PA Bill Number: HB2089
Title: Establishing the Coal and Clay Mine Subsidence and Landslide Insurance and Assistance Program within the Department of Environmental Protection; ...
Description: Establishing the Coal and Clay Mine Subsidence and Landslide Insurance and Assistance Program within the Department of Environmental Protec ...
Last Action: Referred to INSURANCE
Last Action Date: May 14, 2024
Democratic state rep, congressional candidate Santarsiero comes up short :: 04/14/2016
It’s surprising. State Rep. Steve Santarsiero, D-31, running for U.S Congress from Lower Makefield, has spent four terms in Harrisburg, yet no bill he has introduced has become law -- not even on gun control, his signature issue in his candidacy for for the 8th District.
What kind of progressive Democrat is he? Progressives pass laws like cows pass methane, leading to the regulation of cows and restrictions on methane.
Laws, regulations, restrictions. An ever-tightening loop. It’s what progressives do best.
Santarsiero’s opponent in the Democratic primary, “scientist” Shaughnessy Naughton, has called out Steve’s meager legislative accomplishments, hitting him hard on his claim to fellow Democrats in a mailer that, “Steve Santarsiero wrote PA’s Gun Safety Law.”
There is no Pennsylvania “Gun Safety Law.” There is only a bill that was never passed into law.
Now, I have no problem with Steve’s thin record. Government that governs least governs best. Let me be the first to thank him for his noble (if inadvertent) inaction on behalf of the people of the commonwealth.
The problem for Steve is that it's not what lefty progressives who send other lefty progressives to Congress want. They want government -- the bigger, the better. Democratic socialism! Feel the Bern! Regulate gassy cows!
But facts are facts. According to our reporting, of the 54 bills Santarsiero introduced as prime sponsor since 2009, none became law, including House Bill 1010, the so-called “Gun Safety Law.”
His gun control law would have, among other things, closed the “gun show loophole,” which allows private sellers to sell guns at gun shows with no background check.
The Naughton campaign is gleefully exposing the embroidered record.
“Steve Santarsiero has been exaggerating his legislative record to voters in the mail,” Naughton's campaign manager, Erik Polyak, told us. “He says he wrote the law to close the background check loophole, but he didn’t. Pennsylvania does not have a universal background check law.”
The Santarsiero campaign, exercising its own loophole, countered that it’s a “law” in the sense of “proposed law.” Besides, the mailer accurately called it a “bill” on second reference, they said.
Besides, they added, there are more than 50 bills that Santarsiero co-sponsored that became laws. It's a featherweight defense, since no heavy lifting was involved. Co-sponsoring legislation proposed by others is the kind of record that earns a politician nicknames like “State Rep. Me Too.”
No, seems like it’s amateur hour at the Santarsiero campaign. Their candidate is running for Congress, not the township Board of Supervisors, kids. It confounds me why Team Santarsiero hasn't trotted out the most believable defense for Steve’s lack of accomplishments in Harrisburg — that he’s a progressive Democrat trying to do things in a statehouse run by knuckle-dragging tea party Republicans. Liberals always believe that stuff, though in this case, it’s laughable.
Oh, the Pennsylvania statehouse is controlled by Republicans, but they’re not the neanderthal Fox News types. They're Big Government Republicans, aka RINOs – Republicans In Name Only.
Southeastern Pennsylvania is the leading producer of RINOs. Heck, state Republican Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, whose district encompasses parts of Bucks and Montgomery counties, holds the distinction of casting his GOP vote against removing from office disgraced Democrat Attorney General Kathleen Kane. (Is he really a Republican?)
RINO Republicans are who Santarsiero has been working with these last seven years. Just ask the last Republican governor, Tom Corbett, elected on tea party support. Corbett couldn’t move any meaningful right-wing legislation even with the Senate and General Assembly under Republican control.
Corbett's plan to resolve the $50 billion ticking time bomb of unfunded state employee pensions? Zilch. Privatizing the despised state Liquor Control Board, a reform that has more the 70 percent approval from all Pennsylvanians? Zippo. Expanding school vouchers to allow kids in lousy schools a chance to obtain a good education? Corbett’s plan turned out to be a nothingburger.
But when it came to raising $2.3 billion by hiking gasoline taxes and a myriad of fees to fund the big government transportation bill in 2013, Corbett had Republican support. Remember that next January, when the price at the pump shoots up another 25 cents a gallon. Thanks, Republicans!
Bigger government, higher taxes, thwarting reform of state employee goodies. Harrisburg hums with a progressive agenda. Makes you wonder why a progressive like Steve Santarsiero still came up short.
