Bald and golden eagles could get more protection as a proposed bill would greatly increase fines for killing the bird of prey.
Current law levels a penalty of only $200 for anyone convicted of killing the national symbol, though replacing the bird can run more than $2,000.
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A new report from a D.C.-based nonprofit suggests that Pennsylvania lags behind most states regarding religious freedom.
Last week, Napa Legal Institute published its first annual Faith & Freedom Index on which the Keystone State ranked 40th among all 50 states. The report rated each state in terms of its legal protections for faith-based institutions as well as regulatory regimes governing those entities. The commonwealth scored 30 percent for religious freedom and 55 percent for regulatory freedom for an averaged score of 55 percent.
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President Joe Biden held his first presidential re-election campaign event on Saturday at the Philadelphia Convention Center, making strong appeals to his left-wing base.
Biden appeared alongside organized-labor activists and mentioned in the first few seconds of his oration that when he thinks of working Americans, he especially values the ones who associate with causes he finds politically congenial.
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Amid a worsening workforce shortage, more employers – both across the state and the country – may set aside child labor laws as a solution, officials say.
The alarming trend prompted lawmakers on the House Labor and Industry Committee to advance legislation that would double penalties for these violations: $1,000 for first-time offenders and up to $3,000 for repeated incidents.
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One day before Joe Biden heads to a Saturday Philadelphia rally, U.S. Representatives Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA-14) and Dan Meuser (R-PA-9) excoriated him in a press call over quality of life issues.
Joined by Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas, the two lawmakers blasted the president for seeking reelection in 2024, insisting Biden has made life worse for Americans on virtually every facet affected by public policy. They mentioned that inflation rages, real wages slump, energy production languishes, gas prices rise, fentanyl use spreads, reading and math scores tumble and crime swells.
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While Democrats insist Pennsylvania misses out on revenue from natural gas extraction, a Pittsburgh nonprofit’s analysis published on Thursday observes drilling impact fees yielded $2.25 billion through 2021.
Since the boom in hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), the horizontal drilling technique gas companies use to access the vast reserves of fossil fuel from the Marcellus Shale sedimentary rock formation, many politicians have eyed an extraction tax. Instead of such a tax, former Governor Tom Corbett (R) and a Republican-led legislature levied an impact fee in 2012, with revenues going to localities largely to mitigate fracking-related environmental disruption. In the new policy brief from the Allegheny Institute (AI), the think tank’s executive director Frank Gamrat detailed those revenue gains.
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Two Pennsylvania state senators announced this week they are introducing a companion bill to a house-passed measure designed to improve rail safety.
Senate action on the bill sponsored by State Senators Katie Muth (D-Royersford) and Lindsey Williams (D-Pittsburgh) would advance the legislation toward Governor Josh Shapiro’s (D) desk. The house version passed that chamber 141-62 earlier this month with the support of all Democratic representatives and a sizable minority of Republicans.
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As Democrats proceeded with Pennsylvania minimum wage hike legislation on Wednesday, Republican state representatives tried and failed to amend the measure to mitigate job losses.
The bill supported by the Democrats’ one-seat House of Representatives majority would increase the Keystone State’s minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2026. The wage floor would thenceforth permanently rise according to inflation.
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A proposed wind farm has given rise to concerns by state military officials who say the windmills pose a threat to the safety of its training operations.
The windmills would be located within the buffer zone surrounding Ft. Indiantown Gap and lawmakers want to require permission from federal authorities before permits are granted to install them.
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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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Pennsylvania state Senator Devlin Robinson (R-Bethel Park) this week proposed changing a program that subsidizes film production to the tune of $100 million annually.
The Keystone State allots the film-production tax credit to movie and television projects on the basis that it generates net economic growth by bringing in new (if temporary) jobs and boosting local businesses. Robinson is circulating a memorandum among Senate colleagues suggesting the program could benefit from an increased focus on multi-year projects to make the job gains attributable to the program more stable.
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A new media campaign unveiled last month in Philadelphia and New Jersey is providing empirical evidence of what’s been obvious anecdotally all along — it isn’t loyalty that keeps so many public employees ensnared in a labor union five years after the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory membership and dues.
It’s fear and lack of information.
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An LGBTQ group’s “Pride Mass” has been canceled following a report from The Daily Signal highlighting the bishop of Pittsburgh’s condemnation of the event.
The Mass had been scheduled to take place on June 11, at 1 p.m. at Duquesne Holy Spirit Chapel, and was to be presided over by Father Doug Boyd, according to fliers obtained by The Daily Signal, which said the event would be co-hosted by various groups, including Catholics for Change in Our Church and the LGBTQ Ministry at St. Joseph the Worker.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem) is drafting a bill to ensure voters have their in-person votes counted in cases when their defective mail-in ballots were tossed.
Boscola sponsored Act 77, the 2019 law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, and her emerging bill seeks to clarify a part of that statute. A provision in that law led the Delaware County Board of Elections to vote unanimously on May 23 to throw out six of its eligible voters’ ballots cast in the May 16 primary. Three of those voters are now suing the board in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas to have their votes tallied and to guarantee those in similar situations have their ballots counted in the future.
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A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania state lawmakers are championing legislation enabling small-business association healthcare plans to offer workers affordable coverage.
Such plans facilitate lower costs by allowing business and industry organizations to pool their members and negotiate insurance prices. The measure’s author, Representative Valerie Gaydos (R-Moon Township), was among numerous sponsors who told The Pennsylvania Daily Star they experienced firsthand how governmental burdens have made it harder for companies to provide their members with inexpensive medical coverage. Gaydos said this is particularly true since the Affordable Care Act (ACA), signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, heavily restricted association plans.
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Many residents know the common headache of so-called porch pirates as mail theft ramps up in tandem with the pandemic-driven online shopping boom.
In the Senate, Republicans see an obvious solution: increase penalties for those caught stealing packages delivered to residences.
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Free speech attorneys sent a letter this week to University of Pittsburgh officials defending the organizers of a transgender issues debate that ignited a campus protest earlier this year.
Philip Sechler, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom – a non-profit legal firm that litigates issues related to free speech, religious freedom, parental rights, and abortion – said the university demanded an unconstitutional security fee from College Republicans and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for public unrest that officials themselves provoked.
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Charges were dropped this week regarding Christian street preacher Damon Atkins who was arrested for speaking negatively about an LGBTQ pride-flag-raising he attended at Reading, Pennsylvania City Hall on Saturday.
“After review of the video of the incident, including body-worn cameras, and a review of the case law, we did not believe we could prove a criminal case of disorderly conduct,” Berks County’s District Attorney’s office said in a statement.
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A Pittsburgh-based think tank’s analysis published this week shows the city’s public schools spend far more per student than the average public school even as achievement severely lags.
Examining student testing statistics and finance data, the brief by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (AI) determined that Pittsburgh Public Schools spend almost $30,000 per pupil — among the highest spending figures in the state — while their institutions score woefully low.
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Pennsylvania’s House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday passed a resolution calling on the federal government to remove marijuana from the top section of its controlled-substances list.
Called House Resolution 420 — an allusion to 4/20, a day of celebration for many pot smokers — the measure sponsored by state Representative Chris Rabb (D-Philadelphia) asks federal officials to move cannabinoid products off of Schedule I. The topmost of five illicit drug categories, Schedule I includes substances the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) characterizes as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
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No EMS-related hearing in the Pennsylvania General Assembly is complete without legislators and testifiers sounding the alarm over a system in crisis.
At a State Senate Health and Human Services hearing on Tuesday, these warnings and more echoed in the Capitol.
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At first, Keystone State Republicans viewed Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s Fiscal Year 2023-24 budget proposal with mere skepticism. This week, state House Democrats larded it with an extra $1.1 billion and passed it, making a fray between their chamber and the Republican-run Senate even more probable.
The nearly $47 billion spending plan, approved by representatives along party lines, hikes spending by $5.7 billion over the current fiscal year, a more than a 13-percent increase. Members of the Republican minority excoriated their Democratic colleagues for rushing the plan to passage within six hours of its completion, a move they said reflected poor transparency. Representative Doyle Heffley (R-Weissport) spoke for many in his party when he called the House-passed plan a “poison pill” for Pennsylvania’s economy.
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The Pennsylvania House Freedom Caucus (PAFC) this week issued an ultimatum to the Pennsylvania State University: Either your hospitals will stop providing puberty blockers to children or funding won’t be forthcoming.
Penn State Health operates six hospitals in central Pennsylvania. The PAFC is castigating the university-run system for “prescribing experimental puberty blockers and providing “‘gender-affirming care’ to children as young as FIVE YEARS OLD.”
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Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives this week approved a bipartisan expansion of the commonwealth’s “clean slate” policy affecting those with low-level, drug-related felony convictions.
The measure, which passed 189-14, builds on a 2019 policy that made the Keystone State the first in the nation to enact automatic record-sealing for summary offenses as well as certain nonviolent misdemeanors and arrests that didn’t lead to convictions. That reform benefited 1.2 million commonwealth residents. The bill that now awaits consideration by the state Senate would seal records of those who were convicted of minor drug felonies but thereafter stayed crime-free for 10 years.
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Two drag queens read books to young children in front of Independence Hall in a new tourism ad for the City of Philadelphia released Friday.
Visit Philadelphia linked LGBT activism to the American founding in its press release for the ad and highlighted the city’s reputation as LGBT friendly. Drag queens Brittany Lynn and Morgan Wells read a book titled “Giraffes Can’t Dance” to about a dozen children and several parents in front of Independence Hall, the building in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed.
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Incarcerated Pennsylvanias regain their right to vote after release, but Democratic state representatives worry they don’t vote enough, so they advanced legislation on Monday addressing the issue.
Voting 12-9 along party lines, Pennsylvania’s House State Government Committee approved Representative Carol Kazeem’s (D-Chester) resolution to study ex-prisoner election participation. After the Joint State Government Commission completes its research, officials would use the the information gathered to develop policies to aid former inmates’ resumption of voting.
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Let the safety of the people be the supreme law,” wrote the Roman scholar and statesman Cicero, two millennia ago.
This precept was the first the rulers of the ancient Roman Republic remembered. It seems to be the first the rulers of the modern American republic have forgotten. This is evinced in the current debate that claims we incarcerate too many of our citizens.
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Democratic Pennsylvania lawmakers are drafting several bills to enable regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), including one measure creating a new state agency to oversee the technology.
The new proposals build upon legislation Representative Chris Pielli (D-West Chester) announced last month that would mandate labeling of all AI-generated content. Other parts of the legislative package, which Pielli is cosponsoring alongside Representative Bob Merski (D-Erie), also includes a policy governing the commonwealth’s use of software and devices that perform tasks that were once possible only through human action.
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An unorthodox coalition wants Gov. Josh Shapiro to put money behind the support he expressed for school choice on the campaign trail last year.
Advocates said Friday that letting children move to better schools should transcend partisan lines and is crucial for their futures.
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A Pennsylvania state senator is working on legislation to abolish the commonwealth’s new Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CR-SE) guidelines that impose leftist ideology on teachers and students.
The document instructs teachers to “know and acknowledge that biases exist in the educational system,” biases the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) specifies as “racial and cultural.” Educators are further called on to “believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real and take steps to educate themselves about the subtle and obvious ways in which they are used to harm and invalidate the existence of others.” Another guideline tasks teachers with “disrupt[ing] harmful institutional practices, policies, and norms by advocating and engaging in efforts to rewrite policies, change practices, and raise awareness.”
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Two Pennsylvania state senators told colleagues this week they are drafting a measure to count in-person ballots rather than absentee ballots in instances when someone uses both methods to vote.
Before Act 77, a 2019 law letting Pennsylvanians vote by mail without an excuse like illness or travel, those who submitted absentee ballots but became able to vote in person could do so while having their absentee ballots voided. The new law however directs election boards to let an absentee voter cast their vote in person using a provisional ballot; in cases when the mail-in ballot was received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, the earlier mail-in ballot, not the in-person one, is recorded.
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The Pennsylvania State University has reportedly yet to answer a Philadelphia-based free-speech nonprofit’s request that the school confirms adherence to freedom of association.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) asked Penn State to do so after a brief disagreement this spring between administrators and the College Independents. This student group hosts political discussions featuring “a wide variety of viewpoints.”
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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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Two years ago, hell-bent on getting its hooks into the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) – the largest private workforce in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania effectively bought the Pittsburgh mayor’s office.
In November, the union intends to pay more than twice as much to consolidate its monopoly over the region’s chief executives by adding the Allegheny County executive’s office to its collection. And it’s employing the same winning strategy to do so: spending bucketloads of someone else’s money.
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Three school districts north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are litigating over new guidelines enjoined by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) directing teachers and students to adhere to progressive ideology.
Representing Laurel School District, Mars Area School District and Penncrest School District as well as teachers and families in those jurisdictions, attorneys for the nonprofit Thomas More Society contend that the instructions violate both the state and federal constitutions.
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A Pennsylvania lawmaker wants all content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) to be labeled and is drafting legislation to that end.
State Representative Chris Pielli (D-West Chester) insisted consumers should expect to know whether they are accessing human-created or electronically produced information. He said people will have a harder time fulfilling this expectation as AI becomes more advanced and commonly used.
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Two Pennsylvania state lawmakers are spearheading legislation to curb food-stamp fraud by limiting the balances recipients can accumulate.
Representative Ann Flood (R-Pen Argyl) is drafting a bill requiring the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) to request a federal waiver allowing the commonwealth to cap the benefits a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) user can amass. Kerry Beninghoff (R-Bellefonte) has meanwhile begun preparing a resolution asking the Biden administration to set such limits itself. Currently, the federally funded but state administered entitlement does not require those who draw SNAP benefits to spend them in order to remain eligible for them.
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Two Pennsylvania state Senators from opposite sides of the aisle are asking colleagues to support legislation they are drafting to create a state earned income tax credit (EITC).
For nearly a half-century, lower-wage workers have benefitted from a federal EITC which ranges from $560 to $6,935 for a household earning up to $59,187, depending on the number of that filer’s qualifying children. In 2021, this program bestowed $1,874 on the average Pennsylvania family.
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Voters in Philadelphia ranked crime as a top concern heading into the May primary election.
Democrats, who have a strong majority in the city, even chose former City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker, who campaigned on public safety.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano’s Thursday announcement he won’t seek the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey next year vastly boosts potential GOP hopeful Dave McCormick’s prospects.
“I know this will be disappointing for some,” Mastriano said of his decision in a Facebook Live broadcast. “At this moment, the way things are, I am not running for the U.S. Senate seat that is going to be vacated by Casey. We need to beat him.”
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On June 1, 2023, Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania will raise the Pride Flag. In what sounds like a solemn ceremony, students will speak about the Pride Flag’s personal significance to them. Politicians, civic leaders and religious leaders will also show their support for the LGBTQ+ community.
So Lower Gwynedd Township, one of the oldest townships in Montgomery County wants to celebrate a certain lifestyle. They will permit the LGBTQ community to display a flag that represents the pride a group of people has for their sexual orientation: homosexual, bisexual, transexual and others. So what is sexual orientation? According to the website of Planned Parenthood, sexual orientation is defined as: “who you’re attracted to and want to have relationships with.”
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Pennsylvania state Senator Jarrett Coleman (R-Allentown) this week introduced a measure requiring colleagues to take defined-contribution (DC) savings plans rather than traditional pensions.
Coleman, an airline pilot and former Parkland School District director, won his first Senate election last year on a reformist platform and has since briskly worked to effect change regarding education, election integrity, regulation and other issues. Now he’s asking members of his chamber to consider a policy directly affecting their own bottom lines. He believes it’s an important initial step toward more making the commonwealth’s employee retirement programs more solvent.
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At Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt’s initial confirmation hearing on Wednesday, many senators inquired about the commonwealth’s participation in a controversial voter data-sharing program.
Schmidt, a moderate Republican former Philadelphia city commissioner who subsequently was president of the left-leaning nonprofit Committee of Seventy, will sit for a second hearing covering non-electoral issues his department oversees (e.g., professional licensure). But Senate State Government Committee Chair Cris Dush (R-Bellefonte) suggested discussion of Pennsylvania’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) will come up then as well.
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Arguing before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday, one state agency alleged another improperly refused to publish an executive action implementing a de facto carbon tax, effectively halting the polcy.
At issue is a decision made by the Pennsylvania Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) not to publicize a regulation decreed by then-Governor Tom Wolf (D) entering the state into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The LRB, which drafts all state legislation upon lawmakers’ requests and provides other policy reference services, declined to promulgate the rule enrolling the commonwealth in the multistate compact, citing a state House of Representatives resolution opposing it.
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Pennsylvania House Democrats this week proposed a measure called the “Police and Community Safety Act” whose sole purpose is barring police and campus-security agencies from enforcing immigration laws.
Spearheaded by Philadelphia Democrats Jose Giral and Chris Rabb, the bill resembles legislation the latter introduced unsuccessfully in 2017.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano’s plans to soon announce whether he’ll run for U.S. Senate next year have Pennsylvania’s movement conservatives brimming with feelings — not all of them positive.
The Republican who represents Gettysburg, Chambersburg and surrounding communities suffered an overwhelming defeat last year when he ran for governor against Democrat Josh Shapiro. After Mastriano indicated he would publicly decide on a bid against Democratic Senator Bob Casey in just days, state Representative Russ Diamond (R-Jonestown) wrote a tweetstorm Monday urging fellow Republicans to entreat Mastriano not to run.
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Pennsylvania state senators announced Friday they will draft a bill to legalize adults’ recreational use of marijuana.
In a memorandum asking colleagues to join their effort, Senators Dan Laughlin (R-Erie) and Sharif Street (D-Philadelphia) cited CBS News polling suggesting two-thirds of Keystone Staters from varied communities back legal cannabis intake. The senators suggested making pot licit could boost the commonwealth’s agriculture industry and generate scads of new tax revenue. They mentioned 2021 testimony by the state’s nonpartisan Independent Fiscal Office averring that legal adult consumption could bring between $400 million to $1 billion into the state Treasury annually.
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During a May 10 House Judiciary Committee hearing about crime, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA-4) laughably portrayed herself as a champion of the forces of law and order. She sought to position herself as the protector of the innocent victims of crime.
What a pathetic charade conducted by Madeleine Dean. She is the paradigm of the liberal academic from a homogeneous White upper middle-class Philadelphia suburb. Totally removed from the tragedies, destruction, and suffering caused by crime – especially in the inner city – she knows nothing about policing. When her workday is done she retreats to her suburban sanctuary away from the hoi polloi she purports to represent.
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A new bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour is emerging in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
Sponsored by Representative Patty Kim (D-Harrisburg), the bill as described in a memorandum appears similar to legislation Senator Dan Laughlin (R-Erie) is spearheading in his chamber. It contrasts with a more radical measure authored by Representative Chris Rabb (D-Philadelphia) that would hike the wage floor to $16.50 in July 2025 and gradually increase it to $21 by mid-2028. The Rabb bill would also apply the state minimum wage to prisoners, vastly boosting their pay.
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While Pennsylvania will receive more than $2 billion from a number of opioid-related settlements, the total amount will be less than what officials initially hoped.
During the latest meeting of the Pennsylvania Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust on Thursday, Trust Chairman Thomas VanKirk noted that the “Wave 2” settlement money will be at least $200 million less than previously anticipated.
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