PITTSBURGH (KDKA Newsradio) — Pittsburgh-based attorney Jason Richey announced his run for governor of Pennsylvania on the KDKA Radio Morning Show on Thursday.
“It’s nice to announce, formally for the first time — on your program exclusively — that I will be running for governor as a Republican,” he said. “We are trying to come in as an outsider to change the direction of Pennsylvania.”
Richey, a 49-year-old western Pennsylvania native and a lawyer at K&L Gates, became interested in running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had a situation where we had orders from [Gov. Tom Wolf] to send the COVID patients back into the nursing homes, and at the same time, our Health Secretary [Rachel Levine] is pulling her mother out of the nursing home.
“We had decisions made from our governor where his cabinet company could stay open, but other people’s businesses weren’t, or that landscaping could go forward but construction couldn’t. So it was very, very arbitrary.
“Finally, this decision he made to ignore the Legislature and essentially take dictator powers through the Emergency Powers Act, something that the people of Pennsylvania just overruled on Election Day.
“And,” Richey continued, “we have an attorney general in Josh Shapiro who’s supposed to be protecting our constitutional rights, supposed to be protecting the rule of law, and he didn’t do anything at all. No investigation on any of that because that would not have been in the best interests of his political career. And so, that upset me. It upset me as a citizen of Pennsylvania. It upset me as an attorney.”
Related
Richey said his son suggested he run for governor. Although this is his first foray into politics, Richey knows state government through his work as an attorney.
“On behalf of clients at K&L Gates, I’ve been around challenging government action now in about 40 states,” he said. “That experience is going to be incredibly valuable as we have to fix what's happening in Pennsylvania.”
Richey developed his own plan for the future of the state, which he calls a “contract with Pennsylvanians.” It aims at lowering taxes, driving business investment, and continuing to develop the energy, manufacturing and construction sectors. He also said he plans to eliminate wasteful spending.
Richey is a husband and father of three teenage boys in Sewickley.