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Reporting Harrisburg budget news from Pittsburgh is like trying to describe the behavior of an angry and distant star: By the time you’re able to describe the light that reaches your eye, conditions may well have changed.
As I write this Thursday morning, the state House has passed a budget, 117 to 86 — a seemingly robust and bipartisan margin for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s first fiscal plan. But by the time this reaches your email inbox or web browser — or in the days and weeks ahead — it’s at least theoretically possible that Harrisburg might have collapsed into a black hole from which almost nothing can escape.
Starting with legislative agendas.
That’s because the budget passed by the Democrat-controlled House includes $100 million to provide private school vouchers for kids in struggling school districts. That was a deal-breaker for unions and elected Democrats, so Shapiro had to promise to delete the spending using his line-item veto power … even though he’d previously agreed to the proposal in talks with the Republicans who lead the state Senate.
Not surprisingly, on Wednesday evening Senate GOP leaders accused Shapiro of “betray[ing] the good-faith agreement we reached.” Conservative advocacy group Commonwealth Partners argued that “at the first sign of opposition [Shapiro] gave up the fight to rescue kids trapped in failing schools,” and in doing so had “show[n] who really runs this state.”
Shortly before the House vote, state Rep. Seth Grove, a prominent tactician for House conservatives, asked in a floor speech, “How do we trust anything anybody says in this body? How do we find agreements? How do we find bipartisanship?”
Grove also implied that Shapiro’s stated reason for abandoning vouchers — that the program couldn’t be established without separate legislation that House Democrats could block — could cut both ways. Grove identified a long list of programs which, like vouchers, would require both the House and the GOP-controlled Senate to pass separate so-called code bills. Some items on his list included cherished Democratic priorities such as first-ever state funding for public defenders’ offices — and a separate pot of education money intended to shore up the poorest school districts.
“If you can’t keep your promises,” Grove summed up, “I don’t know what the political future for that individual is.”
Senate Republicans currently aren’t slated to return to Harrisburg to vote on anything until September. As I write this, it's not even clear they'll reconvene for a pro forma signing of the budget. And they, too, noted that future legislation is needed to move budget priorities: “As Governor Shapiro’s legal counsel noted, the [budget] bill is not the final step,” their statement warned.
Meanwhile, Democrats I’ve spoken with aren’t exactly high-fiving the outcome either. After all, every House Democrat just voted for a budget that includes school vouchers –- the kind of vote that can haunt you in a primary even if you didn’t really mean it.
To be clear, they had no other choice. Changing the budget on their own would have required sending it back to the Senate, where Republicans doubtless would have eviscerated many provisions Democrats want. But that’s the kind of caveat that political rivals don’t usually include in their attacks.
And while Shapiro voiced support for vouchers during his gubernatorial campaign, you can’t blame Democrats for feeling some whiplash. Their standard bearer built his brand partly by being the scourge of the Trump administration, but his earliest political fight somehow involved backing a voucher policy supported by Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos.
“We’re scratching our heads,” several Democrats I’ve spoken to told me.
So rather than predict the future and end up as the “this take aged badly” poster child of the 2023 budget cycle, it might be safer to note some lessons from the past.
School policy is complicated, with members frequently torn between ideological convictions about education and the expectations of parents in their districts. Just ask former Gov. Tom Ridge, who although a Republican was in many ways much like Shapiro himself: young, charismatic, and often named as a likely candidate for national public office.
Like Shapiro, Ridge was interested in pursuing a voucher program — and unlike Shapiro, his party controlled both chambers of the legislature during his tenure in the 1990s. But he tried and failed to establish vouchers three times. Gov. Tom Corbett also later tried and failed when he had control of the legislature.
Harrisburg has become only more polarized since Ridge left office, and since Shapiro himself sat in the House over a decade ago. Ridge, for example, had hoped for votes from a handful of more conservative western Pennsylvania Democrats … but their districts are today represented by a newer, more progressive generation of leaders.
Those newcomers helped to establish the first Democratic House majority since 2010 … and hardly anyone who fought for that majority did so in order to pass a policy long sought by Republicans. The years also have not been kind to the political influence of the Catholic Church, long a key supporter of vouchers, among Democrats.
History does have its consolations. Ridge never got his vouchers, but he did establish the state’s charter schools law, another school-choice agenda item. And he went on to become a prominent national political figure, serving as former President George W. Bush’s first Homeland Security secretary.
As for Shapiro, he is widely seen as a rising star in the national Democratic firmament, a figure of boundless energy and political talent. But I’d be wary of characterizing this as a "win" for him, just as I'd be wary of any astrological forecast that predicts he’ll implode so early in his tenure. After all, the very first budget of his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wolf, was delayed for the better part of a year, and it didn’t prevent his re-election three years later.
But when viewed through the haze of Harrisburg, almost any star can flicker. Sometimes they even dim.
