| abstract
| - HARRISBURG -- When legislative leaders talk about reform, three words come up a lot: "procedure" and "access" and "openness." They say that judging by those criteria, the Legislature has come a long way in the last year. And, if those are your criteria, that is true. It is far easier to get expense records for lawmakers now. We have a lobbying disclosure law that is far weaker than the federal law, but at least we finally have one. When the House voted on a transportation bill last summer, leaders and Deputy Speaker Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery, hailed the fact that new House rules meant House members had time to read the bill before debating it. That didn't used to happen, of course. And being able to read and digest a bill before voting on it, when it adds tolls to a major highway and could raise tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike by 50 percent within seven years, is crucial to the democratic process. Of course, the usual suspects on both sides voted as they would have if it had been the bad old days and they hadn't read the bill, but still it's good they had the chance. The House also proved, confounding the predictions of many lobbyists and insiders, that bills could be passed even if members, lobbyists and actual experts could read them first. There is other progress: There are a jillion records, reports, committee actions and other things that you can now get on the Internet or will be able to get on the Internet soon, that you couldn't get before without delays rivaling those of the old Soviet bureaucracy. And there seems to be determination on all sides to pass a new state open records law, and to apply it to the Legislature, not just to county and municipal governments and school districts. Even better, it seems as if the new law will presume records are open - albeit with something like 26 exceptions - rather than closed, as the law presumes now. So why do so many critics persist, and why are these actions not hailed as reform? Because so little has changed. While lawmakers and the governor answered questions during budget negotiations, questions about whether education would get another $200 million or whether other programs would get $50 million here or $75 million there were waved off with comments like "I'm not going to get into details." Hey, it's not like it's the people's money and they might like to know, or anything. The legislative leaders are pretending to be OB/GYNs, but unlike new babies, budgets don't have to be layered over with gunk and kept away from the public. The Legislature just prefers to decide how to spend your money in private. When the new House rules prevented amendments right before bills were passed, they were hailed as a big change. And they would have been, if uniformly observed. But those rules were followed, um, unless the bills involved state infrastructure spending projects or the rules were inconvenient on the last two days of the budget session. Then they were ignored. How much change is that? As one critic griped: "Finding out quicker by e-mail and Internet that they are doing the same old crap is not the kind of change the folks who ejected 24 state lawmakers and a Supreme Court justice were asking for." Reform is not about a better-ventilated same-old process. Shapiro was asked Monday at the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon for evidence that, as he claimed, the reforms gave more power to the House and took it from the leaders. And there are several procedural ways in which that has occurred, including taking away the power of the House Rules Committee to substantively amend legislation. But he chose the transportation bill as his example, which is ironic, because while House lawmakers did get to read it, that is all the House got to do with it. It was conceived by the Senate, then the House version was de-Housed completely by the Senate. And that was done so late the House had no choice but to pass the Senate version, protecting the Senate's patronage haven, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, from the House. If that is empowerment, most House members would prefer less of it. Plus, there is not much hope the House will pass further property tax reduction or campaign finance donation limits or toughen the lobbying disclosure law or enact PHEAA reform or turnpike reform or term limits or reduce the size of the Legislature or reduce legislative account surpluses or reform the cozy, insular, incumbent-protecting legislative redistricting system. Even modest further proposals for transparency, like making campaigns reveal their donations far more often, seem to be going nowhere. Even the optimistic Shapiro says he will change his mind and tout a constitutional convention if major reforms like campaign finance reform and others are not enacted by the end of 2008. But since such reforms are unlikely in a re-election year, they really have about two months to get done. Which means it is unlikely -- bordering on impossible -- that real change will happen in Shapiro's time frame. And that will remain true as long as lawmakers believe voters are now over their pay-raise, anti-Legislature revulsion that defeated 24 lawmakers at the polls in 2006, and led to 30 retirements. So unless most of the seven statewide judges up for retention this fall lose, or dozens of county-level retention judges lose, lawmakers will continue to assume voters have finally returned to their pre-pay-raise apathy. In which case, little more disclosure will come, much less real change.
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