Reducing governor’s emergency power

It is Mother’s Day weekend, so I wanted to start with a quick “Happy Mother’s Day” to the two most important moms in my life, my mom (obviously) and my wife:

Happy Mother’s Day!

Now, and without graceful transition, let’s talk about the upcoming election. May 18th brings all voters the chance to vote on one referendum and three constitutional amendments. These are not primaries. These are the final vote on these four issues.

Two of the constitutional amendments concern the governor’s power to declare emergencies. This is an effort to overcome a longstanding problem the legislature has with the state’s constitution that was highlighted by the governor’s handling of the pandemic. The problem, as the Republican controlled legislature sees it, is that the governor is a Democrat.

It turns out that Pennsylvania is not as purple as one might think. In fact, registered Democrats have a 19% edge over registered Republicans. But because of the geographical distribution of voters, our districts (even when redrawn by the state’s Supreme Court) favor Republicans. So while the GOP has controlled both chambers of the assembly for most of the last 20 years, we have had a Republican governor for only six.

The pandemic provides an imperfect political cover to reset the checks and balances in favor of a branch over which Republicans have stable control.

In the governor’s haste to curtail the pandemic, he made a lot of hard decisions and some of them went badly. He owes it to Pennsylvanians to transparently investigate how the pandemic was handled, for accountability and to better plan for the next one.

However, it is difficult to tell how the proposed amendments to the state constitution would improve on what was done or provide that accountability.

Currently the legislature can terminate an emergency order by passing a resolution and sending it to the governor for his signature. If he vetoes it, the assembly can override the veto with a twothirds vote. These checks and balances already exist.

One of the amendments would reduce the length of time a governor can declare an emergency and require legislative approval to continue it. The second would remove the governor from the termination process completely, and thereby reduce the number of votes required to override a governor from twothirds to a simple majority, removing the checks and balances on the legislature’s power.

Before the pandemic, the only protracted use of this power has been in the state’s fight against the ongoing opioid epidemic, which seemed to be working so nobody said anything about it.

During the pandemic, though, science, medicine, and health became political topics in a way that most reasonable people can agree was as unpredictable as it was surreal. Experts in epidemiology and infectious diseases at all levels agreed on what some very basic measures were, but taking — or not taking — those measures somehow became a badge of political alignment instead of what it was: an attempt to slow a highly contagious and deadly virus.

It turns out that these health experts were right about most of the recommendations they were making and adapted recommendations as they learned more. While it has been an agonizing year, science is prevailing.

Meanwhile Pennsylvania’s conservative politicians lined up to speak out against masks. Some Republican members of the Assembly refused to wear masks at meetings. Last May, when the curve was barely a blip compared to where it went over the winter holidays, Republicans voted to reopen Pennsylvania placing the importance of the economy ahead of the health, welfare, and lives of those who are the economy.

Our Republican assembly members believe that the solution to the pandemic was not to take it more seriously, not to pressure Washington for more emergency funding, not to provide more help to struggling business owners, not to provide more funding or solutions to give schools better options, not to follow science and the hard evidence of our ongoing experience with this virus, but instead to take away some of the governor’s powers and install them as their own.

Taking some of the power from the executive would only make sense if it could be demonstrated that the General Assembly had more expertise, but the ruling majority in our legislative branch has consistently shown that it has no interest in expertise, so why should we place our trust in them?

Vote “No” to these two amendments on May 18th to preserve our checks and balances.

Wood