Tony Phyrillas: Watchdog group calls for 'clean sweep' of Pennsylvania judges

Having trouble deciding which Pennsylvania judicial candidates to retain in the Nov. 6 election?

The folks at PACleanSweep want to make it easier for you. Just vote 'No.' That's right. Vote 'No' for everyone on the ballot.

The non-partisan watchdog group that helped launch the citizen revolt against politicians after the July 2005 pay raise is targeting state judges for defeat this year.

PACleanSweep held a news conference in the Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg Thursday morning to launch its new campaign to defeat all 67 judicial candidates up for retention in November.

In addition to its "Just Say No" stance on judges, the group unveiled a new Judicial CleanSweep section of its Web site at http://www.pacleansweep.com/

PACleanSweep has collected a list of all judges up for retention on its Web site with a link to county-by-county lists for use by voters across Pennsylvania.

The group is recruiting volunteers to work the polls on Election Day to help educate voters about the retentions and has released the first of its Top Ten Reasons to Vote NO on Nov. 6, entitled "The Judicial Swindle."

"The twisted judicial pay raise decision by the Supreme Court and the fact that every single judge in the state has benefited from it is the first issue every Pennsylvanian needs to consider," said Russ Diamond, PACleanSweep chairman. "We'll be offering more valid reasons to vote 'no' over the next seven weeks, but this is one that grates on citizens more than most."

Of the 67 judges seeking retention, 25 would not be able to serve out the entire term they seek due to Pennsylvania's mandatory judicial retirement age of 70, Diamond said. This number includes five of the seven statewide appellate court retention candidates. After a retirement, Gov. Ed Rendell appoints a successor until a new contested election can be held to fill that particular seat.

PACleanSweep is basing its retention campaign objectives on an online poll made available over the last month to Web site visitors and e-mail subscribers, Diamond said. The results of the poll are available at www.pacleansweep.com

"Reform-minded people have spoken and this organization is dedicated to doing the people's work," added Diamond. "Judges may decide the law, but the people decide who the judges are."

All Pennsylvanians - regardless of party affiliation - will have an opportunity to cast a vote on seven statewide judges from the Supreme, Superior and Commonwealth courts on Nov. 6, Diamond said.

Another 53 Common Pleas Court judges will also be on the ballot for retention in various counties scattered across the state. All these judges are seeking new 10-year terms.

In Philadelphia, where voters can cast a vote on the seven statewide judges and 10 Common Pleas judges, voters will also determine whether six Municipal Court judges and one Traffic Court judge receive new six-year terms. The next-busiest retention election area will be York County, where voters will decide the fates of six Common Pleas judges.

Tony Phyrillas

Tony Phyrillas is a columnist for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. He received a first place award for Best Opinion Column in 2007 by Suburban Newspapers of America. He was also honored for column writing in 2006 by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Copyright © 2005-2007, THE CENTRIST Blog; All Rights Reserved.

Tony Phyrillas: GOP should hold Montgomery County

An internal poll done for the Republican candidates in the much-watched race for Montgomery County Commissioner shows the GOP slate of Bruce Castor and Jim Matthews keeping control of this crucial SE Pennsylvania county for four more years.

Republicans have controlled Montgomery County politics for the past 138 years, but Democrats have been chipping away in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Castor, the current Montgomery County District Attorney, is on top with 55 percent support, according to the poll. Democrat Joe Hoeffel is second with 51 percent. Jim Matthews comes in third with 40 percent. Incumbent Democrat Ruth Damsker brings up the rear with 34 percent.

If the trend holds until Election Day, Castor and Matthews would keep a Republican majority on the board, with Hoeffel as the minority commissioner.

Castor is the best known political figure in Montgomery County and is well respected as a tough prosecutor. He will be the top vote-getter on Nov. 6. Hoefell, a former county commissioner and former area Congressman, has lots of name recognition, too, because he's always running for something. His ultra liberal politics will attract support from the eastern half of the county.

It's no secret that Gov. Ed Rendell is working hard to capture one of the traditional Republican SE Pennsylvania counties for the Democrats. The key is control of county government. Rendell wants a base where he can operate to swing SE Pennsylvania for the Democrats in the 2008 presidential race.

With the Montgomery County commissioners' race looking safe for the GOP, expect Rendell to concentrate on Chester County and Bucks County in the final weeks of the campaign.

Looking over the latest poll numbers, Matthews, who ran for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania on the Lynn Swann ticket in 2006, has gained 6 points on Damsker in the past month. The last poll showed Matthews and Damsker dead even.

Damkser has lost ground with some wacky behavior and oddball comments. She brought up the "R" word (reassessment) in a county that is doing very well financially. Property taxes are a big issue in Montgomery County and a countywide reassessment would be a de facto tax increase for many residents.

Damsker also has had several widely publicized spats with Commissioners' Chairman Tom Ellis and even broke into tears are a recent commissioners' meeting. There's no crying in politics!

The current GOP-led board managed to cut property taxes in 2007 and Castor/Matthews have promised another property tax cut in 2008 if they're elected.

The poll by Neil Newhouse also asked potential voters to rank the candidates via favorable and unfavorable traits.

Here are the results:

Castor -- Fav. 68% Unfav 9%
Hoeffel -- Fav. 57% Unfav 24%
Matthews -- Fav. 34% Unfav. 6%
Damsker -- Fav. 25% Unfav. 9%

And for laughs, the poll also asked views on other politicians:

Specter -- Fav. 68% Unfav. 28%
Rendell -- Fav. 70% Unfav. 27%
Giuliani -- Fav. 64% Unfav. 29%
H. Clinton -- Fav. 51% Unfav. 46%
Bush -- Fav. 34% Unfav. 65%

(Note the difference between Giuliani's and Clinton's numbers in Montgomery County. If Republicans have any hope of winning Pennsylvania in 2008, Giuliani has to be the party nominee.)

Tony Phyrillas

Tony Phyrillas is a columnist for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. He received a first place award for Best Opinion Column in 2007 by Suburban Newspapers of America. He was also honored for column writing in 2006 by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Copyright © 2005-2007, THE CENTRIST Blog; All Rights Reserved.

Tony Phyrillas: Which Rendell Aides Will Lose Their Jobs Over I-78 Fiasco?

It wasn't quite the Watergate hearings, but the Pennsylvania Senate's inquest into the Rendell Administration's response to the Interstate 78 fiasco made for compelling television.

Courtesy of gavel to gavel coverage by the Pennsylvania Cable Network, you could almost see the beads of sweat rolling down the foreheads of top Rendell officials as they fell on their swords.

I predict at least two of the four administration honchos who testified before the Senate Thursday and the House Friday, and maybe a third, will be out of a job within the next few months.

Transportation Secretary Allen D. Biehler should start cleaning out his desk now. He's the obvious scapegoat. PennDOT bungled the initial job of clearing the highway of snow and ice and was directly responsible for stranding hundreds of truckers and motorists on a desolate stretch of highway for nearly a day. Also expect to see the managers of the two PennDOT engineering districts directly responsible for clearing the problem stretch of I-78 on the unemployment line.

The other person who should be updating his resume is James R. Joseph, the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. Mr. Joseph came across as the worst of the four panelists who faced the Senate committee Thursday. At times aloof, often tongue-tied and barely audible throughout the three-hour hearing, Joseph looked like the proverbial deer caught in the headlines.

In contrast, Col. Jeffrey Miller of the Pennsylvania State Police, came across as confident, even a bit arrogant. Miller could also get the axe, but Rendell has had a checkered history with the State Police and he may not want to create more problems by firing Miller. (Maybe a demotion and assignment to the Hamburg barracks to patrol I-78 might be in order.)

While PennDOT clearly deserves the lion's hare of the blame for the initial failure to deal with the storm and Joseph is out of his league as the state's top emergency manager, Col. Miller appears to have done the best he could with the resources he had. And therein lies the problem.

One thing is evident from the hearings is that the State Police are under-staffed and ill-equipped to deal with a weather-related emergency. Miller said he had 5 troopers working the day shift at the Hamburg barracks when the storm hit. The Hamburg barracks is responsible for patrolling a long stretch of I-78 through the entire length of Berks County. The barracks only has 1 four-wheel drive vehicle at its disposal. A second four-wheel drive vehicle was sent to the I-78 area by the Reading barracks.

Ed Rendell has a lot of explaining to do about the lack of resources for the State Police. This is a governor notorious for diverting needed resources (money and equipment) from vital state agencies to his pet projects (usually in Philadelphia.)

Col. Miller did not give satisfactory answers to reports that his troopers hung up the phones when local police and Berks County 911 officials kept calling with reports of stranded motorists. The State Police have a reputation for arrogance and so does Miller.

The only agency official who came out looking good was Maj. Gen. Jessica Wright, the Pennsylvania Adjutant General. The Pennsylvania National Guard responded well to the emergency. The only criticism of the Guard involved some Guardsmen asking stranded motorists to leave their vehicles to seek shelter. PennDOT then came along and towed the abandoned vehicles and charged the motorists $150 each.

While some of the Senators threw softball questions at the panelists or spent their allotted time making speeches, three Senators stood out during Thursday's hearing: Andrew Dinniman, Mike O'Pake and John Rafferty.

Rafferty had one of the best quips of the day when he asked Joseph if he bothered to look outside to see the weather conditions. "Are there windows in your emergency center?" Rafferty asked Joseph. It appears everyone in the state knew about the storm's intensity by watching TV or listening to the radio ... except PennDOT and emergency officials, Rafferty noted.

Rafferty also wanted a clear answer on the breakdown in the chain of command and why the governor wasn't informed of the disaster until 8 p.m. on Feb. 14. The storm began at midday on Feb. 13.

A lawyer by profession, Rafferty was tenacious and wouldn't let the bureaucrats off the hook until he got a better understanding of who makes the final decision on when an emergency is declared in Pennsylvania.

"What did Ed Rendell know and when did he know it?" is essentially what Rafferty was asking. The panelists danced around the question.

Sen. Mike O'Pake, a Berks Democrat and longtime Rendell sycophant, actually came across incredulous at the administration's failure to deal with the storm. He called it "mingboggling" and criticized the response to the crisis by committee.

"You can't respond to a crisis with a committee system," O'Pake said.

Dinniman, a Chester County Democrat, kept hammering away about the towing fees until Biehler promised that the state would "absorb" the cost.

That's the least PennDOT (with an annual budget of $6.3 billion) can do for the stranded motorists. Maybe Biehler should promise free snow removal for a year to everyone stranded on the state's highways. Oh, wait. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. OK, he can send a crew out this summer to pave their driveways — if he still has a job with the state.

The four officials who run these vital state agencies are not newcomers to the job. Two of them, Biehler and Miller, have been on the job since Rendell took office in 2003. Wright has commanded the Pennsylvania National Guard since February 2004. Joseph took over as PEMA director in September 2005.

At least two, maybe three, made their boss look really bad. Not just in Pennsylvania, but across the country. That's why they won't be around much longer.

Tony Phyrillas is a columnist for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. He received a first place award for Best Opinion Column in 2007 by Suburban Newspapers of America. He was also honored for column writing in 2006 by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Tony Phyrillas: Greedy judges, not low pay, undermine our courts

It appears Pennsylvania judges aren't the only ones whining about their pay.

Federal judges are now making noise about their paychecks. Maybe they should learn from Pennsylvania judges' experiences when it comes to asking taxpayers to shell out more money.

If you'll recall, the infamous July 2005 middle-of-the-night pay raise for Pennsylvania politicians and judges was hatched up by Gov. Ed Rendell, legislative leaders (most of whom have been voted out of office) and Ralph Cappy, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Cappy's court eventually ruled that the way the legislators took the pay raise (something called unvouchered expenses) was unconstitutional, but restored the 10 percent pay raises for themselves and 1,200 other state and local judges. And they also tied future pay increases to salaries of federal judges.

The backlash against Pennsylvania judges began in 2005 when Russell Nigro failed to win his retention re-election for another 10-year term on the state's highest court. The other judge on the ballot that year, Sandra Schultz Newman, narrowly won her retention vote, but she ended up resigning from the court in 2006, citing the constant criticism of judges by Pennsylvania residents.

Pennsylvania voters will get another chance to send a clear message to greedy judges when they get to pick three new judges for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this November. Justice Thomas Saylor is seeking retention and two vacancies on the court (Nigro and Newman) must also be filled. Voters can send a strong message to Cappy (who won't face voters until 2009) that greed is not a virtue when you decided to wear the judicial robes.

Replacing three of the court's seven members would send a strong message to Harrisburg that Pennsylvania taxpayers are tired of being fleeced by politicians, whether they are members of the executive, legislative or judicial branch.

At the same time Pennsylvania judges have been whining about their pay, members of the U.S. Supreme Court have been lobbying for bigger paychecks. Chief Justice John Roberts has made several public pleas for higher pay, calling the lack of a big payday for federal judges a "constitutional crisis."

On Wednesday, Justice Anthony Kennedy told members of a Senate committee that Congress has disregarded judicial pay, creating morale problems among judges and threatening to undermine judicial independence.

The current salary level for judges "is insufficient to attract the finest members" of the legal profession to accept appointments to the bench, Kennedy said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to the Associated Press.

Federal district court judges are paid $165,200 annually; appeals court judges make $175,100; associate justices of the Supreme Court earn $203,000; the chief justice gets $212,100.

Kennedy said "$160,000 sounds like a lot of money to the average American, and it is. But it is insufficient to attract the finest members of the practicing bar to the bench," according to the Associated Press.

There's no argument that lawyers can make a lot more money in private practice than they can serving on the bench. But I challenge Kennedy to find one sitting federal judge who took the job because of the money. And who says the highest paid person is always the most qualified person?

If Roberts and Kennedy agreed to serve on the Supreme Court because they were expecting a big payday, they are fools. Whatever happened to the concept of public service? Nobody held a gun to Roberts and Kennedy and forced them to join the Supreme Court.

Roberts and Kennedy knew what the salary was when they accepted their current positions. They also knew that they would have lifetime tenure and an opportunity to create a legacy for themselves. (And annual financial disclosures show that most of the justices on the Supreme Court have net worths of more than $1 million.)

If Roberts and Kennedy think they can make more money in the private sector, then by all means, they should resign from the court today and join a corporate law firm.

There's nothing in the Constitution that says a Supreme Court justice has to stay on the court into their 90s or until they die in office. They are welcome to step down any time they want and I guarantee there will be thousands of other applicants waiting in line to take their place on the court.

Nobody runs for president of the United States because of the salary. The same goes for the Senate, the House or the bench. Those positions provide intangible rewards that cannot be measured in dollars.

Judges are free to write books and give lectures to supplement their income.

If things are that tight at the Roberts and Kennedy households, maybe their wives could get a job, like most American households, where both spouses have to work to make ends meet.

Tony Phyrillas is a columnist for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. He received a first place award for Best Opinion Column in 2007 by Suburban Newspapers of America. He was also honored for column writing in 2006 by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Tony Phyrillas: N.J. delivers property tax cuts

I'm tired of hearing Pennsylvania politicians say cutting property taxes is too difficult a task for them.

Gov. Ed Rendell and Legislative leaders from both parties have said repeatedly that property tax reform has been the No. 1 priority in Harrisburg for 30 years, but nobody has been able to solve the problem.

That's nonsense. Rendell and the Legislature are full of baloney. Property taxes can be cut. But Pennsylvania politicians lack the will to do the job.

If you want proof that property taxes can cut, look no further than neighboring New Jersey.
In less than one year, Gov. Jon Corzine and the New Jersey state legislature have come up with a plan to deliver property tax relief to nearly all of the state's residents.

I should also note that New Jersey has fewer legislators than Pennsylvania (120 in N.J. compared to 253 in Pennsylvania) and they are paid less than their counterparts in Pennsylvania.

Rendell has been playing a shell game on property taxes for more than four years now. He's managed to distract enough voters with promises of tax relief to get himself re-elected to a second term.

I've never been a fan of Jon Corzine, the multi-millionaire businessman who bought his way into public office. After Corzine became bored serving in the U.S. Senate, he took his millions and purchased the governor's seat in New Jersey.

But I have to tip my hat to Corzine. As a candidate, he promised to cut New Jersey property taxes, which are even higher than property taxes in Pennsylvania.

After one year in office, Corzine kept his word. He is about to sign a $2.3 billion property tax relief bill for New Jersey residents. About 2 million N.J. residents will see tax breaks averaging $1,051 under the tax-relief plan. State officials predict that 95 percent of the New Jersey households will benefit from the tax cuts.

Contrast that with Gov. Rendell, Corzine's fellow tax-and-spend liberal across the Delaware River.

Candidate Rendell promised to cut property taxes for all Pennsylvania residents by 30 percent. That was in 2002. Gov. Rendell reneged on the promise in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Safely re-elected to a second term, Rendell is now talking about raising — not lowering — taxes.

Even his proposal to raise the sales tax in order to cut property taxes is smoke and mirrors. Only one-third of the money from the increased sales tax would go to property tax relief. The rest would feed Ed Spendell’s enormous appetite for spending.

Rendell's parlor tricks with Pennsylvania’s budget have caught the attention of Americans for Tax Reform, a non-partisan coalition of taxpayers and taxpayer groups in Washington, D.C.

"Maybe next year, Gov. 'Spendell' should just use his budget as a list of taxes he does NOT want to raise," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "That would probably save his staff some time and paper."

In addition to his 2002 boast that he could cut property taxes standing on his head, Rendell also promised that Act 72 would help lower property taxes. That was a lie.

Rendell promised that the approval of casino gambling in Pennsylvania would lower property taxes. More lies.

Rendell promised that Act 1 would lead to lower taxes. He lied again.

Now Rendell is promising to cut property taxes if the Legislature approves a 16.7-percent increase in the state sales tax. If he lied to us in each of his first four years in office, why would anyone think Rendell will keep his promise?

That is a question voters need to pose to the 102 Democrats in the state House and the 21 Democrats in the state Senate. How far are these lemmings willing to follow Rendell? Especially when Ed Spendell's policies will sink Pennsylvania into a fiscal crisis.

Pennsylvania voters need to make sure their state legislators understand that if they vote for any more Rendell tax increases, they will be out of a job in 2008.

Tony Phyrillas is a columnist for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. Tony recently was awarded First Prize in Opinion Columns from the 2,000 member national trade organization Suburban Newspapers of America. The Mercury won seven awards, more than any other newspaper in the Pennsylvania. E-mail him at tphyrillas@pottsmerc.com