The worst kind of budget impasse is when both sides have a point.
It’s easy to say what should happen when there is a clear right and clear wrong — even if it is only about perspective. If something is as simple as raising taxes versus lowering them, most people can pick a position pretty easily. The sides might be diametrically opposed, but that makes the decision straightforward. This or that, up or down, left or right.
Pennsylvania’s fight is more nuanced. The arguments regarding funding for the large state-related universities — University of Pittsburgh, Penn State and Temple University — from Democrats and Republicans could appeal to the opposition, too — as long as someone else uttered the words.
This budget negotiation has pushed politics into the odd position of arguing education simultaneously on two fronts, with Democrats being both for and against vouchers in the general budget bill and with Republicans arguing that public universities are really private schools that shouldn’t get state funding.
“They are in fact de facto private universities,” state Rep. Ryan Warner, R-Fayette County, was quoted in a Spotlight PA article. “How could anybody sit here and tell me we need to give these universities hundreds of millions of dollars yet we have no idea how they spend it?”
It’s not a bad argument. It’s just hard to keep track of who is on what side right now.
“We’re failing to invest in our children and our young people,” said state Rep. Donna Bullock, D-Philadelphia.
Again, she’s not wrong.
The Republican-majority Senate left Harrisburg after the House gave its nod to the general budget, which volleyed the bill back to the upper chamber. With the ball in its court, the Senate skipped town with no plans to return until Sept. 18 — and no interest in doing so after Gov. Josh Shapiro backed out of his support for vouchers.
Similarly, the narrowly Democratic-led House may have given a last minute OK to the general budget but isn’t inclined to move on the state-related university appropriations. The GOP did see 28 members vote with Democrats for the bill. But while that’s a majority, it isn’t enough for the two-thirds threshold it demands.
It isn’t that lawmakers or the governor isn’t making concessions or bending occasionally. They are. This isn’t the type of rigid, ugly, gang-war battles the Legislature saw during previous administrations and other legislative leaderships.
That might make it even more frustrating. They have different ideas, but they aren’t as far apart as they have been in the past. The lawmakers and the parties know the votes they need to cast are among the most important they will pass this year.
They just weren’t important enough to do on time or before scattering to Pittsburgh and Greensburg, Erie and Philadelphia. And so far, they aren’t important enough for those leaders to say they will come back and finish the job.
