From Fair Districts PA (http://www.fairdistrictspa.com):
About 250 of you showed up for our Town Hall on December 1. We’ve been working hard to build a conversation about the need for reform in Pennsylvania and the Town Hall was an important expansion of that conversation, with input from current and past legislators, press, national experts and leaders of both new and long-established advocate groups. You can read our full web update and find links to video recordings of the sessions here.
Thank you to all who helped make the day a big success.
And thank you to all who donated online in the past few weeks, or who mailed in generous contributions. Your gifts helped make the Town Hall possible and have put us in a much stronger place to start the new year.
We are already talking to legislators about bills to introduce early in 2019. While Governor Wolf’s advisory Redistricting Reform Commission holds public meetings and gathers input from citizens like us, we’ll be pressing in Harrisburg to move bills forward. We explained our strategy in some depth at the Town Hall and we’ll be explaining more as we move into the next session; you can also find a quick summary in the Town Hall update linked above.
Right now, though, we’re focusing attention on the procedural rules that got in the way of reform in the past session.
There’s not much research comparing state legislatures, but from all that we can learn, our own General Assembly is the least effective, or among the least effective, at fulfilling its primary mission: enacting legislation to serve the common good.
From what we can tell, the only less efficient legislative body in the country is Congress itself. In number of bills passed, PA is in the bottom quartile, far surpassed by even part-time legislatures. In percent of bills passed, PA is at the very bottom: from data we’ve seen, just 7 to 8 percent of bills introduced ever come to a final vote.
As we’ve started examining procedural rules, it’s become clear that most best-practice recommendations for scheduling hearings and votes have been ignored. PA legislative rules allow committee chairs and party leaders far more control than is the case in most general assemblies. As a result, policies supported by a majority of citizens and legislators can be killed in committee or blocked forever from a final vote.
We are focusing attention on PA House procedural rules, since the House of Representatives is intended to be the most responsive body and instead, given our experience, is least accountable to voters.
The rules are put in place as a resolution on the first day of every session, so our goal between now and January 1 is to contact every PA representative to say “reform the rules” and “the status quo is not an option.”
You can find out how you can help on our new “Reform the Rules” web page.
Watch for an email next week you can customize to send to your own representative.
This is challenging, wonky, complicated work, but as one of our Town Hall speakers said Saturday: “your lives are impacted daily, even hourly, by policies put in place in Harrisburg.”
It’s time those policies served us all better.
Thanks for your part in this.
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