Time for Pa. lawmakers to get to work

The Pennsylvania General Assembly is about to end its summer recess with the state House’s return to the Capitol on Tuesday, and the Senate arriving the following week.

There’s much important work that could be done in the House’s 24 and the Senate’s 15 remaining voting session days this year. And some of it is even on the agenda in one chamber or the other.

A bill that would set 18 as the minimum age to get married in Pennsylvania without parental or judicial consent, for example, passed the House 195-0 in June. It’s on the Senate agenda, and Gov. Tom Wolf has said he’d sign the measure. Lawmakers should pass it so Pennsylvania finally has a minimum age for marriage. Most children who marry are girls marrying adult men, which the U.S. State Department rightly calls a human rights abuse.

A bad idea that’s on the House agenda for Tuesday seeks to split Pennsylvania’s appellate court elections into districts, a move that’s touted as a move toward judicial diversity. It’s actually a partisan play by Republicans. And our lawmakers have far better things they could be doing.

For example, they could clean their own House (and Senate) by continuing a downsizing of legislative staff in which 63 House employees accepted buyouts through the end of August. The goal, according to a Pennlive report, was to replace senior workers with lower-paid employees.

A better target would be to reduce legislative staff overall. According to the most recent report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, Pennsylvania had nearly 3,000 permanent legislative staffers in 2015, second only to New York. Despite the recent House cuts, the number of staffers in the General Assembly now exceeds 2,800. Many of these positions are duplicative, with each party in each chamber having its own professional in a technical role that would be better served by a single nonpartisan professional.

One example of extreme waste, and an excellent place to start the cutting, are the public relations operations costing taxpayers nearly $10 million per year that were revealed in an LNP report this year.

“The Legislature’s equipment includes at least three TV studios built to produce state-run, news-like programs that feature lawmakers,” the report found. “The four caucuses — Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate — have a combined public relations staff of about 130 people.”

If lawmakers want to promote themselves, they should use campaign money for that, and leave taxpayers out of it.

Another area in which our lawmakers need to show faith with the people of Pennsylvania is by pursuing reform of the state’s redistricting process. The manipulation of district lines to serve partisan interests is nothing new. The slang term for it, gerrymandering, after all, is named for Elbridge Gerry, who served as Massachusetts’ governor in the early 19th century.

With modern technology, though, this problem has grown worse, and it’s hardly cynical to observe that lawmakers are picking their voters rather than the other way around.

The 2020 census is coming up, making this the right time to at least begin addressing this high-tech perversion of our representative system of government.

A nonpartisan citizens commission would be a much better way to draw district lines than leaving it to the politicians who run in them. Given that Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor and a Republican Legislature, a compromise that serves the public interest over partisan considerations should be possible.

A citizens commission with the power to make decisions could be set up for congressional races beginning in 2022. And while amending the state constitution to put a similar system in place for state House and Senate districts is probably not possible in time for the next census, a step in a more democracy-friendly direction is possible. A commission system could be tasked with offering a map to be considered by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission now tasked with drawing the General Assembly lines. And legislative leaders could encourage their appointees to that commission to accept it.

Citizens should encourage their lawmakers to get to work on outlawing child marriages, cleaning up their own chambers and making democracy work for them in the coming weeks.