Damn straight:
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on Wednesday blasted Republican lawmakers for pushing to impeach state Supreme Court justices who ruled that the Keystone State’s congressional districts were unfairly gerrymandered on partisan lines.
“This is an unprecedented and undemocratic attempt to retaliate against the judicial branch,” Wolf, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The legislature should be helping people, not settling personal grudges. This is nonsense and a waste of precious time and resources.”
Twelve Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers on Tuesday filed legislation to remove four of the five Democratic justices on the court — David Wecht, Christine Donahue, Kevin Dougherty and Debra McCloskey Todd — for “misbehavior in office.”
The court in January voted 5-2 on party lines to strike down congressional maps drawn in 2011, determining that they were so gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor that they violated the state constitution and needed to be replaced before the May primary. The map has typically given Republicans 13 out of 18 congressional seats, even as they have won around 50 percent of the statewide vote.
After lawmakers failed to meet a court-imposed deadline to negotiate new maps with the governor’s office, the court ordered that its own map, drawn by an outside expert, be used.
That decision inspired a federal lawsuit from Pennsylvania Republicans, who also made two unsuccessful appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the court-drawn map.
It also prompted Rep. Cris Dush (R) to kick off the impeachment charge, rallying other GOP lawmakers to back his legislation calling for the justices’ ouster. Backers of the measure say the court overstepped its judicial authority by imposing new district lines. Justice Max Baer, the court’s fifth Democrat, escaped an impeachment resolution because he said the current map could stay in place until 2020.
It’s unclear how much support the impeachment push has in the GOP-controlled legislature.
And more of these GOP idiots are behind this:
Dush also said Republican House Speaker Michael Turzai and state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R), the chair of the state government committee, had told him they would allow his impeachment resolution to come up for a vote.
Dush had argued to The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday that if the court was trying to exceed its power, future Republican-controlled courts might overstep as well.
A day earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Republican lawmakers challenging the new map.
Douglas Keith, counsel at the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which filed a friend of the court brief supporting voters who had challenged the old map, said it was “remarkable” so many legislators were backing the impeachment effort.
“They may think this kind of posturing when they disagree with a court ruling will go over well with partisans in our current political climate, but if so they’re undermining our democracy to score cheap political points,” Keith said. “This is not what the impeachment power is for, and they’d be better served by following the lead of their Republican colleagues who said yesterday it’s time to move on.”
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, accused Republicans of seeking retribution against justices who struck down the old map.
“This brazen attack on an independent court by those who are afraid to face the people in fair elections undermines our democratic values and must be rejected,” Holder said in a statement.
Supreme Court justices are elected in Pennsylvania. To impeach, the state Assembly must first find that a judge committed an impeachable offense. Then, two-thirds of the state Senate must vote to convict after a trial. As of January, Republicans controlled 120 of 203 seats in the Assembly and 34 of 50 seats in the Senate.
It’s unclear whether the legislation has a chance.
This battle just emphasizes why we have to make sure Wolf is re-elected. This latest undemocratic power grab attempt is not only desperate, it’s a sign the the PA GOP is turmoil because their own gubernatorial candidates are busy tearing each other apart:
Watch television these days, and you might think a couple of liberal Republicans are running for governor of Pennsylvania.
Paul Mango and state Sen. Scott Wagner are both successful businessmen running as conservative outsiders (even though Wagner has been in the Senate for four years), and both are tapping their own wealth to run expensive TV ad campaigns — trashing each other.
“Four years ago, Wagner promised he’d lower your property taxes,” Mango says in a recent 30-second spot. “He didn’t just fail, he called for a massive new tax on seniors’ retirement pensions. That’s unconscionable.”
The charge comes from an appearance Wagner made two years ago at a Berks County Patriots meeting, where he spoke positively about taxing some retirement income.
Wagner was talking about the gravity of the state’s budget crisis and said, “The other problem we have, and this really angers me to a certain degree — we don’t tax retirement incomes in the state of Pennsylvania.”
He went on to say he’d explored the idea of taxing retirement income over $50,000 but found it would violate the state Constitution.
Asked about the comment, Wagner’s campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo said in an email that Wagner was talking about the need for broad-based tax reform, adding that Wagner has been a far more consistent supporter of property tax elimination than Mango.
Mango began attacking Wagner in television ads after Wagner secured the endorsement of the state Republican Party. In a new ad, Wagner hits back at Mango.
“No real Republicans support Mango. That’s because Mango is the leading advocate for Obamacare,” an announcer says in the ad. “And get this: Mango’s company is a leader in promoting outsourcing jobs to India and Mexico.”
Mango ran the Pittsburgh office for McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm. Mango campaign spokesman Matthew Beynon said the outsourcing claim is from a piece on the company’s website that Mango had nothing to do with, and that Mango never supported Obamacare.
Wagner’s campaign provided examples of media reports in which Mango speaks positively about universal health coverage and the expansion of Medicaid. Beynon said Mango was quoted in those stories as an analyst of health care policy, not an advocate, and that he’s been a staunch opponent of Obamacare.
Meanwhile, Wolf has been doing an excellent job as Governor and I love this new plan from Wolf:
Governor Tom Wolf has launched an initiative to improve broadband access in rural Pennsylvania—and state lawmakers and other officials in underserved areas appear to be on board.
Chiefly, the plan will involve an incentive program that’ll offer up to $35 million to telecommunication companies bidding for Pennsylvania service areas through a federal auction.
It’ll allow the commonwealth to take advantage of some of the $2 billion the Federal Communications Commission is giving to companies who expand into underserved areas.
Money for the incentives will come from PennDOT, which aims to bulk up its wireless network along the commonwealth’s roads to make way for higher-tech vehicles.
Let’s stick it to the Pennsylvania GOP. Click here to donate and get involved with Wolf’s re-election campaign.