Court Opinion

ID: 9762306
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:19:20.245651+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:33.028672
License: Public Domain

McDERMOTT, Justice,
dissenting.
This case is sufficiently complicated by the expected human vagaries that infect all institutions of government and otherwise. It should breed no further anomalies. The *101Turnpike Commission is without members sufficient to constitute a quorum. This deficiency is caused by the suspension of one member and the resignation of another. In this vacuum, the Fidelity Bank, as trustee of Turnpike bonds, seeks by Declaratory Judgment to know whether two members of the Commission may act in place of three. The matter came first before the Commonwealth Court. There, two things were determined: first, that the suspended member be reinstated and second, that the case was moot because the member who resigned withdrew his resignation and therefore, a quorum existed. That is, it existed for a few days until the member re-resigned and the status of the reinstated member was placed under attack by appeal of this Court.
If the suspended member was improperly reinstated, there is no quorum; if not, there is a quorum. The majority opinion finds, and I agree, that to determine that question, the Governor, whose action suspended the member, must be a party to these proceedings. He is not and that question cannot be answered now. The majority opinion then takes a step I do not believe we are entitled to take. They authorize two members to be a quorum when the statute mandates three. See 36 Pa.C.S.A. § 652d. While I have no doubt that extraordinary occasions invest this Court with extraordinary power, this case has a factitious ring of impending calamity. The Legislature, with swift powers of resolution at hand, seems unperturbed. It can fulfill the requirements of the statute it created. Whatever its reasons may be for not doing so, the responsibility is clearly that of other branches of government. For this Court to rewrite a statute and invest two Commission members with a power their creators did not give them, is to my mind an exercise in judicial statute writing that we ought not indulge, nor be required to do, while a viable Legislature exists.
The calamities foretold may wake the sleeping giant. Our alarm should be the very last. This is not to shuffle responsibility, or for technical reasons to allow the turnpike to sink into the earth, but rather to maintain the integrity and *102responsibility of the separate branches. They have their duties, we have ours. We should not do what they can so plainly do without the gravest reasons.