Suggestions for Pa. House speaker

Pennsylvania has a new speaker of the state House, Rep. Mark Rozzi of Berks County.

Rozzi, a Democrat who is best known for fighting for the rights of child sex abuse victims, was a surprise pick, considering Republicans temporarily hold a slim majority in the House.

If they had united, the GOP could have chosen one of their own. Instead, 16 Republicans voted for Rozzi. Let’s hope this is a sign that the extreme partisanship that has reigned in the Legislature is waning.

Rozzi’s first move as speaker was refreshing.

He pledged to shed his partisan label and operate as an independent. He said he wouldn’t participate in the caucus of either party, and his staff would include Republicans and Democrats.

Now it’s time to get to work. Here are three suggestions for Rozzi in his new role.

Three House seats are vacant, all in Allegheny County, and the House speaker decides when special elections will be held to fill them. The dates of the elections, all of which are expected to be won by Democrats, were a point of dispute in recent weeks amid the power struggle for the House.

Rozzi already took steps to clean up this problem. On Wednesday, the Department of State received paperwork from him scheduling the two contested election dates for Feb. 7.

Longtime Rep. Anthony DeLuca died before Election Day.

It was too late to remove his name from the ballot and voters elected him. Reps. Austin Davis and Summer Lee were reelected but resigned because they also were elected to higher office, Davis as lieutenant governor and Lee to Congress.

The parties settled on Feb. 7 for the election for DeLuca’s seat. But the other two elections were scheduled for May 16, the date of the primary.

That was dirty politics, because it would assure Republicans retain the majority for at least that long.

Rozzi was right to move them all to Feb. 7. It will ensure voters in those districts are represented sooner.

The House speaker also decides who leads the 28 House committees. Those are important positions.

Committee chairs decide which bills will be voted on and advanced in the legislative process, and which bills might as well be burned because they never will be considered.

That’s a lot of power. It has been wielded wrongly at times by previous chairs to block good legislation, sometimes for no reason other than politics.

Rozzi can solve this problem. He can appoint level-headed representatives who are independent thinkers like himself to lead the committees. No more partisan hack

In recent years, the Republican-controlled state Legislature aggressively legislated through constitutional amendments.

It was their way of working around vetoes of some of their crappiest legislation by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf. Lawmakers could avoid Wolf and take their case directly to voters by asking them to approve amendments, which voters almost always do.

As speaker of the House, Rozzi controls which legislation is brought to the House floor for a vote. He can block second votes on referendums.

Not all referendums are bad, though. Some deserve to be followed through on, including one that is of deep personal interest to Rozzi.

It would ask voters if the state Constitution should be amended to allow a two-year window for child sex abuse victims to sue, despite the statute of limitations having expired.

The referendum was driven by the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church that was exposed in a grand jury probe led by Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro. Three years ago, Rozzi sued the Allentown Diocese and Holy Guardian Angels Parish in Reading, saying he was sexually abused by a priest in the 1980s, when he was 13.

In August, Wolf and legislative leaders announced they reached a bipartisan agreement to complete the legislative process for that referendum this year and give long-ago victims of child sex abuse an opportunity to seek justice.

Rozzi must follow through on that commitment and bring that legislation up for a vote soon.