As Budget Stalemate Drags On, GOP’s Veto Override Plan Falls Short

By Andrew Staub | PA Independent

As the state budget impasse rolled into its eighth week, Republican lawmakers swooped back to Harrisburg for a one-day session Tuesday with a plan to override select portions of Gov. Tom Wolf’s veto of the entire GOP spending plan passed in June.

It wasn’t exactly effective.

In fact, the constitutionally questionable strategy offered little more than political theater, looked doomed from the outset and ultimately left the state in the same place it was when the day started — without a budget in place and negotiations ongoing.

Making good on statements from earlier in the day, Democrats withheld the necessary votes to help Republicans reach a two-thirds majority, the requirement for a veto override.

“This is not good government,” state Rep. Joe Markosek, the Democratic chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said before Republicans embarked on a string of votes that would have enacted more than $3 billion in undisputed line items from the vetoed budget.

All failed, despite Republicans placing their Democratic counterparts in the awkward position of voting against funding for rape crisis programs, domestic violence programs, higher education grants and school food services, among other items lawmakers would normally cringe to oppose.

Still smarting over Wolf’s almost immediate veto of their about $30 billion budget that held the line on taxes, Republicans painted the override attempt as a way to send money this week to human service agencies and schools in dire need of funding.

“What we’re doing today isn’t about politics. It’s not about trying to admonish the governor. It’s not about getting people on the record voting against stuff,” said state Rep. Seth Grove, R-York. “It’s literally about trying to fund these organizations and these services that literally everybody has agreed to.”

Democrats stuck to the belief the process was nothing more than political subterfuge designed to make Republicans appear sympathetic to the plight of vulnerable nonprofits and the people they serve.

“This is simply a ploy to try and get people to vote against human services,” said House Minority Leader Frank Dermody, D-Allegheny.

The tactic also raised questions of whether lawmakers were wading into a constitutional quagmire, considering Wolf vetoed the entire budget, not just individual line items. At Dermody’s request, the Legislative Reference Bureau issued an advisory opinion that cast doubt upon lawmakers’ authority to override only select portions of Wolf’s full budget veto.

“Under the Constitution of Pennsylvania, the General Assembly must reconsider a vetoed bill in the manner in which the bill was vetoed,” the bureau wrote in its opinion. “Because the Governor vetoed the General Appropriation Act of 2015 in its entirety, the bill must be reconsidered as a whole not on a line-by-line basis.”

State Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, argued that while the move was unprecedented, lawmakers were within their bounds. Absent any specific prescriptions in the state constitution, the assumption is legislators have “any authority that would be available,” he said.

“There is not a strict prohibition contained in the constitution,” Cutler said.

Had Republicans been successful, such a debate would likely have been moved into a courtroom. For now, that’s unnecessary.

The override votes followed a budget meeting between Wolf and legislative leaders that focused on a pension reform proposal that Republicans have coupled with increased education funding the governor desires. Republicans had hoped Wolf might agree to the idea Tuesday and spur further budget talks, but Wolf said he needed more time to sort out questions about potential savings tied to the pension overhaul.

While Wolf said he thought the override votes were an example of political posturing and did not make sense under the state constitution, he also noted he didn’t think they would harm ongoing budget negotiations.

“I don’t know why they’re doing it,” Wolf said of Republicans after emerging from the budget meeting. “I wouldn’t care to infer anything from what they’re doing.”

Despite the questions, Republicans started churning the wheels of bureaucracy not long after that meeting. It took almost half an hour of debate just to bring the budget back up for consideration and featured almost another three-and-a-half hours of debate on the individual line items.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana, said instead of voting on all 274 line items that had been agreed upon, Republicans focused on about 20 that were examples of various areas impacted the most by the budget stalemate. He also hoped a variety of choices might provide a chance for a breakthrough.

“Obviously that didn’t happen,” Reed said, “so I guess we’re back to square one.”