With Pa. House Adjourned, Child Sex Abuse Bill Remains at Stalemate

With the Pennsylvania House adjourned until late February and the House Speaker on a listening tour around the state, lawmakers remain at a stalemate over how to move forward with a legislative session and a bill that would give legal recourse to victims of childhood sexual abuse.

“Our door remains open. We want to work on rules together in a mature productive way. But since that has not happened, the speaker had to make some decisions on his own so that we could move the institution forward for all Pennsylvanians,” House Democratic Leader Joanna McClinton said in an interview airing this Sunday at 11:30 a.m. on NBC10 @Issue.

Republicans have urged the Speaker to call lawmakers back and pushed for Democrats to join them.

“The message is very simple,” House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler said in an interview also airing on NBC10 @issue on Sunday. “Simply call us back. We can vote the issues. We’re ready to work.”

Cutler is among the Republicans who voted to elect Mark Rozzi, a Democrat from Berks County, as Speaker of the House last month in a closely divided chamber where Democrats had won more seats but were left with fewer people because of vacancies. Cutler, from Lancaster County, has said he expected Rozzi to change his registration from Democrat to independent, which Rozzi has not. The Republican leader now describes his relationship with Rozzi as “obviously strained.”

If House members don’t return to session until February 27 – the date Rozzi set when he adjourned this week – the balance of power in the chamber could shift. Three special elections are scheduled for February 7 to fill open seats left by one Democratic member who died and two others who resigned to take other jobs. If Democrats win all three seats, they would hold the majority in the chamber.

Asked whether Democrats would then hold a new election for Speaker and whether she would run, McClinton said, “it’s not clear.”

McClinton, from Philadelphia, was expected to be Democrats’ choice for speaker when they won a majority of seats in November, but because of the math of the vacancies, Rozzi was elected in a bipartisan compromise.

“I’m ready. I’m willing. I’m able to do the job. I would love the opportunity to shatter the glass ceiling,” McClinton said. “We’ve never had a woman speaker in Harrisburg in the oldest legislative body in the nation. But the thing that’s clear is I have to have all the votes to do that, and on January the 3rd I did not. So I stepped out of the way, I did not even run, so that I could do what’s best for the institution and my caucus.”

The stalemate in the House comes as the chamber gathered earlier in January for a special session to consider a proposed constitutional amendment that would give victims of childhood sexual abuse a window of time to sue their abusers and related institutions. Time is now running out to pass that bill in order for it to be on the May primary ballot for voters to consider, though it could still be passed in time to be on the ballot in November.

McClinton said “absolutely” the bill will get passed in the current session so that it can get on one of the upcoming ballots.

While the House has not been able to come to a consensus on rules to operate, the Senate passed a package of constitutional amendments that includes the measure for victims – which has had bipartisan support – with two other Republican priorities involving voter ID and regulatory issues.

Asked whether he was willing to just address the victims bill first and then the others later, Cutler said “we could do it any number of ways.”

“You could simply take the Senate’s bill and you could say that one has to be on the primary ballot, the other two have to be on a different ballot. That’s one way you could address it,” Cutler said. “We could run them as three separate amendments and send them to the Senate, but you’ve got to be in session in order to do that and failing to call us into session is preventing us from addressing it in any format.”