Karen Heller: Harrisburg's shameless part-timers

Do you have a good job? No? Consider running for the Pennsylvania Senate. The pay is good ($76,163), the perks are great. Most days, you won't even have to show up in Harrisburg.

"How can you call it a full-time legislature when they meet only nine or 10 days in six months to do the only thing they're supposed to do, which is legislate?" asks G. Terry Madonna, a Franklin and Marshall College professor and long-time Harrisburg observer.

To be fair, the Senate actually meets 13 times in six months. Why, three sessions are scheduled next week. But then, the Senate is done for the year.

There are campaigns to run and chicken dinners to endure. No pol wants to be charged with doing anything in a lame-duck session that might result in his goose being cooked in the voting booths.

This makes Donna Cooper apoplectic. She's the governor's secretary of policy and planning. Gov. Rendell is trying to pass two major policy initiatives, energy regulation and health-care reform, in the remaining hours; otherwise, the process must begin all over again.

Sort of like

Groundhog Day

but, you know, without the fun.

"Some would say there's a partisan paralysis," Cooper says. "It's a very adversarial conversation that's gotten worse this year. Why do we have all this down time? It's like a really bad theatrical production that's become surreal."

The bills were introduced shortly after Rendell's second-term inauguration in January 2007. To some legislators, that month marked the beginning of his lame-duck status.

The governor is a Democrat. The Senate has a Republican majority. "There's no question that this has been a session that has moved slowly for a whole variety of issues. There are deep philosophical differences between the governor and the Senate," says Stephen MacNett, the Senate majority's general counsel. The Senate will consider three dozen bills in three days.

"By any objective standard, the state lags as a policy innovator. We change very slowly," says consultant Michael Young, a veteran Harrisburg analyst. "It's imbedded in the culture that if you want to get re-elected, you pay attention to constituent service first and Harrisburg second."

Reform may have slowed business. After lawmakers got slapped for voting themselves a 2 a.m. pay hike in July 2005 - they've got the munchies for money - there has been a crackdown on late sessions "when a lot of work actually got done," Young says.

Last year, the Senate had 23 sessions from October through December. This year: three. This is in deference to Election Day and any suggestion of - you guessed it - crispy lame-duck actions.

Who gets to foot the bill during the long break? Why, you do, paying full-time salaries of 253 members of the legislature and 2,916 staff members.

"The bigger problem is that some members are happy they're not doing anything," Madonna says. If you do something, other than constituent service, he suggests, constituents might get angry, especially if it costs money.

"The legislature is a wounded institution," says Temple professor Joseph McLaughlin, who worked many years with it. "This is a very difficult state to govern. We're intensely partisan, reflecting a culture that's more concerned in bartering specific interests than it is in serving the common good."

After Nov. 4, "both sides are going to begin angling for their nominees for governor," Young says.

That's two years before the governor's race, suggesting two years of little reform or major legislation.

Madonna can't see the point of paying such high salaries for 62 Senate sessions. "They think their job is constituent service. It's not. That's the job of state employees," he says. "They ought to be paid part-time, because that's what they are."