The Pennsylvania Treasury switched investment strategies this week to grow the state’s emergency savings account.
The change of course comes after three years of hefty deposits from the General Assemby in what’s known as the Rainy Day Fund – a $6.1 billion account meant to sustain operations during economic downturns. Since 2021, the balance has increased 25-fold, taking the state’s ability to fund the government from two days to 48 days.
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Just four days remain until June 30, Pennsylvania’s Fiscal Year 2023-24 budget deadline and much still divides Republicans who control the state Senate from Governor Josh Shapiro and his fellow Democrats who control the House of Representatives.
The school-choice debate is among the most concerning facets of budget negotiations so far for the GOP. Shapiro indicated last year that he wanted the commonwealth to create “lifeline scholarships,” i.e. a private-school choice program for economically disadvantaged students in poorly performing schools. Republicans hoped they could coalesce with him around the policy’s enactment.
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Pennsylvania state representatives this week passed legislation creating a state version of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
The federal EITC, which went into effect in 1975, is designed to incentivize work. It ranges from $560 to $6,935 and goes to households earning up to $59,187. The proposed state-level counterpart would allow low-wage earners to claim 25 percent of the federal credit on their Pennsylvania taxes. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia offer a similar credit.
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High-ranking Republican Pennsylvania officials sounded off on Wednesday in the state Capitol Building against Governor Josh Shapiro’s budget legislation which would deplete state reserve funds in five years.
Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity (R) and House Appropriations Minority Chair Seth Grove (R-York) observed that the scenario is rather sunny insofar as the Democratic governor’s projections don’t account for a potential recession. Shapiro’s calculations also assume government spending won’t surpass 2.36 percent in the next five years, a supposition so rosy it provoked Grove to snicker slightly.
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Going into annual budget deliberations, Pennsylvania faces a structural deficit exceeding $1 billion, a problem Republicans say Governor Josh Shapiro (D) should address with a concept he once embraced: zero-based budgeting.
The practice involves setting initial the budget amount at zero and forcing agencies to justify each proposed expenditure rather than using the previous year’s budget as a base upon which to request spending increases.
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Several Republicans in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives are spearheading a package of proposed budgetary reforms to strengthen transparency and prevent fiscal imbalance.
House Minority Appropriations Chair Seth Grove (R-York) announced the series of bills with Representatives James Struzzi (R-Indiana), Eric Nelson (R-Greensburg), Sheryl Delozier (R-Mechanicsburg) and John Lawrence (R-West Grove). The lawmakers suggested their proposals are needed to avert the budgetary problems that arose in Fiscal Year 2016-17. In that period, revenues to the state Treasury totaled $1.5 billion less than the forecast amount.
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Pennsylvania state Representative Rob Kauffman (R-Chambersburg) is preparing a bill to strengthen enforcement against Medicaid fraud, suggesting other legislation aimed at the problem would spur unneeded litigation.
Kauffman’s measure would exact triple damages when a court finds a care provider deliberately and improperly claimed funds from Medicaid, the federal-state healthcare program for low-income Americans. The bill would also empower the commonwealth’s inspector general to impose civil penalties on Medicaid scammers and dedicate new funds to the state attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.
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Pennsylvania’s House Appropriations Committee members signaled general agreement with Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s budget-increase goals for Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) on Monday, though some related issues remain contentious.
Representatives questioned PSP Commissioner Christopher Paris, Acting Deputy Commissioner of Operations George Bivens and other lead staffers at the agency in preparation for the budget process which lawmakers aim to wrap up by June 30.
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Unlike his fellow Democrat and predecessor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro hasn’t asked for tax increases as part of his first budget request. But the ranking Republican on the state House Appropriations Committee said on Wednesday that tax hikes likely await Pennsylvanians in a few years if lawmakers don’t pare back Shapiro’s spending proposal.
“We are facing massive structural deficits,” Representative Seth Grove (R-York) told reporters at the GOP Appropriations Committee Office in Harrisburg. “It’s something that is on our minds here in the General Assembly.”
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Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) is already claiming high-ranking Republicans “are praising” his first budget. Those Republicans’ actual remarks tell a different story.
A press release from the governor selectively quotes eight GOP state lawmakers’ reactions to the budget he unveiled last week. While the snippets accurately capture areas of agreement, they leave out decidedly negative sentiments the Republicans voiced about the $45.9 billion plan which would hike state spending by about four percent over the current level.
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Republicans lost their majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives last year, but on Tuesday GOP members voiced their hope that the state might still curb state spending and lighten the tax burden with which the commonwealth saddles residents and businesses.
With that goal in mind, House Appropriations Committee Minority Chairman Seth Grove (R-York) led a roundtable discussion with several state fiscal-policy experts.
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A Pennsylvania state senator this week announced he will soon reintroduce legislation he proposed last session to end use of election drop boxes and satellite offices.
In a memorandum asking colleagues to cosponsor his bill, Senator Cris Dush (R-Bellefonte) characterized drop boxes where voters can deposit absentee ballots as fraught with security problems. Lawmakers never enacted a law authorizing counties to set up the receptacles, but the commonwealth’s Democrat-controlled executive branch issued guidance to counties in 2020 permitting drop boxes’ usage.
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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court this week ordered counties to decline to count any absentee or mail-in ballot delivered in an undated envelope.
State law, which has permitted no-excuse absentee voting since 2020, requires those not voting in person to place their ballot into a secrecy envelope before placing it into a return envelope. Voter must sign and date that outer envelope for their ballot to be valid under state statute.
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Pennsylvania House State Government Committee Chairman Seth Grove (R-York) released a report Tuesday detailing “a myriad of election issues” in the Keystone State.
Speaking to reporters at the Capitol Building, Grove reviewed his findings, including inconsistent vote-counting rules, ballot harvesting, fraud and administrative errors. The new report is the third he has issued concerning election problems since November 2020.
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State Rep. Seth Grove (R-PA-York) told legislative colleagues on Monday that he will introduce a measure to ease the process by which Pennsylvanians can report voter fraud and other election-related problems.
The bill would require the Pennsylvania secretary of state to establish a 1-800 hotline that voters could call to note any alleged misconduct they encounter in the course of an election. The secretary would also need to host annual training sessions for county-level prosecutors on the commonwealth’s election rules.
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Pennsylvania Rep. Seth Grove (R-York) castigated the state’s Democratic acting secretary of the commonwealth on Saturday for suggesting that stationing Lehigh County detectives at ballot drop boxes will amount to “voter intimidation.”
Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman last week said that tactics to intimidate voters have “a long history in this country” and that “the mere presence of police at a ballot drop box can deter voters from casting their ballot.” She also mentioned that she has been in conversation with her staff about attempting to dissuade Lehigh County from assigning law-enforcement professionals to watch drop boxes into which absentee voters may place their ballots.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) released a report this week on elections in his state—focusing especially on Maricopa County—advocating similar election reforms to those Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers currently seek.
While the report did not make criminal allegations regarding recent elections, it did declare that Arizona’s election system suffers from major procedural vulnerabilities including insufficient time to confirm signatures on ballots submitted during early voting and problems with the chain of custody for ballots placed in drop boxes. Altogether, the attorney general estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 early ballots were transported without proper protocol being followed.
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Because Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor and GOP-controlled legislature couldn’t agree on a congressional redistricting plan, a Commonwealth Court judge has stepped in and chosen one favored by the latter.
Judge Patricia A. McCullough (R), who was charged individually with selecting a new congressional map from among several proposed by state officials and nongovernmental actors, issued a 228-page report explaining her decision.
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On Thursday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) vetoed a proposed new congressional-district map passed by the Republican-run state legislature.
The governor’s decision effectively turns over the selection of a new map to the state judiciary. The Republican-run Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has indicated it would intervene if Wolf and lawmakers failed to agree on how the new districts will be reshaped. But even if that court chooses the reapportionment plan passed by the General Assembly, Wolf’s party may ultimately get its way by appealing to the Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court.
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Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives yesterday passed a new congressional map, though without the support of any Democrats and with indications of disapproval from Gov. Tom Wolf (D).
Two southeastern Republican representatives, Chris Quinn (Media) and Todd Stephens (Horsham) joined the Democrats in opposition. The plan must pass the GOP-led state Senate and receive the governor’s signature to go into effect this year.
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Yesterday, a Pennsylvania House of Representatives panel passed a series of redistricting and election reforms, including a bill establishing a citizens’ commission for redrawing legislative districts.
The redistricting bill, sponsored by Rep. Seth Grove (R-PA-York), chair of the House State Government Committee which vetted the measure, would ditch the current process for creating legislative-district maps. Such maps are drawn anew every decade in response to population shifts revealed by the U.S. Census. Presently, a five-member Legislative Reapportionment Commission (LRC), made up of Republican and Democratic leaders from both state-legislative chambers and chaired by an appointee of the state Supreme Court, oversees district remapping.
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Yesterday, Democrats in Pennsylvania and beyond recalled the Jan. 6, 2021 D.C-Capitol riot as an occasion to denounce voter-ID proposals and urge progressive reforms.
“Here’s the truth,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told an online audience at a panel hosted by leftist organizations including Better PA and the New Pennsylvania Project. “You can draw a straight line between the lies [and former President Donald Trump’s post-2020-election] litigation to the events of January the sixth. And now, you can continue that straight line to voter-suppression laws that are being passed by Republicans in state houses across the country.”
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Pennsylvania’s Republican-run House of Representatives Thursday slated major election-integrity legislation for a vote in mid-December.
The Voting Rights Protection Act, sponsored by Rep. Seth Grove (R-Dover), would strengthen voter-identification requirements, mandate regular election audits, review and correct errors on voter-registration lists and ensure signature verification for all mail-in ballots. The bill was amended this week to also affirm a strict time frame wherein mail-in ballots must be counted.
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Voter-fraud charges recently filed against a Philadelphia former judge of elections are spurring renewed emphasis by Pennsylvania legislators on enacting an election-integrity bill Gov. Tom Wolf (D) vetoed earlier this year.
State Rep. Seth Grove (R-York) introduced the initial version of his legislation in June. The measure, whose central feature was a voter-identification requirement for every election, quickly passed the House and Senate but Wolf rejected it as “voter suppression.” Since that time, the governor has sent mixed signals about whether he might support strengthened voter-ID rules, prompting Grove to reintroduce his bill.
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The prime sponsor of a vetoed voting reform bill said Friday he reintroduced the measure after Gov. Tom Wolf shifted his public opinion on some components of the legislation over the summer.
Rep. Seth Grove, R-York, said House Bill 1800 would bolster voting rights “through three broad concepts of increased access, increased security and modernization.”
“We know access and security are not mutually exclusive,” he said.
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