OFF THE FLOOR:
Two major state government reforms are underrated, laudable
Commentary • Feb. 18, 2008
By Peter L. DeCoursey
Bureau Chief Capitolwire
HARRISBURG (Feb. 18) — What does the recently-enacted Open Records Law have in common with Gov. Ed Rendell's stalled second-term policy agenda?
Both are testaments to the power of reform and the sheer amount of reform that has taken place in state government.
For a change, the debate about the state Open Records Law is whether it deserves a "B" or an "A" for a grade. Usually our reform laws are teetering between a "C" and a "D," if they aren't an "F."
Under this law, lots of records now unavailable to the public will be on the Web, including state contracts and any document submitted to the state requesting state funding. The public can now find out who applied, who won and who lost state grants, including the "WAM" grants doled out at the discretion of legislative leaders.
And many laudable reforms contained only in changeable House and Senate rules are now enacted into law.
While some government accountability advocates wail that the State Ethics Commission, not the Department of Community and Economic Development, should oversee the process, they are wrong.
The Ethics Commission is supposed to secretly review ethical charges and then issue a decision or opinion, all the while protecting individual privacy.
That is exactly the wrong culture in which to embed the open records agency, whose mission is precisely opposite: that every record is open, unless there is a specific reason for it not to be.
If the Open Records Office is housed in DCED, the bureaucracy can be pressured into not opening records for fear of the governor and Legislature, but it also can be shoved in specific cases by public pressure on the governor and Legislature, who control their budget, into releasing records.
The recent history of getting disputed open records from the state or Legislature is simple: if the governor or lawmaker feels enough pressure, they give them out. If not, they don't.
If the office was in the Ethics Commission, public officials could press to keep records secret, but when the public or media pressured them, they could say: "Gosh, I can't pressure the Ethics Commission. That would be wrong."
So keeping that office in DCED, which can be squeezed like an accordion by secrecy-mongers and open records advocates, is better than putting it in the Ethics Commission's Temple of Secrecy.
Equally significant are the rules reforms in both chambers.
I have spent a lot of column inches these last six months detailing how absenteeism, the Bonusgate investigation and inter-caucus House Democratic dissension have stalled the Rendell and House Democratic agenda.
But there is no question that House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Greene, is right in naming a fourth major contributing cause: genuine rules reforms that have transformed the passage of legislation.
The House rules changes that the Speaker's Reform Commission developed, and DeWeese championed in almost all cases, have made passing major legislation much more difficult.
Unless both parties agree to do so, DeWeese can't use his majority to gut a bill, replace it with an amendment and pass it through the House within a few hours, before anyone had a chance to read it.
DeWeese technically retains the power to do that through the Appropriations Committee. But when the Democrats have tried that, it backfired so they lost the underlying bills. The fact that the maneuver now has a taint on it is another sign of reform.
So DeWeese has unilaterally disarmed himself, forsaking the "Gut, Replace and Pass Fast" method that House and Senate GOP leaders used from 1995 to 2006 to pass a big chunk – more than half – of their major bills. If DeWeese were a football coach, his job now is like trying to win games when the other team knows you can never call a pass play.
With that rule in place, and the caucus dissension and other problems, DeWeese can now only move big measures through the House when House Republican leaders, usually under pressure from two-dozen GOP members, agree to let him do so.
When that consensus does not exist, the 24-hour-no-vote-after-amendments rule gives a minority time to find good points of attack to wedge not-so-loyal House Democrats away from the proposed House Democratic proposal.
From a citizen's viewpoint, that is good: if agendas are being slowed until bills actually make sense and accomplish their intent, that is a good thing.
And why did it take centuries for the House to adopt a rule that achieves that laudable purpose?
Yes, the House Democrats are struggling to pass their initiatives on alternative energy reform and investment, health insurance expansion, medical research incentives and many other issues.
But they are trying to do so under the most open and best procedural rules in the history of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
Making our laws the right way may not be the Gov. Ed Rendell "Proccess, what process, it's the result that matters!" mantra, but it is a needed antidote to the way the House had been functioning.
Do I think that House Speaker Emeritus John Perzel, R-Philadelphia, and former House Majority Leader and Speaker Jim Manderino, D-Westmoreland, would have been more successful under these rules than DeWeese has been?
Yes, although they too would be hampered under these rules, and I doubt Perzel would have allowed rules to straitjacket him this severely. And I wonder if the House GOP re-takes that chamber, how long it will take for them to undo those rules? Two hours, max?
When the rules reforms were enacted a year ago, I and many others dismissed them as wind chimes: a pretty noise, not very important.
I was wrong, and so, I think, were the others.
There is a lot more to do, but no one should overlook the impressive extent of reform in the last 14 months, nor avoid giving credit to Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi and, as House Open Records negotiators with Pileggi, DeWeese and Deputy Speaker Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery.
And for the House rules which have procedurally moved the House forward, Reps. David Steil, R-Bucks, and Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery, and the other lawmakers for the underrated reforms they brought to the state Legislature.
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