The Drawer Opens in Harrisburg

Republicans have run the Pennsylvania Senate since 1978. In nearly half a century, the only break came in 1993, WHYY reported, when Sen. Frank Pecora switched parties, the chamber split 25 to 25, and a Democratic lieutenant governor broke the tie. On Nov. 3, voters did on purpose what one senator once did by switching sides. Democrats won 26 of 50 seats, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported, and with at least 111 of 203 House seats and Gov. Josh Shapiro's reelection, they hold all of Harrisburg for the first time since 1993.

Four Senate seats flipped: the 6th, the 16th, the 24th and the 40th. One went the other way, when Democrat James Malone lost his Lancaster County seat to Republican Tom Jones. The result is what the Capital-Star called a one-seat majority.

The drawer

House Speaker Joanna McClinton has a phrase for what the last few years felt like from her side of the building. "Far too often," she said, "hundreds of our bills got stuck in a drawer over in the Senate."

Hold onto that drawer. It explains this moment, and not only in Pennsylvania. A legislature is a place where bills go to be decided, and a drawer is where they go to wait without being decided at all. The House passed bills. The Senate never took many of them up. The bills just sat.

That drawer now opens. House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said the new majority will not waste it: "This is an opportunity that we will not fail. We cannot fail." Sen. Jay Costa, who leads Senate Democrats, made the promise plain: "We're going to get them to the governor's desk."

The machine underneath

Here is the mechanism a reader should understand. Pennsylvania's budget is due June 30, and under Shapiro and a divided legislature it has come in late every year, sometimes by months, WHYY reported. A late budget lands on real people: the money for schools and services sits while two chambers bargain.

McClinton's promise is the simplest one in this election: "We will finally have one on time." With one party running the House, the Senate and the governor's office, there is no one left to blame if it does not.

The list of what Democrats want is long: a $15 minimum wage, up from the federal $7.25; paid family leave; codified access to reproductive health care; more money for public schools; guardrails on data centers. Costa said mass transit funding for Philadelphia would be an early conversation. Some of the work is overdue and not partisan at all. The state Supreme Court struck down the mandatory life sentence for felony murder and ruled that skill games fall under gambling law, giving lawmakers 120 days to respond. They missed both deadlines. "The felony murder ruling, I think, is something we just got to come together on," Costa said.

The case they are owed

Senate Republicans campaigned against what they called "uncontrolled spending" and for smaller annual budgets, the Capital-Star reported. That argument does not disappear because they lost the chamber. It becomes the measuring stick. Costa seemed to know it: "We are going to be fiscally responsible, fiscally conscious," he said.

Republican Party Chairman Greg Rothman, himself a state senator, answered the loss with grace: "Elections bring both victories and setbacks, but our responsibility to the people of Pennsylvania doesn't change."

What we owe each other

T.M. Scanlon asked what we owe one another, and his answer was a test: could you justify your choice to the person with the least power in it? For years, the people with the least power in Harrisburg sat outside the building: the families and workers waiting on bills nobody would bring to a vote, and the services waiting on a budget nobody would finish.

The new majority now owns the drawer. The covenant is simple. Bring the bills out. Vote them up or down, in the open, on time. A majority that empties the drawer and then fills it again with the other side's bills will have learned nothing from forty-eight years of waiting.

The drawer is open. Pennsylvania will see what comes out of it by June 30.

Results are unofficial until certified. This op-ed is part of The State's series on the 12 legislative chambers that changed party control on Nov. 3, all of them to Democrats, according to Ballotpedia.