CHAMBERSBURG – The Pennsylvania budget is now ten days late.
While that’s a small drop in the bucket compared to how late it was last year, not having a finalized budget does affect local municipalities.
Both the PA House and Senate are working this weekend.
Could the budget get done?
Attorney Clint Barkdoll noted, “If you look at the schedule they rolled out for this weekend, there are evening sessions scheduled – 7 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday, and a Sunday evening for the House and Senate coming in, and it does look like it’s teed up to pass something. But as I’ve said from the beginning, if I was the governor, I would be demanding that these people be brought in for a special session, I would lock the doors of the Capitol until this gets done. I would have started doing that in about the middle of June to avoid this. But it’s just like year after year, it’s the norm.”
We technically don’t have a federal budget either.
Barkdoll said, “That was due October 1. And again, there’s no pressure. You hear nothing about it, and it seems like the state is the same way. Everyone just kind of goes about their business, and oh, we’ll get around to this when we get around to it. Realizing that there’s school districts, all of these other entities around the Commonwealth are just sitting and waiting to find out what they’re going to receive.”
Michele Jansen of News Talk 103.7FM said, “But he’s such a great executive. He is such a great leader. Pennsylvania is so lucky, according to even the conservative outlets that say, my guess, relatively speaking, compared to everywhere else. But it’s not true. I haven’t seen Josh Shapiro be a real leader in any of this. And you would think, in the year when he’s running for governor, in two years before he wants to run for president, and let’s not kid ourselves, everybody knows it. The way he’s going after J.D. Vance right now, you would think of all times he would demonstrate that amazing leadership of his and actually get this done on time. Oh, we got it done within two weeks. I don’t care. That’s not good enough. Remember, they went in the day after that presentation, the day after, so that we could get this thing going. It’s like no, you didn’t. Look at the way Democrats in the House just said, the original thing he laid out. There it is. We did all the work.”
Barkdoll said, “I would have called a special session. I fault the Senate too. Why did they go on recess for a week at the 11th hour? Was this a ploy to create this scenario? But I still think Shapiro could have responded, said no. I’m making you stay. We’re going to do a special session to iron this out. Here we are a couple weeks now late, and we still don’t have any details. That’s the other irony of this. You talk to the rank and file lawmakers; they have no idea what’s in this package that’s about to get rolled out tomorrow and Sunday, and that concerns me. As we’ve talked about, is there just going to be a rush to vote? They all want to get this done and then move out for the rest of the summer. And are there going to be all kinds of things buried in there that we then discover well after the fact?”
Jansen said, “This is all about pressure and just getting it done. And I barely know what I’m voting for, but I’m going to vote for it because the leadership told me to. We’ll see the proof will be in the pudding. We’ll see how many compromises come out in this that I think people on both sides will be sort of disappointed about and think you guys didn’t really put a lot of effort into this.”
Pat Ryan of News Talk 103.7FM said, “There’s no pressure on them at all from the voters at all because if voters really cared on both sides, I don’t care what Democrat or Republican or Independent, you would be lighting up their phones. You would want transparency. These are the people that we have elected to represent us. And it’s just a bunch of guys in a smoky room here that will shove it back down to the rank and file. They’ll vote on it because you want to move it forward. You move it forward. We have no participation in the process, but it’s our own fault we’ve allowed this.”
Barkdoll added, “Take that to the federal level. You hear nothing out of Trump or House and Senate Republicans. We’re over nine months now without a federal budget. You don’t feel any pressure from the public. They never bring it up. They’ll just keep doing these CRs, and I think that’s why this keeps happening. These folks know they can get away with it, and there’s never any consequence for it.”
PA Senator Doug Mastriano said, “We are in the middle of a budget fight. We’re going back to starting tonight, non-voting sessions tonight, and then voting Saturday and Sunday. So we might have something done next week. A lot of people on the other side clearly don’t understand the process here. Yes, the process of getting a budget started with the governor with his proposal. Then, of course we have our version and a House version, and the governor must be in town for these negotiations to go forward. There’s a handful of people in the room. I’m not in the room. I’m not in leadership, and I’m not on the Appropriations Committee. So it’s a handful of folks from the Senate and the House and the governor, and he’s missing in action. He’s running around doing photo ops. That’s a fact. We see it on his feed, instead of him being in Harrisburg and doing his job. And I don’t know how serious they take this whole process here. If the people don’t care or if his numbers stay strong, he’ll keep on running around town. It’s only until the people of Pennsylvania say, stop the photo ops and the big smiles, and get to town and do the hard work that you were hired to do.”
Jansen said, “When even Fox News and the New York Post give him all kinds of accolades for supposedly fighting for the soul of the Democrat Party against the Socialists, which I heard no such thing out of this governor. I heard a very tepid, meek statement where he said, well, I strongly disagree with those values, but that’s who the people voted for. To me, that’s just him saying we’re a big tent party, like everybody else did, just using different words. But when they keep hearing from such news sources, I’m going to put them in quotes: news sources in this case of what a great executive he is, and what a great moderate leader he is in Pennsylvania. Where? Where’s the leadership? His own party in the House, they have majority control there, did nothing but rubber stamp his original budget. He might like that, but everybody knows that’s a pie in the sky budget. If he really had leadership skills, he’d be whipping his own majority in the House to make sure they’re doing the right thing for the people here and getting this budget through that doesn’t give away the farm on either side.”
Mastriano said, “That’s the problem. So he pretends to be a leader, but he doesn’t lead. He says mediocre things publicly because he’s mediocre, and if that and I totally don’t understand Fox News that they’ve been playing this game with him really since 2022 during the election. I remember when I was on some of the Fox programs, some of the lead-ins were really to benefit Josh Shapiro than the Republican candidate, me, and he is the face of mediocrity, but he’s a very radical person. Look at his voting record here. So it doesn’t take a big brain or a PhD to see that the guy is a far left person. He’s a typical politician, though. He’s more disciplined in what he says, and he’s very mediocre. No hard decisions, no leadership. That’s why we don’t have a budget.”
PA Representative Rich Irvin suggested, “I think it’s going to be done this Sunday. We’re actually called in on Saturday evening. Our appropriations committee is going to be meeting for the House, and then Saturday, I think the bills are positioned well enough that we could get this done in one day. It’s frustrating for me in the fact that we could have had this done probably before the Fourth of July weekend. We have a tax code bill that I think the Democrats intentionally sabotaged. There was a lot of good and agreed-to language in it as far as reducing the taxes on utilities, which I think would be one of the largest tax cuts in Pennsylvania history. I think any kind of tax cut is a good tax cut. I would be willing to make it a permanent tax cut, especially until we can get the baseload energy processing up to where it needs to be, which I know that’s a fight that we get with a lot of the left in thinking that baseload needs to come from your fossil fuel production or nuclear.”
Jansen said, “You talked about the tax code bill that was sabotaged, and I remember when you guys came in, it got very controversial very quickly, and they started loading it up with all kinds of things that would not be good for the Pennsylvania economy down the road. I’m very concerned. I know there’s not really too much you all can do about it. You don’t have the majority in the House, and frankly, once leadership speaks at this stage of the game and election year, we know we’re going to move forward. I’m a little nervous as to what we’re going to get out of the details of this as more people have more time to look at it. I mean, this idea that oh, my elected representative gets to look at everything and then we go and debate it and everybody gives their arguments. We know that’s not true, and it’s not practical in some senses. But in other senses, the pendulum has swung very, very far in a non-transparent direction, in my opinion. What are your biggest concerns for what you think might have been compromised on? Just from anything you’re hearing, or what would be the thing you’re going to be looking for?”
Irvin said, “Obviously the spend number, and I know a lot of our caucus is especially against tapping into the reserve funding, the Rainy Day Fund, at this point in time. The wins that we made last year on policy, whether it be RGGI, whether it be any kind of regulation reduction to help promote business and economic growth to make sure that we do not lose any of those gains that we had made last year. So I think between that and the spend number are the two things that I’m going to be really looking at. I think the real kicker is the EITC tax credits for your private schools and Christian schools that do go out that are very important. The Democrats have tried to shift that to nothing but low income children and families, where there’s a lot of middle-class families that are not happy with their public school education, that take advantage of that, and I think that would really hurt Pennsylvania.”
Jansen said, “It was a poorly named bill where they acted like they were just creating more transference. We were actually helping the program. No, you aren’t, and they were shifting it to early child care, which is not what it was intended for, and also cutting some of it, making it more onerous, so that businesses would no longer find it beneficial to take the tax cut to contribute. It’s just absurd. It was a big fat lie.”
Ryan suggested, “If you’re at the altar of the school unions and it’s not following the actual children and helping out those in desperate need of at least some pathway out, the results speak for themselves.”
Jansen asked, “What is the reason that they do these late night sessions here at the end?”
Irvin said, “I think my opinion is we do have busy schedules. We’re scheduled out months in advance, and I think a Saturday night and a Sunday session day probably is helpful in making sure that everyone is available for the budget to do the vote on the budget because like I said, most all your representatives do have their calendar full. I sort of plan for the whole month of July, I try to keep pretty fluid because of the fact that we haven’t been getting a budget passed on time, but as far as that goes, that would be my guess on why the speaker made the choice of bringing us in on a Sunday.”