Barletta talks energy, Saudi Arabia during Washington County campaign stop
U.S. Senate candidate Lou Barletta met behind closed doors with employees of natural gas driller Range Resources during a campaign stop in Washington County Monday.
Barletta, a Republican, spoke to reporters following the early afternoon visit to the company’s Southpointe offices, where staff at the front desk stopped members of the media from joining the event Barletta’s campaign had described ahead of time as an “employee townhall.”
Following the event, Barletta – a Republican congressman who’s challenging Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey Jr. – touted the fossil fuel industry as a way to stop an exodus of younger Pennsylvanians from the state.
“There’s nothing else I envision for Pennsylvania that’d do more to bring these kind of jobs here, to keep people here – our children here – than energy,” said Barletta, 62.
Last year, Barletta praised the Trump administration for backing out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. He also criticized Casey’s support of the Clean Power Plan, a set of measures implemented in a bid to curb global warming that Barletta called harmful to the state’s economy.
Recent polls have shown Casey, 58, with a double-digit lead over the four-term House member.
One published last month by Franklin & Marshall College’s Center for Opinion Research in Lancaster showed 50 percent of likely voters favoring the incumbent to Barletta’s 33 percent. Another 15 percent were undecided.
Barletta also discussed the evident assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who disappeared when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 2.
“The Saudis are our allies, obviously, we’re tied to them militarily and financially,” Barletta said. “But nonetheless, this cannot be tolerated at all. So they need to come forth with the truth.”
He said Saudi Arabia’s government should face consequences “if, in fact, it is what we think it is.”
Barletta wouldn’t say whether or not he wanted that response to include ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led invasion of its neighbor Yemen, which since 2015 has killed unknown thousands of civilians and caused widespread famine, or stopping weapons exports to Saudi Arabia, the largest buyer of U.S. arms.
“Let’s see what the administration’s idea is. … We’ll wait and see what those measures might be, what kind of sanctions it could be, what will happen” Barletta said. “But it can’t and shouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.”