Capitol Beat
State Rep. Bryan Cutler will serve as minority chair of the House Education Committee in the next legislative session. Pennsylvania House Republican Photography
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GOP state Rep. Bryan Cutler held top leadership positions in the House Republican Caucus through some historic moments – including the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 presidential cycle and its aftermath, as well as the development of new state legislative maps.
Following the 2024 election, in which Republicans were unable to flip the chamber into their control, Cutler decided to step down from GOP leadership after stints as minority leader, majority leader and speaker of the house. City & State recently spoke with Cutler about his time in GOP leadership, the results of the 2024 election cycle and what advice he’d like to pass on to new legislative leaders in the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
When you look back at your time in GOP leadership – whether it’s majority leader, speaker, minority leader – what are you most proud of?
For me, personally, one of the things I’m most proud of is the ability to actually solve problems. It really was not the easiest of times. You look back, particularly when I was leader, 2019 to 2020, you had COVID, you had the 2020 election. You had a lot of upheaval going on at that point. Despite all of that, we were still able to get a lot done.
In my time as leader, in 2019 and 2020, we passed a record number of bills out of the House. I think the exact number was 648. That was obviously during the COVID shutdown, so we had 21 bills that got vetoed, most of which dealt with that, some of which dealt with other things like the Election Code, things like that.
But even those bills that were vetoed passed with strong, bipartisan margins. That’s always kind of been my way of solving problems, and I took that into my role, both as leader and then speaker, and then again back as leader. I’ll carry that into the Education Committee now as we look towards the next session.
In terms of specific legislation, my first bill actually protected the constitutional rights of hunters from illegal search and seizures. Bill Kortz was my Democrat lead on that. Fast-forward to when I was leader, Leader Frank Dermody and I worked on Pennie, our state-based insurance exchange. That was kind of a weird political overlap, where both Gov. Tom Wolf and President Donald Trump both wanted the same thing. Leader Dermody and I were able to work on that together, and we got it across the finish line. Most importantly, it actually saved people money because one of the features that we put in the law was you had to post the amount of savings that was related to the re-insurance program. Year-over-year, for several years in a row, the premiums actually were cheaper than the prior year. It wasn’t a discount off a projected increase; it was an actual decrease in cost as we built that system. So that was good.
This was a cycle where Republicans scored wins up and down the ballot – but ultimately, in the state House, the Republican Caucus couldn’t flip it. Why do you think the party fell short in its quest to regain control of the chamber?
I’m not really gonna be able to give a complete answer because we don’t have all the metadata in yet. That won’t be finalized yet for a little bit longer. But just in terms of some of the raw numbers, when you look at the total number of votes netted by Republican House candidates versus our Democratic counterparts, we netted 300,000 more votes than they did.
When you start digging into it, once the data is finalized, I think you’re going to find that where those new state House district lines were drawn had a huge impact on the ability to pick up races. … This election cycle – that map is incredibly incumbent-friendly, and that carried over even to whatever party controlled that seat previously. So even with both sides having retirements, there were still no pickups. Not a single seat changed hands. There’s been plenty of cycles where we might pick up a couple, but they pick up a couple, and then the net number changes. That didn’t even happen this time. I think we’re going to see that the lines had a huge impact.
The other thing we have to look at – and I don’t have this answer yet, and we won’t until the data is finalized – is the number of under-votes (failing to select a candidate in a given race). I know here in Lancaster County, all the state House races were on the back of the ballot. We don’t know if that had an impact or not, because from a candidate standpoint and a spending standpoint, we had the best candidates we’ve ever had. I think we had record investments, both in terms of internal to the state and then external money coming in from a variety of institutions. The problem is we were still significantly outspent 6- or 7-to-1 by many of the Democratic dark money groups. That’s something that we’ll have to keep contending with – and we will.
What can Republicans do differently in the next election cycle?
We should continue to embrace mail-in voting and early absentee voting and things like that. We showed that even an incremental movement – we went from the low- to mid-20 percentile into, I think, 34% this time, and we saw those results statewide. We need to engage and carry that the rest of the way down-ballot. As long as we stay engaged and we keep doing that, I think that we’ll continue to outperform. The truth is, mail-in voting is exactly the same as absentee voting. It literally was copied and pasted, one section to the other. It’s literally the same law.
Traditionally, Republicans always did very well in absentee voting, and we oftentimes were not just competitive, but could many times win. We saw that this time in a lot of counties where the Republicans broke records. As long as we’re able to continue and improve upon that, I think our success is just beginning.
What motivated you to step aside from leadership following the election?
A couple of things. One – again, this goes back to how I was raised – I had my shot to get us back to the majority, regardless of whether the reasons were internal or external. The job wasn’t done, so it’s time to put fresh people in the room. Part of being a leader is recognizing when it’s time to change some of the players on the field. I was willing to do that. I think that will be for the benefit of the caucus.
On a personal level, that’s a very high burnout rate job in terms of the amount of traveling and the engagement across the state. So I was ready to take that step back, spend a little bit more time in the district and go back to working issues myself. One of the challenges of being leader is you often don’t have your own issues, because your top priorities are everybody else’s in the caucus. So I’d like to go back and be that resource for those who are still there, but be able to go back to work on issues and find solutions to individual issues that I am very passionate about. So that’s really what drove that decision.
What are some of the issues you are prioritizing?
Well, we’ve done a lot of work in this area, but we’ve still got some to do, and that’s in the career and technical world. This is something we started under Gov. Wolf, we’ve been able to continue it under Gov. Shapiro – and I hope that we can take up some of this with the skilled craftsmanship and the kinds of jobs that our employers need.
I was a very non-traditional student. I went to X-ray school right out of high school. I was in a two-year, essentially on-the-job training trade program – and I loved it; it was great. For a variety of life reasons – my father had just passed away, my mom was terminally ill – I wasn’t ready to go to college at that point in my life. And by doing that in that way, by going to a trade school first and then eventually getting a bachelor’s – and I eventually went to law school, I was significantly older – but that pathway opened up my eyes to how we present those kinds of entryways to our students.
I don’t know that it’s always best to send people out of high school to college, incur a bunch of debt, to maybe change majors and not really know where they are going … I’ve always believed that education is the great equalizer. It’s what opens the doors for people. Ensuring that people have a good-paying career and not incur a bunch of debt to secure that, I think, is essential for our success as a commonwealth as we go forward. I think that the Education Committee is best suited to impact those issues there.
As a new slate of leaders takes over in the House Republican Caucus, is there any advice you’d like to pass on to them?
One of the things that I always enjoyed – I started it as whip, and honestly, it became more difficult once I was leader, and obviously my time as speaker was really impacted by COVID – but one of my favorite parts was going out to members’ districts. I go, I meet with them, see their districts. You can learn a lot about the members on both sides of the aisle, because I’ve done it for Republicans and Democrats … Get to know the other members and understand their “why.” Because once you understand their “why,” you’ll understand what motivates them and how they make decisions.
Unfortunately, that became very difficult during COVID, and one of the things that I talked to Leader Bradford about was we essentially had three classes of individuals … where those members didn’t do orientation like I did, or Leader Bradford did, or even Leader Topper. Our classes did bipartisan orientation. We had dinners together. We had committee dinners together … when you know members as people and you understand their issues – the truth is, you’re a lot more willing to come to an agreement to solve a problem.
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