News & Brews August 21, 2025
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SEPTA deal ‘unlikely’ before cuts
The Inquirer reports, “With just … days remaining until SEPTA’s service cuts go into effect on Sunday, there is diminishing hope that lawmakers in Pennsylvania’s divided legislature will be able to reach a deal to stop them.” Senate Republicans have proposed using $1.2 billion, mostly from an existing fund, until a longer-term agreement can be reached. Gov. Shapiro and Democrat lawmakers instead want “to increase mass transit’s share of the sales tax by 1.75 percentage points.” Meanwhile, Shapiro is seeking to shift blame to lawmakers, saying they have “got to make some tough choices.” For a governor who campaigned on bringing people together and “getting sh** done,” Shapiro currently seems unable to do either.
Democrat governors face ‘school choice reckoning’
Corey DeAngelis—senior fellow at the American Culture Project and a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research—writes in the New York Post that what makes the new school choice program in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill “so compelling — even for Democratic governors beholden to teachers’ unions — is a built-in incentive that’s impossible to ignore. If states don’t opt in, their constituents — whether they know it or not — will be subsidizing scholarships for families in the red states that are already rushing to sign on.” DeAngelis writes that one Democrat governor who is “showing signs of cracking under the pressure of common sense” is Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose “team has said he’s considering opting in to the federal program.” Of course, Shapiro has said one thing and done another on school choice before, so we’ll see what he does.
Op-Ed: ‘Why school choice matters’
Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Shante Woodlin of Philadelphia shares her family’s powerful school choice story. “At the beginning of our school search, my husband was working full time while I stayed home with our children,” she writes. “Living on a single income made the idea of private school feel impossible, until we discovered the Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia (CSFP). It made private education possible for us through financial assistance.” Still tuition costs are pressing. “That’s why PASS [or Lifeline Scholarships] (which would offer up to $15,000 in scholarships for eligible students) could be transformative.”
CMS looks at citizenship eligibility for Medicaid
Stateline reports that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has begun “an effort to check the immigration status of people who get their health insurance through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.” Individuals in the country illegally are not eligible for these programs using federal funds. CMS “will begin sending Pennsylvania and other states monthly enrollment reports that identify people with Medicaid or CHIP whose immigration or citizenship status can’t be confirmed through federal databases. States are then responsible for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals in those reports.”
Court rules on RTK and personal social media posts
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday upheld the status quo which says posts on the personal social media accounts of public officials “are not automatically subject to the state’s open-records laws,” the Tribune-Review reports. In response to the ruling, Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania News Media Association, said, “I don’t think this issue is settled for the purposes of Pennsylvania law. They missed that opportunity here. There will be more litigation as a result.”