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If you thought Harrisburg was bad…

Anyone who thinks Harrisburg is dysfunctional should follow the stories coming out of Albany (New York, not Georgia) this week.  Not having provided sufficient entertainment with the Eliot Spitzer affair, the state has decided to stage a kind of musical legislatures, with Democrats locking Republicans out of the state Senate and both parties at one point staging simultaneous sessions of the body with themselves in control. (The Senate, long under Republican control, went over to the Democrats in 2008, but switches by individual members have left it unclear exactly who’s in charge.) There hasn’t been this much entertainment in an English-speaking parliament since members of the House of Commons held the speaker in his chair while passing anti-royalist legislation in the 1600s.

While the Albany situation may be entertaining for outsiders, it carries a serious lesson: that the combination of aggressive partisanship, gerrymandered districts and legislative arrogance can produce an almost wholly incompetent legislature in a relatively short period of time. The lessons for Pennsylvania, which possesses each of these elements (albeit in smaller quantities than its northern neighbor), should be obvious. Let’s hope that Harrisburg gets the message, and begins to act in the public’s, rather than its own, interests before it becomes knows as Albany South.

June 24, 2009 at 9:19 pm

--Michael Livingston

Tags: Add new tag, Albany, Eliot Spitzer, harrisburg

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