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Will Corbett protest spread beyond cities?
Public support for Republican Governor Tom Corbett―from 'just close your eyes' anti-abortion/pre-abortion ultrasound to a proposed budget that delivers deep cuts to social services and public universities―is in a slump. But can anyone stop him?
Will Corbett protest spread beyond cities?
Pennsylvanians appear to be waking up: support for Republican Gov. Tom Corbett―whose suggestion that women undergoing an anti-abortion/pre-abortion ultrasound “just have to close [their] eyes” went viral―is in a slump.
Just 41 percent of respondents said they approved of Corbett's performance in a Quinnipiac University poll released last week (down from 47 in December), with 41 percent disapproving.
Corbett kept a low-profile for much of his first year in office in part because he, unlike his star-wattage colleagues in New Jersey (Chris Christie) and Wisconsin (Scott Walker), refrained from attacking public employee unions. But now Pennsylvanians are getting to know him, and many don't like what they see: voters oppose mandatory ultrasounds 48 to 42 percent, and oppose his handling of the budget (which cuts services to the poor, sick, and disabled) 49 to 36 percent. A full 65 percent oppose proposed cuts to public universities.
Corbett's agenda is of course extraordinarily unpopular in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, dozens of people packed into City Council chambers to protest cuts before a body that has no say over those cuts. Health Commissioner and Deputy Mayor for Health and Opportunity Donald Schwartz (Michael Nutter's is a mayoralty of many titles) warned that budget cuts “will harm the most vulnerable in our city in a way that will directly increase the number of homeless on our streets, will reduce the number of individuals with drug abuse issues and mental illness who receive care, and will, as a consequence, likely increase the number of people in our jails.”
This is Corbett's second austerity budget―I explored the first in this story here.
Corbett disguises his 20 percent cut to social services under the guise of a new “block grant” that grants counties flexibility―it rolls seven line item funds for programs helping those with mental illness, intellectual disabilities and the homeless into one chunk of money. That chunk, however, is less than the sum of its parts―20 percent less―and so Corbett is in effect making one big cut and then forcing municipalities to decide what programs will lose out locally.
The other big under-the-radar cut is the wholesale elimination of General Assistance, the $205-per-month (unchanged and unadjusted for inflation since 1990) paid to vulnerable Pennsylvanians including disabled people, domestic violence survivor, and recovering addicts.
Councilwoman Marian Tasco, who chairs the Committee on Public Health and Human Services, acknowledged that “we do not have any direct influence over these cuts from the governor.” So she said Philadelphians should reach out to people across the state and “show that Philadelphia is not the only county that will be impacted. They act like Philadelphia is the only county with poor people.”
The cuts will indeed hit municipalities statewide. But Philadelphia bears a disproportionate share of the region's burdens: poor people excluded from suburbs by rich-people zoning ordinances and the lack of public transit, and drug addicts who come from around the region to take advantage of clustered social services.
“We don't advertise ourselves as a regional hub,” Schwartz testified. “But there are people who come to Philadelphia because they don't really have a choice, and there is such a concentration of people and services.”
Philadelphians, unfortunately, have very little power to press the rest of the state to do its fair share. But state cuts, fueled by a long-running ideology that assigns Philadelphia full blame for its problems, may roll up the welcome mat for other places' homegrown problems.
“If Philadelphia is unable to care for people,” said Schwartz, “it very well may ripple back to surrounding counties.”
Once Corbett's budget is approved, however, the social service and activist groups will turn their ire from Corbett to City Hall, where the decisions over how to distribute the Harrisburg-inflicted pain will be made. City-dwellers have more leverage over City Hall than Harrisburg. Unfortunately, City Hall has few options aside from raising taxes locally (though as a partial solution they could, as I explore here, ask wealthy nonprofits to chip in something).
“If Corbett doesn't do his job and the state legislature doesn't do their jobs,” said Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, “we can't be irresponsible the way that they have been irresponsible.”
But could Philadelphia unite with counties statewide―conservative and liberal, rural and urban―to fight the cuts?
Councilman Jim Kenney, in what might be City Council's first mention ever of “animal husbandry,” suggested that agricultural cuts might provide “a real opportunity” for “an agro-urban coalition.”
“I feel like that might be a marriage that can be made with Republican groups that are also angry with the cuts that they are going to be getting.”
As I mentioned above, the majority of the state's opinion on Corbett is souring. And even Republicans are now distancing themselves from what is shaping up to be an extreme right-wing agenda: 37 of the 112 original legislative cosponsors have dropped their names from the now comatose ultrasound bill, which Cumberland County Republican Party Chairwoman Karen Best calls “an intrusion ... meant to intimidate women.”
And the powerful Republican Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Jake Corman, whose Centre County district is home to Penn State, has announced his opposition to the proposed $229 million cut to state-owned and state-related universities.
“Many members on the both sides on the aisle, in the House and in the Senate, are not comfortable with what is being proposed right now,” State Senator Vincent Hughes, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, testified yesterday. “We are fighting not only a budget number. We are fighting an ideology here.”
These are all issues―from the “state rape” ultrasound bill (which in some cases would require that a probe be inserted into the vagina), to public universities (which a majority of state residents say a family member has attended)―that, ahem, touch Pennsylvanians. The conservative mantras of “liberty” and “free markets” poll well in the abstract, but the slow American learning curve picks up when it comes to implementation: most Pennsylvanians (65 percent), for example, oppose Corbett's school voucher scheme.
Pennsylvania Democrats, notoriously hard to love and in several cases incarcerated for corruption, are the logical beneficiaries of Republican overreach.
But public opposition now poses less of a threat thanks to legislation signed by Corbett last week requiring voters to present photo ID, which an estimated 11 percent of Americans―disproportionately black, elderly, poor or students, or in other words, Democrats―don't have. Meanwhile, the flood of billionaire dollars that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision released into Super PAC coffers positions the rich and powerful to tighten their hold over both parties.
Most Pennsylvanians surely don't think an ID requirement is a big deal. They use photo identification all the time. But as we have learned again and again, the Constitution bars the majority from taking civil rights from a minority. This is true of gay marriage―or perhaps was, since half of Pennsylvanians now back same-sex nuptials―and it is true of voter ID, which a Rasmussen poll reports 75 percent of Americans support.
So the sole Corbett initiative with majority backing persecutes a minority. With the majority suffering, dividing Pennsylvanians may be the only Corbett can govern.
And he may succeed. Franklin and Marshall political scientist Terry Madonna tells me that Corbett's budget, some tinkering with the higher education cuts aside, will be approved. Unless activists mount something like Wisconsin's occupation of the state capitol, I think Madonna is right.
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