News & Brews March 7, 2025
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Shapiro’s Dept. of Self Promotion faces Senate grilling
The Post-Gazette reports that at yesterday’s budget hearing with the governor’s office, GOP state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (York County), “citing the state’s $3.2 billion structural budget deficit … highlighted the more-than-doubled size of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s communications staff and criticized his use of state resources to produce what she called ‘kind of frivolous’ social media content.” She’s not wrong. Shapiro has more than two dozen taxpayer-funded staff members who are paid to tout him to the public. Former Gov. Wolf, meanwhile, had 12.
Democrat lawmakers warming to voter ID
After years of opposing commonsense voter ID requirements—even to the point of former Gov. Wolf vetoing a comprehensive election reform package because it included voter ID—Pa. Democrat lawmakers are reportedly appearing to warm up to the idea. The lawmakers are quite behind the times, of course, as the majority of Pa. voters have long supported voter ID. The Inquirer reports that Democrat House Speaker Joanna McClinton (Philadelphia and Delaware counties) “herself opposes voter ID expansions. But what was once a nonstarter for Democrats is now being discussed … as an issue they are willing to negotiate—if they get other long-awaited election law changes or Democratic priorities in return.“
NLRB wades into United Steelworkers v. U.S. Steel
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the National Labor Relations Board is launching an “initial investigation” after United Steelworkers accused U.S. Steel “of intimidating workers opposed to a merger with Japan’s Nippon Steel.” The union’s complaint “accuses the steelmaker of making threatening statements, filing a lawsuit intended to squash dissent, and interrogating employees.” But U.S. Steel responded that the complaint is “just another example of the USW International’s effort to thwart the transaction, despite the opinions of many of its members.”
Op-Ed: ‘Political hit job on cyber charter schools’
We’ve been hearing a lot lately on funding for public cyber charter schools—mostly from pro-union Leftists (Hello, Gov. Shapiro) arguing that funding for these schools and the students that they education should be cut. Even though the Left says funding for traditional public schools should only and ever go up, up, up. Commonwealth Foundation President and CEO Andrew J. Lewis dives into the double standard behind this “political hit job.” He writes, “The simple truth is that the governor and his allies are trying to kill schools that teacher unions leaders don’t like — which is to say, anything but traditional public schools.”
Pa. ‘missing out on natural gas power plant construction boom’
Pittsburgh Works Together reports that even though “Pennsylvania is the #2 producer of natural gas in the United States, accounting for roughly 20% of the country’s total,” we are the only top natural gas producing state in the country that has no gas power plants under development. In fact, “Not a single utility-scale natural gas project has been started in Pennsylvania since then-Gov. Wolf pushed the state into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.” And this “has potentially cost the Commonwealth billions of dollars in construction and investment, as well as the associated jobs.” Of course, Gov. Shapiro has continued Wolf’s disastrous push into RGGI.