PITTSBURGH (TNS) — It’s seemingly self-evident that the people’s business should take place, as far as possible, in full view of the people themselves. This is one of the principles underlying the “listening sessions” led by Pennsylvania House Speaker Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, and his bipartisan “working group,” which is tasked with designing the rules to govern a historically divided chamber.
This is also the principle behind Right-to-Know and Sunshine laws, which are meant to ensure that the media and engaged members of the public can observe and investigate how (and if) those entrusted with the commonweal are stewarding it. This is all right and just.
But while sunshine may be the best disinfectant, it can also burn. (As a melanin-deficient person, I can vouch for this fact several times over.) Some aspects of politics, just like certain garden plants, do not benefit from direct sunlight. They can only thrive when veiled in shadow.
If Rozzi’s tenure is going to spark a renewal of bipartisanship in Harrisburg, it will be through his work in the private side of politics, not the public.
That’s what I learned from one of the great dealmakers in modern Pennsylvania history, a man whose identity will be disclosed to aficionados by the intricate diction of the following locution.
”Never since that summer day in 1682 when William Penn sailed up the estuary and launched the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives has there been a more complicated and abstruse circumstance than right now.”
I first met H. William DeWeese a dozen years ago under rather odd circumstances. I was 22 years old and in my first month working for then-Majority Leader Mike Turzai, whom I accompanied to Gov. Tom Corbett’s inaugural ball.
In a back corner of the ballroom, I suddenly found myself face to face with DeWeese, who had been doggedly pursued and ultimately indicted by Corbett for using state resources for campaign purposes. And yet here he was, at his prosecutor’s (persecutor’s?) party. He told me the same thing last week that he told me that night: He was there to support the principle of democracy.
Democracy, he would know better than most, is a messy business. That’s in part why the ancients, preoccupied with order, were so suspicious of it. This led to the concept of the “mixed constitution,” containing elements of monarchy and aristocracy as well as democracy, which found arguably its finest expression in the American Constitution.
Elected representatives express the democratic principle but also the aristocratic principle. They have to balance two relationships that are in constant tension: their relationship with the people, and their relationships with each other. Sometimes — indeed, quite often — that tension is resolved in favor of the clique and against the people. Thus we have had to endure, for instance, decades of shenanigans to stall a real vote over restrictions on lobbyists’ gifts to legislators.
But at the same time, part of representing the people is learning how to work closely, and sometimes discreetly, with the people’s other representatives. This kind of collegiality, especially bipartisan collegiality, requires the trust that can only develop behind closed doors
DeWeese described it as the difference between “the centrifugal forces generated by social media and the 24-hour cable news dynamic” and “the centripetal forces most capitol buildings would benefit from.” Peacocking in front of the cameras (whether for television or TikTok) and constantly being “on message” in public — that’s a euphemism for routinely casting your opponents’ proposals and motivations in the worst light possible — frays the bonds of trust and mutual understanding that are essential to good governance.
Bipartisan sessions in the Speaker’s office or restaurants or even private residences, on the other hand: That’s where real political leadership is learned and demonstrated. That’s where, DeWeese is eager to tell you from historical anecdotes and his own experience, all the great compromises that move politics forward are made.
DeWeese recalled the last time the House was split 102-101 in favor of the Democrats, when he played the same role as Rep. Joanna McClinton: the Democratic leader who couldn’t count on a majority. The compromise that elevated moderate Republican Denny O’Brien of Philadelphia to the speakership, famously midwifed in part by tenderfoot legislator Josh Shapiro, was pounded out in late night sessions at the Conshohocken Marriott and in Gov. Ed Rendell’s basement.
Bill DeWeese’s floor nomination of O’Brien came as a surprise to the media and the public, but the details of the arrangement had been agreed to by the principal parties. The Mark Rozzi compromise, on the other hand, was just as surprising but less organized.
Even the question of whether the Speaker would rule as a small- or big-”i” independent was apparently ambiguous, leading to ugly personal recriminations spilling into the public. And now the most insider of insider negotiations — the rules of the chamber — is being litigated in public. This may be a decent civics lesson for those who are paying attention, but it also works against compromise by subjecting members to public pressures, especially from the most vocal and least pragmatic members of their parties.
Of course, DeWeese’s nostalgia, and my own, only goes so far. Besides being shielded from public inspection, the old smoke-filled backrooms often excluded women and others not part of the white-male-dominated political class. They served each other as often as they served the people. We shouldn’t go back.
But who could disagree with DeWeese that “more was able to be accomplished in the days of David Lawrence,” while political distrust has been “magnified exponentially by the age of performance”? The correction, in other words, has gone too far.
The only way to govern a split legislative chamber is through trust — the kind of trust that can only be built through intimacy. That, more than public listening sessions, is where Rozzi needs to focus if he wants to make this experiment in bipartisanship work.
(Brandon McGinley is the deputy editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
