A month after securing a 101-vote majority, Democrats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives held hearings on gun safety, raising the minimum wage and expanding access to reproductive health care.
While at first glance they may seem like routine work for the state legislature, hearings on Democratic policy priorities are a source of optimism for advocates across the state.
Under GOP control of the House over the past six sessions, committee chairs have given Democratic goals no place on the agenda. But with control of the committees, Democratic leaders are giving airtime to advocates of long-awaited reforms.
These supporters say that under Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, there is a better chance than ever of enacting these reforms over the past 12 years. However, with Republicans controlling the state Senate, achieving these goals will be an exercise in bipartisanship.
“I think there will be a very real political process and ultimately there will be real choices that legislators and the governor will have to make,” said Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the employee-friendly Keystone Research Center.
Richard Edley, chief executive of the Rehab Community Providers Association, said it’s not as if Republicans oppose many of the initiatives House Democrats are currently hoping to advance.
On the contrary, the temperature of politics across the country has dropped to state levels, causing partisan paralysis.
“When you can bring the parties together, there is a little less gridlock,” said Edley, whose organization supports social service providers. “Where we sit, we are looking for champions on both sides of the aisle.”
At Monday’s Democratic Policy Committee hearing on state Rep. Roni Green in Philadelphia, proposal to escalate the minimum wage in Pennsylvania to $18 an hour, lawmakers heard from a home health care worker and a Harrisburg coffee shop owner about the need and benefits of paying a living minimum wage.
“I am a qualified, responsible and trained care worker and I earn less than $15 an hour,” Genale Rambler, a member of the International Union of Service Workers who cares for dementia patients at home, told the committee. “This has to change. The General Assembly has a responsibility to ensure that workers like me and hundreds of thousands of others have a living wage.”
Herzenberg said that while conservatives typically oppose minimum wage increases as bad for business, this is an issue driven by economic realities. Each of Pennsylvania’s contiguous states has a minimum wage higher than the federally required $7.25 per hour. Pennsylvania employers must pay employees without tips.
This puts pressure on employers from areas close to the border to compete on the labor market. Many restaurant chains and retailers across the country, such as Starbucks and Target, have raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour or more, regardless of the state minimum.
“There has been a big movement across the country where employers have discovered that they can take $15 an hour and the sky won’t fall,” Herzenberg said.
Patrick Keenan, policy director of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, said Democrats and Republicans are more aligned in some areas than many people think.
Providing access to health care for low-income people is a statewide issue in both urban and rural communities. Keenan said more than half of adults in Pennsylvania have difficulty paying for health care, and as a result, they either put off seeking care or are forced to employ savings to pay for health care.
In the first-ever survey conducted by Keenan’s organization and Altarum Healthcare Value Hub, a nonprofit health care research and consulting group, health care experiences in 2020, nearly 70% of Pennsylvanians ranked health care as the most crucial issue the government should address in the next year, and 90% expressed support for a broad range of solutions proposed by the government.
“I don’t know of many issues in Pennsylvania where so many people agree,” Keenan said.
Last year, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, voters in six states chose in referendums to retain access to abortion.
“Everywhere there was a vote for abortion, it won,” said Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates Executive Director Signe Espinoza. “Now is certainly not the time for that [for lawmakers] be lukewarm. We know voters showed up and why they showed up.”
Espinoza said she hoped the message from voters, particularly those in conservative Kansas, Kentucky and Montana, was heard by Pennsylvania lawmakers and that it would clear the way for passage of legislation to ease Pennsylvania’s abortion restrictions.
The goals include eliminating the requirement that people seeking abortions wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure and ending restrictions on midwives and advanced practice physicians providing abortion care, she said.
Planned Parenthood has also pushed to end the diversion of federal welfare money to crisis pregnancy centers, where pregnant women are advised not to seek abortions.
“I hope that Republicans can actually come to grips with and confront the fact that TANF dollars should not go to crisis pregnancy centers,” Espinoza said.
Espinoza said elected officials are ultimately accountable to voters and she believes people will make their voices heard at the ballot box.
“If we can’t get them to address the needs of their voters, voters will reject them,” she said.
Education funding is sure to be a major part of this year’s budget negotiations following the Commonwealth Court’s historic ruling declaring Pennsylvania’s dependence on property taxes unconstitutional. Republicans appear ready to face the consequences of inaction on the state’s well-being, Herzenberg said.
He said careers and technical education are key areas for the economy where Shapiro’s proposal falls tiny.
Pennsylvania’s higher education system receives one-third of the funding it received in the early 1980s.
In the House Appropriations Committee budget hearingPASSHE Chancellor Daniel Greenstein hailed the system as key to developing Pennsylvania’s workforce in high-demand areas such as nursing, teaching and computer science.
During that hearing, Republican lawmakers expressed concern about Greenstein’s warning that the 2% escalate in Shapiro funding was only one-third of the amount the system needed to avoid a tuition escalate.
“My weather forecast is cloudy and there are occasional blue spots,” Herzenberg said, adding that one of the blue spots is workforce development. “Ultimately, the Venn diagrams have to have some degree of alignment with what the Legislature and the governor will accept.”
