Tom Brier is finding out that, sometimes, you don’t just get to run for Congress.

Sure, almost everybody says, in the abstract, they want real choices in a democracy, and that people should be applauded for climbing in to the arena and offering their service.

Nonetheless, national pundits are already working from the assumption that state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, from North York, will be the Democratic Party’s eventual candidate against incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Carroll Township, in what many expect will be one of the tightest Congressional races in Pennsylvania this year.

So Brier, a 27-year-old attorney from Hershey, routinely has to push through questions like:

You can’t win this; why not pick another race for the good of the party?

You’re too young. Why would we send someone with two years of full-time work experience to Congress?

What’s your angle? Aren’t you really just running to set yourself up for future campaigns?

He’s heard them all – even to a degree, from his parents, who last year asked the oldest of their three sons to think carefully about stepping away from a law job with a leading Philadelphia firm at a time when he’s still trying to pay down tens of thousands of dollars of student loans.

Brier swears he’s not angry at the questions. He says he understands them. And he uses them as an opportunity to let people get to know him, and take the measure of a man, so to speak.

But more than anything else he wants you to know this: He is not going away.

He plans to be on the ballot for the April 28 Democratic primary. He’s going to be working full-time over the next four months to make sure you know his name, and whether he wins or not, he really wants to give the party’s voters a choice.

“I’m not going to be a pariah, and attack him personally,” Brier said in a recent interview at his campaign office in Derry Township about his race against DePasquale, who did become the frontrunner the moment he entered the race. “But I think it’s good for voters to have a choice.”

So, next question.

How this started

Brier’s surprising journey to congressional candidate started, he said, with a side writing project on the political philosophies of America’s Founding Fathers – it became a book titled “While Reason Slept.”

Coming to the belief that the politics of 2016 had strayed pretty far from the vision the founders had about how American democracy was supposed to work, Brier set about researching and writing what would become his book during the off-hours of his judicial clerkship in Scranton.

Then, around the same time, Brier said he was jarred by the deaths of three of his former Hershey High School classmates to substance abuse problems. Their addictions become death sentences, he believes, because of a growing lack of upward mobility in America that squelches people’s desire to get clean and improve their lives.

Brier, from the relative comfort of his Philadelphia law office, looked in a mirror and realized, “I wasn’t doing anything to really help people.” And he decided – with the reality of a newly competitive Congressional district in his hometown and the surprising success of his book allowing him to pursue it full-time – that he would try to more directly become a part of the solution.

After the realignment of congressional boundaries, the district includes Dauphin County and parts of York and Cumberland counties; it includes the cities of Harrisburg and York.

“If this had been a very competitive district for a long time, there would probably be more of a party infrastructure in place and would probably be somebody in line (to seek the seat),” said Brier, who actually launched his campaign for Congress several months before DePasquale made his candidacy official.

“But there’s no one, really. And so the fact that a Lutheran minister (George Scott) could run in 2018, and win (in the Democratic primary) and come really close to beating an incumbent, I think shows that it’s really an opportunity for anybody to get involved, and that’s what the new lines created. ...

“So I sublet my apartment (in Philly), I moved all my stuff out, got an apartment here in Hershey, and moved back home.”

Brier, you might say, was born to politics.

His parents, Scranton natives Tom Sr. and Terri Brier, met while working on former Gov. Robert P. Casey’s 1986 campaign. His uncle, Patrick Brier, is married to one of U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr.'s sisters. Political discussion was a staple of family conversation during his youth, Brier says.

And then came Barack Obama, the barrier-shattering president who, someday, may rival John F. Kennedy in terms of inspiring political candidates.

Brier, who graduated from Hershey High in 2010, Dickinson College in 2014, and Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law in 2017, has lived in the present-day 10th District most of his life.

To this point, he is best known as either A) a guard on basketball teams that won league titles in high school and advanced to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Division III tournament in college; B) the author of “While Reason Slept,”; and C) a budding lawyer who clerked for a year in the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals and then joined Philadelphia’s Blank Rome law firm.

He’d like to become known as the first Democratic Congressman that parts of the newly-drawn District 10 have seen since the mid-1960s.

Is he too young?

Brier has a ready-made answer for that. Was Thomas Jefferson too young, at age 32, to write the Declaration of Independence? Was James Madison too young, at 25, to sign it?

More practically, he adds, this is a legislative seat – one where the No. 1 job is to learn about issues facing the nation, learn how constituents are affected by those issues, and put that all together and arrive at a policy choice that makes the most sense.

And shouldn’t younger Americans, who are the ones who will have to live in a climate ravaged by global warming, and who are barred from buying homes or cars because of student debt, have a voice at that table?, Brier asks.

Tom Brier, candidate for the Democratic nomination in Pa.'s 10th Congressional District, works crowds at a Harrisburg event this summer.submitted by Brier campaign

As a candidate, Brier hews to the progressive side of the Democratic Party. Here’s a sampling of his stands on some top issues:

Climate change: Far past merely putting America back among the signatories to the Paris Climate Accord, Brier has endorsed Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey’s Green New Deal, an initiative aimed at making the United States a leader in moving the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Campaign finance reform: Brier says he would support and work for a constitutional amendment to prohibit businesses and corporations from being able to make political contributions.

Student debt: He supports efforts to permit more students to earn debt forgiveness of student loans by completing a set period of public service, with a broader definition of what public service is. Brier also supports capping interest rates on student loans at 3.5 to 4 percent.

Tax reform: Brier would like to upset the current federal tax code by closing corporate tax loopholes and explore policies aimed at granting the government equity stakes in companies that are using taxpayer-funded technological advances to make a profit. Proceeds from such moves, Brier said, could be plowed back into lower effective tax rates for low- and moderate-income families.

As for his primary opponent, Brier has three main lines of attack on DePasquale’s record.

DePasquale, he noted, voted as a state legislator for the 2011 bill that set up the Congressional districts that were ultimately thrown out by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2018 as a product of illegal gerrymandering. That was tantamount to denying the vote to central Pa. Democrats, Brier says.

And now, Brier said, “he’s coming back to the same voters whose voting rights he took away for a decade and asking for their vote. That’s the definition of a hypocrite, and that’s exactly why we’re in this position now, is that we’ve had these crimes against democracy for a long time."

“To fix that system, we need to do the opposite what the establishment is doing,” Brier said.

Brier has sworn off all money from corporate- or business-funded political action committees, something he says DePasquale has relied upon heavily in the past. Voters can be assured of his sincerity when it comes to tackling this issue, Brier says.

He also flags DePasquale for voting for a bill that Perry sponsored when both men were in the Pa. House, which expanded the rights of gun owners to shoot in self-defense when on their properties or in their cars. The expansion of the state’s “Castle Doctrine” law had previously applied only to intruders to a residence.

DePasquale was one of 54 House Democrats who supported Perry’s bill in 2011; only 37 opposed.

Brier said he believes this kind of policy only adds fuel to the gun violence problem facing America, by giving more people license to resort to deadly force first when other alternatives may be available.

PennLive gave DePasquale the opportunity to respond to Brier’s criticisms last week; the auditor general declined for this story, saying that he will address Brier’s critiques over the course of the campaign.

There are plenty of Democrats who say they have been impressed with Brier’s first run, including his steady progress toward a stated goal of raising $500,000 for the primary campaign. (DePasquale, as of the latest filings, has more cash on hand, but Brier insists that with about $210,000 already on hand as of Jan. 1, he will also have more than enough to run a full-fledged advertising campaign this spring.)

But DePasquale has cleaned up in the endorsement primary, with long lists of local and county elected officials in his corner.

It’s not a knock against Brier, many say.

“But when you’re talking about somebody to go head-to-head with Representative Perry, I think it takes some experience and people’s familiarity with your work to be competitive on that front,” said Chris Dietz, a Millersburg borough council member who’s endorsed DePasquale.

Dietz also said, as one Democrat, “I’d rather have money to spend against Congressman Perry in the fall, than be spending it in the primary,” but he acknowledged that Brier has earned the right to run his campaign as he sees fit.

If anyone is thinking it privately, however, so far no one has publicly called on him to leave the race in the interest of party unity.

Which is good, because Brier is pushing back hard on the notion that his candidacy could somehow harm the Democrats’ chance of taking the 10th.

The reality is, Brier said, his efforts to register voters on five different college campuses, and his outreach to heavily-Democratic but historically light-voting precincts in the cities of York and Harrisburg, are doing exactly the kind of party-building that the party’s nominee, whoever it is, will need to pull off this upset.

“I think we have tapped into the very demographic that is necessary to win in the general,” Brier says. “For a Democrat to win in a race like this, it’s about getting new voters, registering people to vote, and inspiring people to turn out at a clip that President Obama was able to. ... And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Those new voters could have the secondary effect, he notes, of helping to secure Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes for the Democratic presidential nominee.

“It’s a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come back to my hometown and run in the most important district in the most important state in the most important election of our entire lifetimes.”