Who does the PA legislature work for?
A grassroots analysis of bills passed in the PA General Assembly in the 2021-2022 legislative session
Background/context:
Between June and September 2024, a small team of volunteers from Put People First! PA, the Nonviolent Medicaid Army and the PA Poor People’s Campaign collaborated on a critical investigation to determine whether, and to what extent, the Pennsylvania legislature acts in the interest of everyday people. Having first approached several research firms about taking on this project, which they declined, the team decided to take on the project themselves. This study has been entirely funded out of grassroots fundraising done by Put People First! PA - therefore, entirely by the working class of Pennsylvania. It was not commissioned by nor is it connected to any private philanthropic entities or government institutions.
About the organizations:
Put People First! PA gives voice to everyday people who are struggling to meet our basic needs. We define our basic needs as things we need to live healthy and fulfilling lives — things like education, housing, health care, jobs at living wages, food, and a healthy environment. We’re a membership organization made up mostly of people who know from our life experience that poor and working people need to unite and have a voice. No one else is going to do it for us. We’re building, county by county, all across Pennsylvania. We’re urban and rural. We’re multiracial. We’re politically independent. Until we unite, we don’t have the power to change things.
The Nonviolent Medicaid Army of the poor is a growing militant force of the poor and dispossessed, united across identities, regions, races and issues, modeled after MLK’s ‘nonviolent army of the poor’ from the first Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. We are a network of organizations and committees that understand healthcare to be a strategic front of struggle to unite the working class.
The Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign is the PA State Chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The campaign addresses the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation, the war economy and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.
About the team:
The person responsible for the primary analysis of all bills passed in the 2021-2022 legislative session is Cedar Monroe. Cedar Monroe is an author, activist, and chaplain. He holds a Masters in Divinity from Episcopal Divinity School and worked as an interfaith chaplain in poor communities for thirteen years. They cofounded Chaplains on the Harbor, a ministry for and with people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and addiction, in western Washington state; co-founded Harbor Roots Farm, a supportive employment project supporting people coming out of jail to learn how to farm and connect with the earth; and is the author of Trash: A Poor White Journey (2024).
The overall coordinator of the project is Nijmie Zakkiyah Dzurinko. Nijmie is a working class Black and Indigenous organizer and strategist of over 20 years from Pennsylvania. She is co-founder and volunteer coordinator of Put People First! PA which also founded the Nonviolent Medicaid Army. They are a former tri-chair of and currently sit on the coordinating committee of the PA Poor People's Campaign. Nijmie also organizes with the National Union of the Homeless.
Oluwasekemi “Kemi” Odumosu contributed to this project as a volunteer consultant. A Black researcher from Philadelphia and the daughter of a single working mother, Kemi is a passionate advocate for improving economic mobility for workers through organizations like the Poor People’s Campaign. Kemi holds a Master of Science in Public Policy and Data Analytics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Karen Saunders organizes with the Vermont Workers Center and the Nonviolent Medicaid Army.
Methodology:
This study reviewed the 166 bills passed under general legislation in 2021- 2022 in Pennsylvania. All bills were assessed by comparing them to the issue-specific policy framework laid out in the Poor People’s Campaign Moral Budget. Because several bills had multiple provisions that needed to be analyzed separately, we divided the bills into 171 provisions.
Of those 171, 6 bills passed under general legislation were budget related (in addition to 12 appropriations bills also passed in relation to the budget). These bills are not analyzed as part of this study. This means that a total of 165 provisions are included in this data.
The Poor People’s Moral Budget, released in 2019, identifies the following areas as necessary components of a truly moral legislative and policy agenda: 1. Democracy and Equal Protection under the Law (voting rights and immigration) 2. Domestic Tranquility (wages and social welfare) 3. Equitable Economy (taxes) 4. Life and Health (Medicaid and healthcare) 5. Our Future (childcare and education) 6. Our Planet (climate change and water) and 7. Peace and the Common Defense (militarism and mass incarceration).
Viewable table with data organized by bill number, link, subject, title, date enacted, and how our analysis has categorized the bill can be found here.
We used four categories. First, we determined whether or not the bill or provision was addressing any of the issues raised in the Moral Budget. If they did not, we categorize them as unrelated.
If the bills or provisions do address issues raised in the Moral Budget, we categorize them in three ways: help, hurt, neutral. In other words, does this bill help or hurt the working class? If a bill or provision meets some part of the demands of the Moral Budget (for example, reducing incarceration or addressing the housing crisis), they help. If they instead push policies that counter the Moral Budget (for example, reducing corporate taxes), they hurt. If they raise the issues addressed in the Moral Budget, but do nothing to address it (for example, calling for a study or mandating public health educational materials without funding the issue), they are labeled as neutral–they do address the issue, but do not provide significant relief, and neither help nor hurt in any substantial way.
Notes are provided for all the bills. Most bills were simply irrelevant to the basic human needs in the moral budget. All bills directly related to these needs have been designated as either helpful, neutral, or harmful. For each of those, the topic, population affected, and room for improvement is also specified.
Synopsis of findings:
In this study, 95 provisions and bills are found to be irrelevant to meeting human needs. That is 58% - the majority - of the 165 provisions and bills being analyzed.
That means that only 70 provisions and bills are connected in any way to the human needs raised in the Moral Budget (42%). Of these, 27 are found to be “neutral”, or 16% of the provisions and bills. Thirty are found to “help”, or 18%. Thirteen are found to “hurt”, or 8%. Therefore, the total number of bills and provisions that don’t help the working class - whether they are harmful, neutral, or irrelevant is 135 out of 165 or 81.8%.
Here’s the same information broken down further.
The six budget bills were not analyzed using this method. We did not have the resources, and there was not enough public information, to complete a full analysis of the capital budgets. In the future, it would be useful to do more study here. However, we were able to note the major trends in the general and capital budgets, based on the governor’s proposal and the final bills that passed, and how the priorities of the Moral Budget were being addressed. This is linked here.
Scale and scope: help vs. hurt
While, in a technical sense, more than twice the amount of provisions and bills were found to be “helpful” rather than “hurtful” the data tell a deeper story. Overall, the scale and scope of the bills and provisions that help is puny in comparison to the scale and scope of the bills that hurt.
For instance SB 739 expands who can apply for Fire and EMS grants, from just volunteer departments to any Fire or EMS company. The money being distributed is $25 million from Federal Covid Assistance funding. EMS in particular would be seriously strengthened by expanded and protected Medicaid, Medicare, and universal healthcare measures, because it would increase funding for these services. There seems to be consensus that EMS services particularly are in crisis in PA. The top concern, of course, is funding and lack of sufficient insurance or Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. This is an example of ways that money distributed during COVID helped shore up public health. The main room for improvement is for funding to be expanded, not retracted, in post-Covid years.
Another example is SB 635. This bill changes a few definitions and includes residential properties with more than 5 units in the Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE), "a financial tool for property owners to obtain low-cost, long-term financing for energy efficient equipment, renewable energy, water conservation, resiliency, and indoor air quality projects." This program is voluntary county by county and the grants cannot be used for renovation, but can be used to update buildings with green energy options. When counties opt in to this, they also set standards for clean energy projects in their area and what qualifications will be for businesses and owners who want to participate. This is a small step toward renewable energy demanded by the Moral Budget, but one that entirely depends on voluntary participation by the county, and then voluntary participation by commercial property owners. It's an incentive program, but it does not mandate clean energy in any way.
HB 1342 on the other hand, is marketed in its memo as a bill that eliminates estate tax for a military member who died while in service. However, it changes a significant number of tax codes that do significantly impact state revenue, including adding a child tax credit (good for the working class, but only if they are eligible for federal child tax credits). The majority of the bill beyond this decreases corporate tax from 9.99% to 4.99% by one percent the first year and half a percent a year until 2031, increases small business expense deduction from 25k to 1.8 million, and greatly increases tax credits for various types of business, including film production, entertainment, research and development, and others. Of note, the initial reduction for the first year is calculated to cost the state 202 million in lost revenue. The child tax credit would result in a 25 million loss for the coming fiscal year, while the total business tax breaks came close to costing 275 million in lost revenue. Clearly, this was a major win for big business and it is touted as a win for the state's economic future. Important to note that this is a bipartisan bill, although spearheaded by Republicans.
Additional observations
Land transfer bills are highlighted in yellow. Some involve transfer of land to park trails, while others are transferring public land to private corporations or individuals. Bills to create task forces or studies are highlighted in blue. Whether useful or detrimental, none of these has clear policy guidance. Three mandate health information be more widely provided (highlighted purple) but only one of these provides practical guidance, and none provide better services.
A large percentage of legislation passed by the PA legislature is just changing language: whether the names of bridges or the language of legal codes or business guidelines. It is largely administrative, doing very little to change conditions. This is important, because one of the strategies of the powers that be is to focus on minutiae and maintaining the status quo. They look busy but do little.
The scope of the 18% of bills that help often is so narrow that no substantial changes are being made. However, though a smaller percentage of the overall total, the bills that “hurt” and benefit profiteers over people, offer much more sweeping concessions.
Many of the bills that “help” are not commensurate to the scale of the challenges that we face as a working class. For example, bills to remove barriers for immigrant healthcare workers or make probation requirements easier for people released from prison don’t guarantee work or healthcare or end mass incarceration. Or they provide a small bit of funding to cap oil wells, but then make implementation contingent on bids from corporate entities. These bills are almost tokens, small gestures to placate people without making any substantial change.
Meanwhile, the few bills that substantially help the ruling class are sweeping in scope–they slash corporate tax in half, for example. There are not many of them, and they are often cushioned in administrative bills, but they do a shocking amount of damage. The rest of harmful bills largely continue to increase the criminalization and mass incarceration of the working class.
It is also useful to notice timing here. There are a huge batch of bills passed in the beginning of July around the budget and then the legislature does very little for the following 3 months. On Nov 3, just before the session is going to end, nearly 70 bills are passed on the floor in the same day and many of these have not been really sufficiently reviewed by lawmakers and some of them, based on news reports, don't even seem to know all that they voted for. Major tax cuts are hidden in these measures, as well as pet projects. While some of these bills have repeatedly come to the floor and been debated, not all have, and this seems to be a strategy to both confuse lawmakers and citizens, because it's easy to not even realize what has been passed.
Considerations and Recommendations
How do we define “the working class”? Broadly speaking - all those who have to work for a living. Census data from the 2023 American Community Survey reports that 12% of Pennsylvanians are living in poverty. We use the Poor People’s Campaign metric of 200% of the federal poverty line in considering who is poor, as the official poverty measure does not accurately reflect the cost of living. This means that in our estimation, nearly 25% of Pennsylvanians are living in or near poverty. Then there are the 65% of PA households bringing in less than 100k per year. Most of these families are also living one missed paycheck, housing, or health crisis away from poverty. All people in Pennsylvania need clean water, healthcare, food, housing, education, transportation and freedom from criminalization.
According to Spotlight PA, PA lawmakers have the 3rd highest salary in the country, behind only California and New York. Our legislators’ base salary is now more than $106,000 per year, putting them in a minority of PA households. Additionally, our legislators have lifetime medical benefits as well as retirement benefits.
The approach of the organizations conducting this study is of political independence and “holding all power holders accountable”. We do not take our direction from either of the political parties or corporate philanthropy. Some may raise the objection that in the 2021-2022 legislative session, Republicans were in control of both the House and Senate in Pennsylvania. We do not believe that the lack of meaningful legislation in the 2021-2022 session is ONLY the result of Republican control. For instance, many positive measures promoted by Poor People’s Campaign organizations such as drivers licenses for all, an end to life without parole, and a gift ban have not passed the PA House since Democratic control was assumed.
The PA Poor People’s Campaign suggests the following actions the legislature can take to demonstrate a basic commitment to working for the people and meeting human needs.
Senate pass HB 1417 to restore the adult dental benefit in Medicaid
Senate pass HB 2433 to stop dark money spending in PA elections
Senate pass HB 2180 to cancel PA student lunch debt
House pass HB 279 to restore drivers licenses for all
Appendix:
Poor People’s Campaign state fact sheet on conditions in Pennsylvania
Put People First! PA: www.putpeoplefirstpa.org
Nonviolent Medicaid Army: www.nonviolentmedicaidarmy.org
PA Poor People’s Campaign: https://www.pennsylvaniapoorpeoplescampaign.org/