In Legislature, a taste of reform whets voters' appetite for more

==In Legislature, a taste of reform whets voters' appetite for more==
:Thursday, January 04, 2007, by Ruth Ann Dailey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Heading into the New Year's holiday, Pennsylvania
voters watching the last-minute shenanigans in
Harrisburg wouldn't have known whether to laugh or
cry.
A representative sold out his party? Voters were
threatened with either one let-'em-eat-cake
power-broker or the other? Was this really a New Year?
It was sounding a lot like the old one, and the one
before that, and the one before that ... until news of
what could be a plus for the commonwealth broke on
Tuesday.
We the people have such a string of successes now,
counting from our state's nadir in July 2005, that we
can almost enjoy the antics of our surviving shameless
wheeler-dealers. Almost.
Rep. Tom Caltagirone, of Bucks County, enraged his
fellow Democrats when he announced Saturday that he
would vote for Republican John Perzel to remain
Speaker of the House, negating his own party's
one-seat advantage.
His "reprehensible," "selfish" act of "political
treason," fumed state Democratic Party Chairman T.J.
Rooney in a weekend news release, "thwart[s] the will
of the voters" and is "a slap in the face to his
constituents and all Democrats throughout
Pennsylvania."
This is a slap in the face? Where was the
purple-prosed Mr. Rooney during the payjacking? Oh
right -- he still supports that maneuver but decided
to retire from the House rather than risk re-election.
Mr. Caltagirone supported the pay raise but later
repented, voted to repeal it and returned what he'd
received. The man whose speakership his party-hopping
vote was meant to deny, House Minority Leader Bill
DeWeese, actually stripped committee chairmanships
from Democrats with the nerve to vote against the pay
raise.
It's this kind of brass-knuckled brokering that Mr.
Caltagirone's slicker deal-making was intended to
rebuke, or so it would seem, now that he's got
religion -- the religion of reform.
The Democratic leadership frantically spun a different
tale. "Caltagirone sold out to an ineffective and
scandal-ridden Republican Party that was handed
enormous losses as a result of unprecedented arrogance
and 12 years of unchecked power," wrote Mr. Rooney in
his call for Democrats to protest Mr. Caltagirone's
decision.
"On Nov. 7, the voters of Pennsylvania sent a clear
message. [They] cast 200,000 more votes for Democrats
than Republicans on Election Day."
Reading his bilious bulletin, you'd think nothing of
significance had happened in the prior 18 months.
Quite a bit did, however, and the best thing about
this dramatic contest for House Speaker is that it
forces us voters to revisit what we accomplished.
Within months of the July 2005 pay heist, we'd
pressured many of our representatives to return the
money and repeal the measure. We turned a sitting
judge out of office, and far more politicians than
usual thought it wise to retire.
When we split up as party members to vote in the May
2006 primaries, however, we fared very differently.
Republicans purged their pay grabbers in greater
numbers than the Democrats did, getting rid of all
their highest-ranking leaders except Philly's Mr.
Perzel and removing the protection of incumbency from
previously "safe" seats.
That is, the Republican Party was "handed enormous
losses" because of the rank-and-file's idealism. And
it took Republican votes in the general election to
finally defeat the state's last unrepentant payjacker,
Democrat Mike Veon.
It's a terrible shame that Mr. DeWeese and Mr. Perzel
survived the voters' wrath, like cockroaches after a
nuclear blast. As the debris settles, it may yet prove
to be a shame that these two played so great a role in
the contest for Speaker of the House.
The surprise winner of Tuesday's contest for speaker
was Republican Dennis O'Brien, a compromise choice
engineered by Mr. DeWeese to deny Mr. Perzel the
last-minute victory he thought he'd engineered with
Mr. Caltagirone. But will this "compromise candidate"
as speaker deliver the reforms we've been demanding
for the last 18 months?
Since the reformed professionals still outnumber the
professed reformers in Harrisburg, the best way for us
voters to keep our eyes on the prize of political
change is to ask ourselves the question that's never
far from our politicos' minds: What's in it for us?
As the drama unfolded over the weekend, the old pros
desperate to hang onto their power started to throw us
a few crumbs of reform. It's not much but it's
something. Perhaps the crumbs will whet our appetite
for the whole loaf.
category:news coverage