“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session,” is a quote attributed to both Mark Twain and Gideon Tucker, but it seems that the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t believe it, to judge by the OpEd space they gave to this gem:
Pa. House Dems are not voting for months due to a leaky roof. That’s unacceptable.
Our elected officials can’t let obstacles — including leaky roofs — stop them from doing the people’s work. While the Capitol is under renovation, there are many places where they could meet instead.
by Matthew J. Brouillette, For The Inquirer | Tuesday, December 19, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST
In 1897, after a fire devastated the Pennsylvania Capitol, the legislature met at Grace Methodist Church in Harrisburg. Even a gutted Capitol couldn’t stop our elected officials from doing the people’s work.
Fast forward to 2023, and Pennsylvania House Democratic leaders announced their chamber will not hold votes for the next three months — until mid-March — because of a leaky ceiling in the House chamber. They plan to take off the entire winter for a leak that was caused by damage reportedly discovered in December of 2022.
You read that correctly. One year ago.
This is an embarrassment.
As Kentuckians discovered in 2020, having a General Assembly that meets only once a year, for very curtailed sessions, is not always a good thing. With the legislature out of session, and unable to reconvene unless the Governor calls a special session, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) was able to act like the dictator he wants to be in dealing with the COVID-19 panicdemic.
No, that’s not a typographical error; the spelling of panicdemic is meant to deliberately express how I saw the reaction to the virus.
Mr Beshear could have called a special session, but refused. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.
Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.
When the General Assembly was finally able to meet again, in January of 2021, as specified under the state constitution, they quickly passed laws, over the Governor’s vetoes, restricting his ’emergency powers’ under KRS 39A, specifically with KRS §39A.090, undoing the Governor’s ability to issue emergency directives which restrict the rights of the people of the Commonwealth, targeting those orders he imposed closing businesses, schools and churches, among other things, for months at a time.
However, while Kentucky’s legislature may meet only for restricted times, Pennsylvania’s legislature is just as bad, in the opposite direction: the Keystone State has a full-time state legislature! Mr Brouillette, president and CEO of Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs, wants the House back in session.
In early 2023, the state House — led by former Speaker Mark Rozzi (D., Berks) — took another extended hiatus to allow time for special elections that would once again give Democrats a slim, one-vote majority. Even with that majority, however, lawmakers have been stunningly unproductive.
Indeed, in the first six months of 2023, an analysis by the Commonwealth Foundation determined that House Democrats led the most inconsequential and unproductive Pennsylvania legislature in half a century, sending only 15 bills to the governor.
A legislature in which Democrats control the lower House sending only 15 bills to the Governor sounds like a good thing to me! The state Senate, controlled by Republicans, has the power to put a stop to Democrat stupidity, and only legislation which has bipartisan support could pass.
One thing the legislature did do was pass restrictions on Philadelphia District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, by turning over prosecution of crimes committed on SEPTA property to a special prosecutor, someone decent people hope will result in bad guys actually going to jail.
Gov. Josh Shapiro has blamed some of the lackluster performance — such as the state’s dragged-out budget negotiations — on the fact that Pennsylvania has the only full-time divided legislature in the nation. But this partisan gridlock rests squarely on the shoulders of House Democrats, who blocked the budget for months.
Even Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, one of the least consequential governors in Pennsylvania history, accomplished more with a Republican-controlled legislature.
Not coincidentally, the current plan for an extended vacation under Democratic Speaker Joanna McClinton approximately coincides with another Democratic vacancy that’s left the House divided 101-101. This raises the question of whether a leaky roof is really behind the planned adjournment — or whether Democrats are using the roof as a scapegoat for their continued incompetence.
Regardless of which party blocked passage of the budget for months, one thing is clear: the more time the legislature spends on the budget, the less time is available for other mischief, and whenever the Democrats have power, mischief is the more probable result. Democrats being in power leads to things like the idiocy of Philadelphia’s 15¢ per bag charge for using paper bags at the grocery store, or, far, far worse, an attempt to pass laws to further restrict the people’s Second Amendment rights.
Mr Brouillette did point out as an alternative is rather near-and-dear to my heart:
At the outset of the pandemic, state House lawmakers, under Republican leadership, passed temporary rules to allow remote voting. If a leaky roof threatens to shut down legislative operations, reinstating such temporary rules could be in order. Indeed, many lawmakers don’t show up in Harrisburg for session anyway, so remote voting would cater to their current absences.
There are parliamentary procedure items which might be difficult to use with remote voting and, perhaps, legislative sessions via videoconferencing, but, to me, the idea of having representatives nearer their homes, closer and more accessible to their constituents is a wholly good idea. One of Pennsylvania’s strengths is a very large state House of Representatives, one in which everybody has a chance to know, personally, their state representatives. I knew Representative Doyle Heffley (R-122nd District) when I lived in Jim Thorpe, and Mr Heffley, and his wife Kellie, knew me. If I had a concern and needed to talk to my state Representative, I could have.
This is something which could, and should, be set up for Congress as well. It’s one thing when Mr Heffley has to go from his home in Lower Towamensing Township to Harrisburg, 88 miles away, for the legislative session, but something entirely different when Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6th District) has to travel the 530 miles from his home in Lexington to Washington, DC. While I do not know if Mr Barr ever drives between the two, I do know that Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky 4th District) sometimes drives the 460 miles between his home and Washington, 7½ hours of travel, but, driving a Tesla, he has a couple of extended stops for recharging!
Consider the representatives from states like Nevada and Wyoming, who not only have huge districts geographically, but are around 2,000 miles away from Washington. Air travel makes traveling across the country easy, but think how isolated those states are from the Congress which passed laws for them. How many people from Utah have ever been to Washington?
Our senators and representatives need to be more closely connected to the constituents they represent, and allowing some form of attendance by videoconferencing and remote voting can help keep them in their districts more, and Washington less. Perhaps that will make legislative sessions less dangerous to our lives, liberty, and property.