The Pennsylvania War Veterans’ Memorial Fountain at the state Capitol reflects a rainbow. (Peter Hall/Capital-Star)
By Avani Shah-Lipman
Six years ago, a constituent approached Rep. Jeanne McNeill, representing Pennsylvania’s 133rd district, with a problem. Her son with special needs had been denied a public school education.
The mother spent time living in both of her parents’ houses in Whitehall and Allentown. Her son was kicked out of school in Whitehall because the school claimed the family did not have legal residence there. So, she went to Allentown to ask if her son could enroll. They said no, so her son sat at home for five weeks.
McNeill, a Democrat from Whitehall, was inspired to take action to prevent other constituents’ children in her district from being deprived of an education.
So, she drafted a bill.
“It says no school can disenroll a student due to residency until it’s determined where the student actually resides,” McNeill said.
Six long years later, after much advocacy and hard work, the bill was signed into law.
“I didn’t give up. All we can do is keep trying,” McNeill said.
It’s shocking that one problem, that ultimately passed with unanimous consent, could take so much time and effort to fix. Though this six-year-long story has a happy ending, many other bills with similarly wide support face a less promising fate.
In 2023, only 86 of the 2,634 bills introduced to the Pennsylvania state legislature were enacted. That is a 3.26% success rate — the fourth worst in the nation. Bills have countless points along their journey where they can kick the bucket.
After bills are introduced in either chamber, they are sent to a committee for amendments or approval. If the committee chair (appointed by the majority-party leader) doesn’t support the bill, they will never schedule it for a committee vote. If it does make it through committee, the speaker of the House or the Senate president pro tempore may never schedule a time to hold a full vote on the bill.
Even with bipartisan support, the people in charge must act quickly, because at the end of each two-year legislative session, every bill dies and will need to be reintroduced at the beginning of the next session, just as McNeill did three times.
Many seemingly “common sense” bills, such as adding carbon monoxide detectors to daycares (tabled in a House committee after passing in the Senate), die in one of these ways.
There is a solution to this problem — priority bills. Each representative could choose a bill to be guaranteed a vote in every step of its journey, as long as it passes in the previous step. Representatives would be incentivized to work with the committees and/or members of both parties at each stage to amend the bill and increase its chance of passing.
In fact, state Rep. Melissa Shusterman, a Democrat from Schuylkill Township, introduced a resolution in 2021 to allow members to designate priority bills. Ironically, her bill died in committee. Shusterman still advocates for this idea, said Jennifer Pyc, Shusterman’s district office director.
A handful of other states, like California and Nebraska, employ a similar system, where representatives have a built-in way to call attention to issues they care about.
Both Rep. John Lawrence, a Republican from Chester County, and Rep. Mindy Fee, a Republican from Manheim, said they were unsure about how successful this idea would be but were willing to try it. They both emphasized the importance of the legislative process, though they admitted it could be arduous.
“The price of democracy is that it’s deliberative, and it takes time to change things,” Lawrence said.
In contrast, Rep. Mike Schlossberg, a Democrat from the Allentown area, said he believes the priority bill solution is not viable and that the current process is the best way to test if bills are worthy of a full chamber vote.
“It seems like an artificial way of forcing a vote on an issue that may not have generated support,” he wrote in an email.
The extreme division in the Pennsylvania General Assembly is a major reason why bills do not pass, so the priority bill method could help push bills of all ideologies forward while our representatives (hopefully) learn to collaborate.
This should be easy since representatives of both parties said fighting for their constituents is their top priority.
Avani Shah-Lipman is a senior at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr.