Join the club
Grand jury outraged by lawmakers Pennsylvania lawmakers tend to have a high threshold for embarrassment. So, for nearly six years after passing a pay raise in the middle of the night and unleashing a torrent of public anger, they have resisted calls for reform from think tanks, pundits, grass-roots reform advocates, the governor, scholars, and a long list of others.
Now that a criminal investigative grand jury has joined the list, it will be interesting to see whether lawmakers finally pay attention.
The grand jury has been investigating corruption in the Legislature for more than two years. It has recommended charges against five powerful current and former representatives and 19 staffers from both parties, including two former speakers of the House.
All of the charges so far generally involve using publicly paid legislative staffers and other public resources to staff and partially fund political campaigns.
The grand jury report, which was filed in February but released Monday, is a long sigh of exasperation. Grand jurors lamented the gross abuse of power inherent in using public resources for political profit. And it addressed the unfettered culture of corruption within the Capitol that allowed such practices to flourish.
Its recommendations for reform are familiar to anyone who has followed the legislative folly since the 2005 pay raise fiasco: a smaller part-time Legislature; vast reductions in legislative staffing; conversion of flat-rate per-diem expense payments into reimbursements for actual expenses; and many more regarding ethics, transparency and accountability.
None of the grand jurors are legislative experts. They are, rather, as supervising Judge Barry Fuedale called them, “a serious-minded group of citizens.” Their job titles include bus driver, used car salesperson, information technology technician, research technician, chemical engineer, teacher, retiree, tax collector, machine operator, sheet-metal mechanic, highway worker, data manager, wastewater plant operator, business analyst, food service worker and production worker.
They heeded the testimony of an expert witness, Dr. Alan Rosenthal of Rutgers University, who studies state legislatures. He told the grand jury that Pennsylvania’s Legislature “exists in a time warp,” operating as if it was the 1950s.
Ideally, the grand jury’s report will help kick it into the 21st century.
The Scranton Times Tribune