Common Sense Weekly

Welcome to Common Sense Weekly! This is the Commonwealth Foundation's weekly news roundup of policy issues being debated in Harrisburg and across Pennsylvania.

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RGGI Is Unconstitutional, Harmful, and Useless

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is on the cusp of shaping the commonwealth’s economic future. The court will soon rule on the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s entry into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI

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), the multistate cap-and-trade program that would impose a new energy tax on Pennsylvania power producers, impacting consumers’ electric costs. The state’s top court will decide whether the Keystone State prospers from energy abundance or falls victim to energy poverty.

Pennsylvania’s membership with RGGI was problematic from the onset. Former Gov. Tom Wolf entered Pennsylvania into RGGI through a unilateral executive order, usurping the legislature's sole constitutional authority to levy taxes.

Wolf’s executive action was unconstitutional. Without the power of the purse, he could not legally create the new tax necessary for RGGI membership. Thankfully, the Commonwealth Court overruled

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Wolf’s unilateral act, stating

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“[t]he power to levy taxes is specifically reserved to the General Assembly.”



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Shapiro’s “Fast-Track” Program Is Great for His Allies, But Bad for Pennsylvania

Is Josh Shapiro the future of the Democratic Party? He certainly wants to be, but he just failed an early test.

This is the reality of the supposed permitting reform that our governor unveiled in November. Shapiro created

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a “fast track” program to get bureaucratic roadblocks out of the way of much-needed infrastructure projects in the state. The political calculus is clear: Shapiro wants to be seen as a moderate—someone who will rush to the middle and deliver growth and jobs. That’s a new direction for the Democratic Party after Kamala Harris lost the presidential race on a more progressive platform.

But the governor’s new policy is little more than political window-dressing. His new fast-track program gives him the power to decide which infrastructure projects to approve—and which ones to kill. In other words, he can choose the projects that are most likely to benefit him politically, instead of clearing the way for the infrastructure that Pennsylvania needs most.



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We Need More Three Mile Islands

Jane Fonda isn't a nuclear expert, but she played one on TV. In the 1979 film The China Syndrome, Fonda portrayed Kimberly Wells, a vivacious news reporter who discovered a cover-up at a nuclear power plant. The conspiracy involved the possibility of a meltdown that could "render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable."

The movie's timing and location were both impeccable. Twelve days after Fonda's film hit theaters, a reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI) in central Pennsylvania partially melted down. The accident resulted from "mechanical malfunctions…made much worse by a combination of human errors," according to a federal post-mortem report.

There were no documented fatalities, illnesses, or injuries; TMI suffered more from poor emergency-procedure planning, haphazard public relations, and hyperbolic media meltdowns than from the actual meltdown itself. But the incident was cannon fodder for the anti-nuclear movement. Fonda, an avid anti-nuke activist well before the accident, knew that she and her comrades commanded the zeitgeist. "You know the expression 'We had legs'?" she later said. "We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island."



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Campaign Funds, Secretive Nonprofit Pay for Josh Shapiro's Sports Tickets

Gov. Josh Shapiro

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viewed a Villanova University basketball game last week alongside a coach who’s won two national championships.

A few days later, he talked to tailgaters outside Lincoln Financial Field before heading inside to watch the Philadelphia Eagles take on the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Shapiro paid for neither ticket out of pocket.



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Learn how the Taxpayer Protection Act will protect Pennsylvania taxpayers and put our state back on the path of fiscal responsibility here

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