TodayBonusgate, a distraction we don’t need
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Editorial
Article RatingMy first thought when the Bonusgate charges broke last week was that Mike Veon probably wishes he hadn’t voted against the pay grab repeal.
That turned out to be a bit too glib. The whole saga started the way a lot of these scandals do — with a bit of self-interested whistleblowing. One state worker learned that a less-industrious colleague netted a huge bonus and connected it to that person’s extracurricular activities in the political realm, then started shopping the story around.
Nevertheless, tying the legislative pay grab in with Bonusgate isn’t a mistake. Both of these developments have sparked calls for legislative reform. State Sen. Jeff Piccola, R-Dauphin, is already proposing a special legislative session on ethics and reform, and the grassroots groups that sprang up to condemn the pay grab are making their voices heard once again.
There have been some diffident, reluctant attempts to change the way business is done in the Legislature since the 2006 election, which gave us a wave of retirements and incumbent defeats, including two of the Senate’s top leaders. The wave also caused control of the House to change parties.
That latter development is tainted, however, in light of the first fruits of Bonusgate, which netted 12 indictments in the Democratic House caucus, including the former House whip, Veon, who was defeated in 2006 after his unrepentant support of the pay grab emboldened a strong opponent.
Indeed, the popular theory is that Bonusgate is directly responsible for Democrats’ success that year — that they couldn’t have taken the House without that unfair advantage. That proposition overlooks some important issues, however.
For one thing, Attorney General Tom Corbett’s investigation is still going on. We may yet find similar shenanigans undertaken by the other party, though we shouldn’t assume anything one way or the other until the probe ends.
Then there’s the fact that 2006 was a Democratic year nationwide. Both houses of Congress went Democratic, Gov. Ed Rendell was re-elected and Sen. Bob Casey upended a powerful Republican incumbent, both by landslide margins. It would be foolish to assume Rendell and Casey’s strong performances together didn’t provide coattails to down-ballot Dems.
And that’s a better explanation than the notion that legislative Dems, who haven’t exactly been electoral world-beaters in the past decade, suddenly grabbed eight House seats by misappropriating a few taxpayer dollars -- especially since most people believe this practice of paying unjustified bonuses was well established before 2006.
Where we are now is a sort of reverse Maxwell Smart situation. The “Get Smart” secret agent’s trademark was to assert “150 Special Forces agents” were arrayed against him, then, when contradicted, would say, “Would you believe two dozen Delta Force commandoes? How about Chuck Norris with a BB gun?”
In this case, the Legislature launched a thousand hostile op-eds with the pay grab, which was merely a self-interested use of the instruments of power. Now they’ve compounded the situation by replacing lawmaking with lawbreaking.
And the confusion doesn’t bode well for the electorate. Where it was pretty easy to cherry-pick the villains of the pay grab, it’s very likely Bonusgate repercussions will still be felt well after the election, complicating any retaliation at the polling place.
The House might easily be thrown back into Republican hands this November — Democrats have only a one-seat advantage, after all — but it will simply return to control of the party whose leadership brought us the pay grab. That’s not progress.
It might well be time to consider the calls from such grassroots groups as Democracy Rising for a constitutional convention. It’s a drastic move, and it invites the possibility of chaos generated by any number of single-issue groups who will press for their ideas to be enshrined in the state constitution, immune from challenge.
But it’s hard to argue that the Legislature will reform itself without seeing more progress than we’ve had since the beginning of the current session. A mild lobbyist registration law passed and the open records law was improved, though arguably not enough. And the Senate voluntarily declared there would be no lame-duck session this year, though that decision isn’t binding on future years.
Meanwhile, a serious reform — a constitutional amendment to take partisanship out of the redistricting process — languished in committee, which means it can’t be passed in time for the next round of reapportionment following the 2010 census. A nonpartisan process could theoretically be created by statute before then, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath until that happens.
With the Legislature busy considering funding infrastructure improvements, whether to lease the Turnpike or stick with tolls on Interstate 80, the impending rush of unregulated electrical rates, the state pension shortfall, proposals to improve health care insurance and more, it’s likely Bonusgate will prove a major distraction from all those issues.
And however inconvenient that is for legislators, it’s bad news for all of us.
Volpe can be reached at fvolpe@cumberlink.com.
