As the General Assembly stalled out, the House speaker announced a ‘listening tour’ of Pennsylvania

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania General Assembly is at a complete halt.

The state Senate recessed last week until Feb. 27. The House has no plans to return, hasn’t set rules, or even set committee chairs as both parties struggle for power in a razor-thin majority. Instead, the new House speaker will lead a “listening tour” around the state.

And when one part of the state legislature isn’t working, none of it can.

“The House is essentially neutralized. It can’t perform its function,” said Khalif Ali, executive director of the good-government advocacy group Common Cause PA.

For the next few weeks, Pennsylvanians can expect that their lawmakers — whose annual starting salaries could top $100,000 this year — won’t be passing any laws any time soon.

Almost all of these problems hinge on one person: Pennsylvania’s new speaker of the House, Mark Rozzi. Rozzi, a six-term Democrat representing parts of Reading and its suburbs, was elected speaker Jan. 3 in a surprise vote supported by all House Democrats and House GOP leadership. The Senate canceled its scheduled voting sessions for the next two weeks of January because of the legislative hold-up in the House.

To solve the partisan gridlock, Rozzi created a work group of three Democrats and three Republicans. He expanded on this initiative Friday by announcing a listening tour with the group to ask good-government organizations and state residents “how best to heal the divides in Harrisburg, what a fair set of House rules should include, and a plan to finally get survivors of childhood sexual assault the justice and truth that they so desperately deserve.”

“As a rank-and-file member of the House for 10 years, I was never involved in the behind-the-scenes politics of the General Assembly,” Rozzi said in a news release. “Now, having been thrust into it over the last two weeks, I can tell you one thing: Harrisburg is broken.”

Rozzi has yet to announce any dates or locations for this listening tour, though he suggested they would take place over the next few weeks.

Since taking the speaker’s gavel, Rozzi has never taken questions from reporters. It’s unclear whether he’s hired a full staff to help him handle his duties and — thanks to this listening tour — it will be at least a few weeks until the House resumes session.

It looks more likely that the House won’t reconvene before three special elections scheduled for Feb. 7. These elections for vacancies in solidly blue districts outside Pittsburgh will shift Democrats into a majority.

Rozzi pledged to be an “independent speaker” who would not join the internal deliberations of either party. Republicans said they cut a deal with Rozzi just before the speaker vote to formally change his political affiliation to independent. This way, the House would continue to meet before the Feb. 7 special elections and Democrats take the majority.

Since then, House GOP members have suggested that Rozzi has privately walked back his promise to change his political party, and some have begun calling for him to step down as speaker.

“There should’ve been some type of agreement that would bridge the gap to allow the House to continue to function and vote on bills and draft legislation to get it over to the Senate, but we’re not seeing that,” Ali added. “We’re still just talking about power, not the people of Pennsylvania.”

The House GOP policy committee will meet Monday about the need to return to session and pass Senate Bill 1, an omnibus package of three constitutional amendments: one to require voter ID to cast a ballot, one to increase the legislature’s power over regulations, and another to create a two-year window for childhood sexual-abuse victims to file civil suits against their abusers or the institutions that protected them. If passed by the House, these amendments would appear on the May primary ballot.

Ali said he’s hopeful that once the legislature is back to work, a razor-thin majority House and GOP-controlled Senate will have to work together and find compromise.

“Nothing is going to come out of the General Assembly without some compromise,” he said.