to be running against someone with Mr. Bresnahan\u2019s promiscuous trading record. But all of them can learn from Ms. Cognetti\u2019s anticorruption moxie, a dose of which could help a Democratic Party struggling to regain the public\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n

Ms. Cognetti has been happily pummeling Mr. Bresnahan on the stock-trading issue. But she is quick to point out that there are \u201cvery high-profile examples\u201d of this behavior on both sides of the aisle, along with reform fans in both parties. \u201cI mean, the president mentioned it in his State of the Union.\u201d<\/p>\n

In campaigning against the Washington swamp, the out party traditionally enjoys an edge. In 2018, Democrats decried the corruption and chaos of Trump 1.0 and won back the House. In 2006, a string of Republican scandals \u2014 including the indictment and later resignation of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, on campaign finance-related charges and revelations that Representative Mark Foley had been creeping on young House pages \u2014 helped Democrats flip both chambers of Congress.<\/p>\n

But Democrats cannot kick back and expect the politics of scandal to play out as they usually do. Today\u2019s anticorruption zeitgeist feels different. Americans aren\u2019t upset with one party\u2019s misconduct; they are sick of the whole system, and many see Democrats as the champions of an illegitimate status quo. Last summer a poll commissioned by the progressive government-reform group End Citizens United found that among likely voters in House battleground districts, slightly more<\/a> considered Democrats to be corrupt than Republicans (49 to 44 percent). Respondents said they trusted Republicans more \u201con key issues like standing up to special interests\u201d and \u201cfighting government corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Cognetti\u2019s path shows how to build the credibility Democrats lack. Having worked on Democratic campaigns and served in President Barack Obama\u2019s Treasury Department, she dove into local politics in 2018, as a director on Scranton\u2019s troubled school board. \u201cI really started to battle the Democratic machine from then, because the school district is the first stop on the way to City Council and other places,\u201d she said. In 2019 she went to work as a special assistant to the auditor general, Pennsylvania\u2019s top fiscal watchdog. \u201cI was happily doing that when the mayor of Scranton got indicted,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n

Ask Ms. Cognetti what reform she is proudest of as mayor, and you\u2019ll get a list of unglamorous-sounding achievements. Under her, the city put in place systems to improve financial accountability. It did away with cash payments for city business. Its code-enforcement department was professionalized. A whistle-blower hotline was set up. Nepotism in hiring, a long-running tradition, was rooted out. \u201cHiring on merit\u201d is something that \u201cbreaks through\u201d with the public, she told me.<\/p>\n

Ms. Cognetti has refused a government car and a gas card. She pays for her own travel, even for job-related trips, and she pays for her own stamps for correspondence like sympathy cards.<\/p>\n

I asked whether such small-bore efforts really matter or if they might risk seeming a little gimmicky. \u201cIt matters because the previous folks had enriched themselves,\u201d she insisted. With her mayoral predecessor having been found with stacks of cash in his home and ultimately sentenced<\/a> to seven years in prison, Ms. Cognetti felt she needed to \u201cdraw a contrast,\u201d she stressed. \u201cYou have to build trust back. And part of that is doing some things that sometimes is an overcorrection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reforms like outlawing congressional stock trading would allow members to similarly signal \u201cthat they are about service and not themselves,\u201d she said. Polls show that a vast majority<\/a> of Americans support a ban, which Ms. Cognetti considers a no-brainer.<\/a> \u201cIt is not at all about begrudging anyone\u2019s wealth,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just, do it as a private citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Cognetti is well aware that there are more systemic problems plaguing Washington. Opening up primary elections currently restricted to voters affiliated with a party is one of the items on her list to tackle. And like many Democrats, she is all for draining the dark money from politics.<\/p>\n

But the more discrete, easier-to-get-your-arms-around issues still matter. In many cases, she said, those battles are \u201cthe kind of stuff that resonates with people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bresnahan had better hope she\u2019s wrong on this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Representative Rob Bresnahan is in a sticky political spot. A Pennsylvania Republican, he ran for the House in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[57433,7975,69512,6375,902,3613,69352,69510,28,69509,178,69508,180,179,69511],"class_list":{"0":"post-152936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-bresnahan","9":"tag-cognetti","10":"tag-corruption-institutional","11":"tag-democratic-party","12":"tag-elections","13":"tag-house-of-representatives","14":"tag-midterm-elections-2026","15":"tag-paige","16":"tag-pennsylvania","17":"tag-rob-jr","18":"tag-scranton","19":"tag-scranton-pa","20":"tag-scranton-headlines","21":"tag-scranton-news","22":"tag-united-states-politics-and-government"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}