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Musical chairs continues for Pa. Congressional seats

The domino effect of the Specter party shift continues to work its way through Pa. politics, as Congressmen. Jim Gerlach (R-6) and Joe Sestak (D-7) threaten to run for Senate, state Representative Curt Schroder (R-Chester) eyes Gerlach’s seat, and Republican former U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan and state Representative Bryan Lentz (D-Delaware) consider Sestak’s seat.

The one thing you can be sure of is that all of this will change several tims before next Fall. Probably the first to change will be Specter’s “lead” over Sestak, which I suspect is about 90 percent name recognition and 10 percent substance, if that. If this changes, of course, so will everything else, since more weakness on Specter’s part encourages both Sestak and Gerlach and leads the other dominos to fall into place. Or not.

One interesting question is why state legislators feel compelled to run almost immediately for Congress as soon as a seat becomes available. The two most likely answers appear to be, one, that Congressmen are more famous and get paid more, and two, that it’s hard to run without already holding an office that you can use to, well, extort money in order to run for the next one. The down side is that there’s no particular correlation between success in Harrisburg and Washington—the issues are different and the scrutiny much greater—so a system of this nature probably has a lot to do with the mediocrity of the state’s representation in Washington over the years.

June 1, 2009 at 11:06 am

--Michael Livingston

Tags: Bryan Lentz, Curt Schroder, Jim Gerlach, Joe Sestak, PA-6, PA-7

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