With the nation in crisis in the spring of 1968, Pennsylvania voters peacefully went to the polls to ratify five proposals to modernize the state Constitution.
The amendments adopted on April 23, 1968 were the product of Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention of 1967-68.
The referendum and the three-month convention that preceded it capped a decade-long effort to revise Pennsylvania’s 19th century constitution. READ MORE »
Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy blazed like a comet across the American sky in the spring of 1968. Kennedy launched his campaign on March 16 in the Senate Caucus Room. Neither he nor the nation was prepared for what transpired during the next three months.
As a teenager interested in politics, I had never seen anything like it and still haven’t to this day. The three-months campaign began on a note of uncertainty, generated intense excitement along the primary trail and ended with profound tragedy at a triumphant moment. READ MORE »
The turmoil of 1968 produced an enduring image that lives to this day. This print depicts a trio of freedom fighters who fell to assassins’ bullets: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
It took five years of political and human tragedy to render this image of a generation’s loss.
At the start of the 20th century, prints featuring the likenesses of another trio of martyrs stirred the nation’s consciousness. They featured three Republican presidents who fell to assassins’ bullets: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley.
It took thirty-six years of political and human tragedy to render this image of loss for the Civil War generation. READ MORE »
Heroic moments are infrequent in presidential politics.
Fifty years ago this week, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was an unlikely hero as he launched a quixotic candidacy to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from President Lyndon Johnson.
The Vietnam War was the catalyst for McCarthy’s announcement of his candidacy on Nov. 30, 1967 in the Senate Caucus Room. It didn’t seem like much of an announcement. McCarthy didn’t refer directly to his own candidacy and mentioned how he wished someone else had taken on the task. Other liberal politicians courted by anti-war activists that fall, including Robert Kennedy, had rebuffed pleas to run. READ MORE »
He was more a member of the landed gentry than a farmer, but that didn’t matter.
When John Dickinson wrote the first of a series of letters from a “farmer in Pennsylvania” in the Pennsylvania Chronicle in November 1767, he struck a chord with his “countrymen.”
“My Dear Countrymen, I am a farmer, settled after a variety of fortunes near the banks of the River Delaware in the province of Pennsylvania,” wrote Dickinson in his first letter. “…From my infancy, I was taught to love humanity and liberty.”
In the course of a dozen letters, Dickinson presented the legal and political reasons to support his argument that the various moves undertaken by Great Britain to impose taxes on her American colonies were illegal and unconstitutional. In these letters, Dickinson sounded themes that gained currency in the impending American Revolution and ring familiar to us 250 years later. READ MORE »
Column by Mike Young and Terry Madonna
Politics!
Today it’s everywhere or often seems so.
Trump mania pervades news coverage while heated and often testy debates about health care, immigration, criminal justice and trade policy increasingly dominate the national conversation.
Turn on any news program and try to escape it. We are dominated by a growing national obsession with politics.
Nor are state governments immune to our growing national preoccupation with politics and political problems. As states struggle to find new revenues and balance annual budgets, they increasingly move into policy arenas like immigration and climate change previously monopolized by the federal government.
But one place political questions do not prevail – indeed according to legal doctrine cannot prevail – is when the courts consider the problem of reapportionment, the decennial process in which states draw the congressional and state legislative districts to conform to population shifts occurring over the past decade.
Decennial reapportionment has been the law of the land since a landmark Supreme Court case in 1964 (Reynolds v Sims) ruled that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment requires voting districts be as equal in population as possible.
Equal they may now be – but fair they are still not. The problem is “gerrymandering” – the ancient, insidious and so far insoluble practice in American politics of creating voting districts that protect incumbents and immunize the party in power from competitive elections. The result across the nation has been a conglomeration of weirdly shaped almost ghoulish in appearance congressional districts that defy geography in the service of partisan advantage. READ MORE »
Canada’s 150th anniversary is a good reminder for Americans that this continental land mass provides room for another kind of democratic experiment.
Growing up in Buffalo New York, I was aware of the other — of a separate country just on the other side of the Niagara River with a parliamentary government and enduring customs and traditions of its own. READ MORE »
State Senator David Argall (R-29) has introduced a constitutional amendment to change the way Pennsylvania nominates its Lt. gubernatorial candidates. An amendment that is long overdo. It would allow the gubernatorial candidate to select a running mate subject to approval by the party executive committee. The two candidates would run on one ticket in the primary and not separately as they do now. Mike Young and I back on December 14, 2004 wrote a column decrying the follies of the current method of nominating Lt. gubernatorial candidates. Those arguments are still very relevant. That column appears below.
From Light Governor to Lt Governor
One of the worst kept political secrets in Harrisburg received a very public airing recently. In some high profile press reporting on the state’s lieutenant governor, the reading public learned that incumbent Cathy Baker Knoll has some problems. Actually she has many problems. Among them: staff turnovers of huge proportions in her office; some dubious government decisions made by members of her immediate family; allegations by some state senators that she incompetently handles her job as presiding officer of the senate; and most ignominiously we learn that Governor Ed Rendell ignores her.
Nor is the governor a majority of one here.
Not to make too fine a point of it, but Pennsylvania’s second in command is not taken very seriously by Harrisburg officialdom. A reasonable first reaction is to say “so what.” Conventional wisdom holds that the Lt. Governor does very little that matters. After all, the office is known colloquially around Harrisburg as “Light Governor.” And with reason–it has virtually no major responsibilities.
Yes, Lt. Governors do preside over the senate. But this role is largely ceremonial and procedural. Nor do administrative responsibilities involve much heavy lifting. The incoming governor customarily hands out a policy portfolio to the new Lt. Governor.
For example, Bill Scranton under Dick Thornburgh had energy and Mark Schweiker under Tom Ridge had emergency management. But there’s nothing in these assignments that any cabinet secretary or other gubernatorial advisor could not perform.
Lt. Governor’s do serve as chair of the Pardons Board. But no huge job here either, since the Board is advisory to the governor. So, why worry about the Lt. Governor, and especially about how qualified he or she might be. We demand little from the office, so why be surprised if little is what we get?
Que Serra Serra!
Still, it is interesting to ask just why Pennsylvanians are so cavalier about who ends up Lt. Governor, why are we nonchalant about number two? Part of the answer lies in the state’s improbable good luck with long-lived governors. In fact, no incumbent governor in modern history has died in office, making moot the question of whether the Lt. Governor is qualified to pick up the burden of office from a fallen governor. None have had to do so.
But our luck has been a close thing. Significantly, the last two governor’s had their tenure interrupted–Bob Casey by a double organ transplant and Tom Ridge by his resignation to become homeland security czar in the Bush administration. Both Lt. Governors who had to serve as acting Chief Executive or as Chief Executive performed quite well.
No one seriously challenged their credentials to serve as governor. Both largely continued the agenda of the current administration. Mark Singel was more hemmed in by Casey’s top advisors and Schweiker had the Quecreek mining disaster to deal with, but both left office with reputations enhanced. Pennsylvanians rightly
consider themselves fortunate in both replacements.
Surely luck is nice to have when you need it, but it is rarely a winning long-term strategy. Sooner or later luck runs out; often it seems at the worst possible moment. And it’s only chance and good fortune that have produced qualified Lt. Governors for Pennsylvania when they were needed.
The fundamental problem is the nomination process. Candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor are nominated separately in primary elections, then run together in general elections. Regional voting and name familiarity are heavy influences on winning. Typically voters know little about the candidates for Lt. Governor, and even less about what they would do if the big office were suddenly thrust upon them.
The clear contrast is with the vice presidency. Presidential nominees now select their running mates, weighing carefully the running mates personal compatibility, capacity to succeed to the presidency, and support for key policies. In Pennsylvania, none of this matters, since Lt Governor candidates run separately, and are subjected to virtually no screening for competency or compatibility with gubernatorial candidates, as presidential candidates face.
In truth, Pennsylvania selects its Lt. Governor in a dangerous high stakes game of political roulette. Gubernatorial candidates may endorse, but can’t select their running mates, and they don’t run as a team on the primary ballot. Not only can’t gubernatorial candidates pick their running mates, occasionally they don’t even try.
Most notable is the current case of Governor Rendell and Lt. Governor Knoll. Rendell endorsed no one when he ran for governor in 2002. Knoll won a crowded primary for the second spot aided significantly by her statewide name recognition from earlier races. Once she won her party’s primary, she became Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania by virtue of Rendell’s election.
Under the existing system there is no way to be assured that any Lt. Governor will be qualified to succeed to the governorship, much less be in agreement with the governor’s policy direction. Perhaps this worked well enough in times past. But, no longer! Once state government was a minor player in our lives, and governors, if not expendable, were readily replaceable. But those times are no more.
Today state government is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that deeply influences the lives of more than 12 million, and governors, if not quite irreplaceable, are pretty darn important. It is time to recognize that Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governorship also has undergone a transformation from a job once considered marginal if not superfluous, to a job analogous to the national vice-presidency, where the incumbent must be qualified to succeed if the need arises.
American political institutions resist reform. In Pennsylvania, this resistance has developed into a political art form.
We usually wait for crisis or even tragedy before fixing what clearly needs to be fixed. And a simple fix can resolve this particular problem. We can require candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor to run in the primary as a team, as they do now in general elections. Alternately, we can allow successful gubernatorial nominees to name a Lt. Governor candidate to the ticket, much as presidential candidates now do.
Either option works. Both get the job done. This one is a free shot. The only way to make things worse is continuing to select Lt. Governors the way we do now.
The wheels are already in motion to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. A reminder of how the United States came about may be worthwhile for Americans after a very divisive presidential election.
The USA 250th Commission was created last July under a law signed by President Obama to coordinate anniversary activities at the local, state and national level.
One aim of the 250th commission is to inform how the events leading to 1776 are key in the development of our national heritage, individual liberty, representative government and equal and inalienable rights and had a “profound influence throughout the world.”
The lead up to 2026 comes at a troubled time for American democracy just like during the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. READ MORE »
Several years ago, I was on a south central PA radio station talking about the Electoral College. After the interview I wrote some additional commentary which appears below. But first, as we approach the vote by the presidential electors on Monday, December 19, what do we know about the current situation with the likely vote. There is virtually no chance that Trump will not secure the 270 electoral votes necessary to elect him president. It does not matter what the Democratic electors do–37 Trump electors would have to refrain from voting for him. That is just not going to happen. There have been 157 faithless electors in American history, and in no case did they affect the outcome of the presidential election. In PA, Samuel Miles earned a dubious distinction in 1796. He became the first elector in American history to violate a pledge. He had pledged to vote for John Adams, the Federalist candidate, but instead voted for the Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson. In 1832, the state had faithless electors, but that involved the voting for vice president, not president.
What the drafters of the U.S. Constitution thought and did in 1787 has been always instructive. First was their aversion to electing directly the president, the demonstrable fear of the masses and democracy. Support for electing the president by popular vote was supported at the constitutional convention only by the delegates from Pennsylvania. A second consideration was their desire to ensure that the chief executive not be dominated by Congress—something the delegates at one point agreed to when they put the selection of the president into the hands of Congress but then reversed themselves by giving the job to state legislatures. The language in Article II is unambiguous: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled . . . .”
For the most part, state legislatures picked the electors in the first three presidential elections. Thereafter, electors in the states were chosen by the winner-take-all method and in congressional districts by the popular vote until the district method was abandoned in most states after the outbreak of the Civil War.
Not much remarked upon in any discussion of the EC these days is the fact that some Founders believed that because the big states would put up sufficient candidates none of them would secure a majority of the EC, forcing the actual selection of a president into the House of Representatives. In the House, each state, regardless of size, has one vote in the selection process, which naturally would enhance the influence of small states in the selection of a president.
There is the question that moving to popular vote would mean that small state would be ignored in presidential elections. The important factor is not so much the big state/small state distinction, but which states are competitive. That list stretches to 12-15 states at the moment, irrespective of size, though certainly the states with the larger electoral counts see more of the candidates. But one thing is certain, no candidate will make the pledge that Nixon made in 1960 to visit every state in the union, which found him in some not so helpful places, while Kennedy campaigned in the vote-rich industrial states as the 1960 campaign came to a conclusion.
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