The law is full of deadlines. Some of them are very real. If you owe taxes, you must pay them by April 15 or you will be charged interest and penalties. If you want to sue someone, you must do so before the statute of limitations expires, otherwise the lawsuit will be dismissed.
Other terms are apparently just appearances. The most vital of them is the deadline for implementing the state budget, which expires on June 30. This year, for the fifth year in a row, the governor and the legislative branch failed to complete this task on time. Unlike the examples mentioned above – and unlike countless other deadlines that the legislature imposes on the citizens of this community – no penalty will be imposed on anyone.
That’s not much of a term, is it?
When ordinary Pennsylvanians have work deadlines, school deadlines, or state-mandated deadlines to meet, failure to meet them usually comes with some sort of penalty. But for our full-time legislators (salaries start at $110,016-plus expenses) and Governor ($229,642), these deadlines are merely a polite suggestion that they should do their job.
The Pennsylvania Constitution requires an annual budget, but does not provide an exact dateleaving this choice to the legislator. This flexibility worked for a while. But now, after five straight years of missing the deadline and leaving state spending in limbo — sometimes for months — it is clear that the norm that allows the Legislature to be accountable has been broken.
The blame for this continued failure must fall almost entirely on Governor Josh Shapiro. While the governor loves to complain that he is hampered by divided government, Pennsylvania’s party governors have had to deal with this disadvantage many times in the recent past, with Democrats Tom Wolf and Ed Rendell facing off against Senate Republicans for eight years. What has changed is that this governor also wants to be president, so he is proposing a budget designed to appeal to Democratic voters in 2028, not to the 253 members of the narrowly divided General Assembly or the citizens of this commonwealth. Shapiro’s annual budgets are designed to fail – and they do.
Rep. Melissa Shusterman (R-Chester) recently proposed a solution by introducing legislation that would keep the Legislature in session every day after June 30 in the absence of a budget, and would also amend the Constitution to require the governor to call a special session if a general appropriations bill is not passed by that date.
We applaud this initiative, but we must recognize that requiring lawmakers to attend is not the same as requiring them to do work, just as requiring a governor to submit a budget is not the same as requiring him to submit a budget that could actually be passed.
Simply requiring the legislature to do something won’t work because it is unenforceable – a court can find that the legislature has violated the law, but the only remedy is for a judge to order the legislator to get to work – something the state’s citizens already do.
We can see the truth of this from lawsuit regarding education financing which ended in 2023. It took the state court system eight years to find that the legislature had failed to meet the constitutional requirement to provide “a solid and effective public education system” What was the cure after all this? The judge told them to go and do it. Three years later, nothing has changed.
The answer, therefore, is to provide additional incentive. The answer can be found in one of the other good government provisions of the Philadelphia City Charter. There, in the section requiring the re-drawing of municipal districts every ten years in accordance with the census, the statute states that if the City Council fails to complete the task on time, they stop making money.
Pennsylvania voters may look favorably on an amendment to our state constitution that did the same for our legislators – and our governor.
There is no budget, no salary. There’s a simplicity to it that every voter who works for a living can understand: If you don’t do your job, you don’t get paid.
