The Pennsylvania Legislature is one of the few full-time state legislatures in America, and its informal motto could be described as "preparation counts." We plan, we deliberate, we pass balanced budgets, and occasionally we do something--like establishing senior citizen low cost prescriptions, a state system for encouraging organ donation, Martin Luther King's birthday as a state holiday, mail voter registration--that puts us in the forefront of national leadership for the worthwhile, progressive causes.
This session has begun with two rather earthshaking events. First came the election, about which I have blogged here at length, of social services advocate Republican Dennis O'Brien as Speaker as the Democratic nominee over incumbent Republican Speaker John Perzel following the late December official certification of a narrow 102-101 Democratic majority due to major gains in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Then came the dramatic, disturbing, and somewhat puzzling 139 count indictment of Democratic Senator and long Senate Appropriations Committee Democratic Minority Chairman Vincent Fumo on charges of misappropriating over $2 million of State Senate and non-profit funding for his own use. Fumo is a man of formidable intellect, and a net worth of about $25 million, largely earned while in the Senate in a series of brilliant busines deals.
Politically, Fumo is a formidable mixture of outspoken liberalism against the war in Iraq, for a woman's right to choose and gay rights, and pragmatic center-right leadership on issues of gun control and business taxation. He claims to delivered about $8 billion worth of funds to Philadelphia during his years in Senate, beginning in 1979.
The first order of business in the O'Brien Speakership has been the creation of the Speaker's Commission on Legislative Reform, which I am the senior member of. We are initially focused on making the rules of the House making the rules of the House lead to operations that are more transparent to the public and more internally democratic. Our goal is to be able to present at least a preliminary report to the House for the essential operating rules by March 12, 2007.
Serving on this commission, and being free of the hassles of dealing with an active calendar of important legislation during our start-up period, has given me an opportunity to reflect on both the big issues of internal governance and the factors that led me to serve in the legislature and stay in the legislature for thirty-three years now. My retrospective and introspective thoughts have been strengthened by numerous conversations with our 50 new legislators--a longtime high for one session--in which I have endeavored to compare my pre-election motivation and experiences with theirs.
"We are a decision-making body and not a debating society," I said at one point in our commission deliberations. My point was that we have to focus on how our procedures affect legislative outcomes, and not just on encouraging debate. Some of the most active legislative debaters in the House are on this commission: myself, Democrats Greg Vitali, Curtis Thomas, Kathy Manderino, Bob Freeman, and Tom Tangretti, and Republicans David Argall, Curt Shroder, and Sam Rohrer quickly come to mind in this category.
But a high school debating society got me to really focus on the possibility of active political involvement when I was in high school: I was a floor leader and the secretary of the Political Union of Central High School.
I had been canvassing for Democratic candidates in my home election division under my father's direction since I was five years old, and had the social awareness to volunteer to tutor poverty-stricken kids in North Philadelphia at the Clara Baldwin House. The Political Union--modeled upon the Yale Political Union which had a similar influence upon John Kerry a few years earlier--also led me to get involved actively at age 15 in seeking donations of books for Mississippi black school children, who in the early and mid- 1960's often were encouraged to drop out from the public schools before reaching high school.
The Political Union also focused me on practical politics. After I was assigned as a college freshman to interview members of the Philadelphia City Council, I concluded--with a mixture of accurate understanding and the typical self-confidence of Ivy League students--that they were burned out and largely clueless.
I was the first to urge my father David Cohen, then a newly elected Democratic wardleader with an extensive record of community service and a good mixture of labor, business, civic, and civil rights clients as an attorney, to run for a newly vacant district city council seat.
I was quite active in his successful campaign, and in each of his ten subsequent campaigns for Philadelphia municipal office from 1967 through 2003. I was also can active volunteer in his Council office while in college, helping initiate the now-traditional City Council practice of taking stands on major national issues. I helped him with research on air pollution and zoning questions, and stimulated his actions against Nixon's ultimately defeated nomination of G. Harold Carswell.
When he returned to City Council as a Councilman at Large in 1980, I used my knowledge of state legislative rules reform--which I had first been a leader of in 1979--to help him reform the City Council rules. The modern and regularly updated Mason's Manual superseded the much vaguer Jefferson's Manual as the Supreme legislative authority, and numerous brass knuckle stratagies and rhetorical attacks were suddenly out of order.
I continued to help him on various City Council projects throughout his record nearly 26 year tenure as Councilman at Large, culminating in my initiation and his relentless pushing for passage of a wage tax cut--finally enacted in 2004-- for low-income Philadelphians.
Participating actively in politics as a college student in the Vietnam War era--and having a father who regularly spoke at peace demonstrations--made me more engaged and less alienated than the vast majority of my fellow students. Before my father was elected to City Council, I was appointed as a Congressional intern by Congressman, later mayor, William J. Green, and after his election I won a statewide competition run by a non-profit organization headquartered at Franklin and Marshall college to serve as an intern to Senator Joseph S. Clark.
I signed up on the Penn campus to participate on the advisory committee for the 1970 White House conference on Children and Youth, an opportunity to contrast my experience as a somewhat privileged college student with the experiences of many others in less fortunate circumstances. I was one of the first fourteen students elected to the University Council, the advisory board for Penn President Gaylord P. Harnwell, the former head of the physics department and an authority on atomic energy and education in various foreign countries such as the Soviet Union and Iran.
I also began to develop ties to Pennsylvania state government, serving on outgoing Governor Raymond P. Shafer's Youth Advisory Council and on Governor to be Milton Shapp's campaign staff.
When my legislative predecessor Eugene Gelfand won a surprise upset victory for judge on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas