Election fatigue leaves legislative priorities vague, for now
By Christina Lengyel | The Center Square contributor
(The Center Square) – For many, living in Pennsylvania during the 2024 election cycle has been an exhausting affair.
Relentless campaign advertising, packed rallies and wall-to-wall media coverage – heightened by the first attempted assassination of Donald Trump this summer in Butler – leaves many on the “battleground” feeling dismayed and divided.
Now, as the dust settles, state legislators want to direct focus back to the business of running a commonwealth. With Democrats maintaining a razor-thin margin in the House and a firm grasp on the governor’s mansion, the party must find compromise with the Republican-controlled Senate and their own colleagues across the aisle in the lower chamber.
Their common ground is the economy, the issue on which many analysts say the national election hinged. Rising inflationary pressure during the Biden administration cast a long shadow over Kamala Harris’s campaign as she and other supporters leaned on favorable economic reports that didn’t align with Americans’ everyday experiences.
State lawmakers must reconcile the same tension.
In an interview with the Center Square, House Republican Leader Rep. Jesse Topper, R-Bedford, said, “In many ways, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the country.” He noted that most residents were concerned with “kitchen table issues.”
Democrats conveyed a similar sentiment. In a statement issued earlier this week, House leadership said working together to make life easier for working-class families remains a “top priority.”
“All parties stood up and took notice of where the people are,” Topper said of finding common ground with the Democratic majority. “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, everyone is hearing the same concerns.”
It remains to be seen how they’ll approach those concerns. Topper cited reducing regulation as a guiding principle in his strategies for getting money back in people’s pockets.
Deregulation has been a major policy push for the party nationally, stoking fears that the nation could backslide in areas like climate change, worker protections and health and safety.
In Pennsylvania, business deregulation appeals across the aisle. Cutting red tape, lawmakers believe, will generate more tax revenue in a state that carries a higher burden than most, according to an analysis by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University.
With more than 164,000 regulatory restrictions on the books, the commonwealth focuses more on areas like environmental protection, culture and the arts, and administration than other states — but much less in areas like health services and banking, insurance and securities.
“Jurisdictions that allow regulations to consistently pile up over the years experience slower economic growth, but this effect can be reversed when policymakers actively cut red tape,” the Mercatus Center’s Patrick McLaughlin and Dustin Chambers argued. “Policymakers can reduce the harm of excessive regulation by improving the management of their rulemaking systems, thereby making it more likely that the rules on the books actually solve the problems they were intended to solve.”
Though right-wing thinkers and politicians tend to talk more about overregulation and the need to reduce red tape, Mercatus pointed to a left-wing success story: British Columbia in Canada.
There, they credit leaders as being pioneers in getting rid of red tape.
“Its economic growth rate increased by one percentage point because it cut regulations by nearly 40%,” McLaughlin and Chambers argued. “Several U.S. states have attempted to follow suit, including Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia.”
While Democrats support some regulatory reform, their vision of giving money back to the taxpayer is more literal – through public school spending and bigger tax breaks for low-income working families.
With the high ground in annual budget negotiations, the party can also block Republican-backed priorities like school choice expansion, universal voter ID, stricter abortion limits and the regulatory reform on which they disagree.
And it’s that same balance that saw the biggest ever one-year infusion of state funding in public education – something Democrats writ-large say is long overdue. Despite their concerns about sustaining the funding amid a multi-billion dollar structural deficit, Senate Republicans traded the figure for business tax cuts and the creation of affordable tuition programs.
Anthony Hennen and Christen Smith contributed to this report.
