The Pennsylvania Legislature Should Be Embarrassed
"This legislature has failed to pass a Gift Ban for 20+ years!"
Our banners spanning the Capitol steps on June 9th made sure that our legislators, our audience, anyone passing by, and the media couldn’t miss the shameful truth that despite 33 Gift Ban bills being introduced over the past 20 years, our legislature has made the choice again and again to put money and power over the well-being of Pennsylvanians.
Our volunteers from across the state spoke about how the corrupting influence of unlimited gifts, aka bribes, empowers corporate lobbyists while disempowering, damaging, and silencing Pennsylvanians, especially our more than 5 million poor and working-class residents. They shared their frustrations that, despite four years of marching, lobbying, and advocating for a Gift Ban, self-indulgent legislators still tell us ridiculous excuses about why the Gift Ban hasn’t been passed into law.
“At the end of the day, whatever you’re standing for, gifts are getting in your way. Corruption in our government is what stops us from achieving the things we need, like better housing, like better healthcare for the citizens of this state.”
-Jamaal Henderson
“The people in this legislature, they divide us. They divide us using race. They divide us into parties. They divide us by gender, by our sexual orientation, by our religion. They divide us by our culture. Because they know that if we stand united against their greed,
we will win.”-Rachel Murphy
Catch all of the amazing speeches from our volunteers by watching the livestream of the rally on Facebook.
Following those powerful speeches, we marched inside the Capitol building to Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman’s office to demand that he bring the Gift Ban to a vote in the Senate. We were greeted with a locked door and the Capitol Police. With copies of the 33 Gift Ban bills that have been introduced and ignored during Senator Corman’s 22 years in Harrisburg in hand, we occupied the space outside Senator Corman’s locked office, chanting “It shouldn’t take you 20 years to pass this simple bill.” We also dropped a banner reading "Pass the Gift Ban or Get Out," over the balcony across from Senator Corman's office.
MarchOnHarrisburg's Executive Director, Rabbi Michael Pollack, was eventually allowed to enter Senator Corman’s office to deliver the bills. After being denied a meeting with Senator Corman, he and three other activists sat in front of Senator Corman’s office, refusing to move until Senator Corman agreed to meet. All four were arrested by Capitol Police and charged with defying a lawful order and trespassing. Check out the livestream of the actions at Corman’s office here, and our 60-second recap here.
During this same time, a group of eight of our volunteers interrupted a packed Pennsylvania Senate session immediately after it was gavelled in at noon. From the Senate gallery, our volunteers addressed Senator Corman directly with a call-and-response chant: “Senator Corman, this is your chance, show your constituents, the people of Pennsylvania, that you place public service, over personal greed!
The embarrassing and immoral inaction of Senator Corman and the legislature was highlighted in more than 100 news outlets across the country who ran this AP story, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, US News & World Report, The Morning Call, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Patriot-News, WTAJ, WESA (Pittsburgh's local NPR station), WITF (Harrisburg's local NPR station), and more! Spotlight PA also wrote and ran this story following our event.
We made it clear on the next day to Senator Corman we weren’t going away by showing up to his district the next day. WTAJ covered our event in Bellefonte where we shined a bright light on Sen. Corman's corrupt relationships with moneyed interests, such as his side job on the Board of Directors of Old Dominion National Bank, his close relationship with the lobbying firm Maverick Strategies, and his dealings with campaign donors like Comcast, natural gas frackers, wage stealing construction firms, and Wall Street. You can get all of the details by watching our livestream here.
Where's the Gift Ban Now?
While Corman refuses to comment on bringing the Gift Ban to a vote in the Senate, the good news is that House leadership is telling us that they have a plan to vote on the Gift Ban in the House. The bad news, and the hard truth, is this isn’t going to happen before their summer break begins at the end of June— and we need to keep up the pressure in the Senate if we want it to clear both chambers.
Instead of prioritizing the Gift Ban, our House State Government Committee has spent an absurd amount of time playing chicken with the Governor over a Voter ID bill. We are, of course, against HB 1300 and its provisions that limit access to voting, and we are frustrated that the Committee has wasted so much time on something harmful and unnecessary that the Governor will rightly veto anyway.
The Committee has at least recognized that there is much-unfinished business, and so they are foregoing their summer vacation and will continue to meet as subcommittees. HB 1009, the Gift Ban, was referred yesterday to the Subcommittee on Campaign Finance and Elections, where it will be discussed over the summer before being voted out of the full House State Government Committee in September, and then move through the full House with the stated public support of Speaker Cutler and Majority Leader Benninghoff. While we’re optimistic this will happen because of the support we have whipped in the House, the truth is that the path to passing the Gift Ban is littered with broken promises. This is why we will continue to take action, educate the public and hold them accountable to their word.
In May of 2019, then-Speaker of the House Mike Turzai signed onto the Gift Ban and promised us it would pass “In the next few months.” Six months later, it passed out of Committee, and then it was later removed from consideration once the pandemic started. In October 2020, House Majority Leader Benninghoff’s office told us that they would pass the Gift Ban “Within the first few months of the next session (which started in January of 2021).” June is almost over, and still, there is no Gift Ban.
We hear a lot of excuses. Most recently, we heard that our latest actions put a bad taste in the mouths of several legislators, and that is what slowed down the progress of the Gift Ban this month. This is a tired and unoriginal excuse legislators have used from the beginning, and we guarantee that the corruption and disenfranchisement that Pennsylvanians are forced to swallow every day tastes far worse. The fact is that without our bold activism around the Gift Ban for the past four years, this bill would still be dead on arrival, as it had been every session for the last 20 years until now. Since we started four years ago, we have cleared through several obstructionists and forced movement on the Gift Ban. We are close, and we are ready to finally make bribery illegal in Pennsylvania.
So What's Next?
While we are holding the House accountable to their word through the Fall, we need your help to keep up the pressure in the Senate on Senator Corman this Summer! Throughout the next few months, we'll be at "Friday in the 'Fonte" in Corman's hometown of Bellefonte, building power among his constituents to support the Gift Ban. If you're interested in joining us for the first one on Friday, June 25th, at 5:50 PM - 7:30 PM, RSVP here. If you can’t make it this Friday, we will also be at the two remaining Fridays in the Fonte events in July and September. Get more details and RSVP to join us on July 30th here and on September 24th here.
You can also take action right now (and every day) by making two calls and two tweets to Sen. Corman and Senator Argall. Get instructions and scripts at GiftBan.org.
FORWARD TOGETHER.
Special thanks to all of our amazing volunteers who helped make this action possible: those who lobbied our legislature leading up to the action, those of you who drove hours to get to Harrisburg and Bellefonte, those who helped create the banners and art, those who held up the giant banners, those who spoke at the event, the Teamsters for joining us, those who took off work to join us, those who took video and pictures, those who risked arrest, those who were arrested, those who donated to our jail support fund, those of you who supported the actions by calling Corman and Argall, those who watched live on social media, those who shared our story out. The MarchOnHarrisburg Team is endlessly grateful to organize alongside you all. Thank you for your commitment to take our democracy where it’s never been so that one day we all can experience the fruitful opportunities that a truly representative government has to offer.