PA political heist

[moses]

Originally Posted by Kasept

Gov. Wolf may want to familiarize himself with how the PA Development Trust was established. It's not available for him to raid. The money isn't Commonwealth tax revenue.

6th District (Bucks County) State Sen. Tommy Tomlinson on ATR tomorrow at 11a to explain things to the Governor.

If an act of the Legislature provided those protections, I don’t see any reason why an additional act of the Legislature (in the form of a budget bill) couldn’t eliminate those protections. This is how it works in NJ - there are a bunch of statutory protections placed on things and the State budget supersedes those statutes (often allowing the Governor to raid various dedicated funds.)

I’m not sure if PA is the same...but this all derives from the general principle that a Legislature cannot bind future Legislatures. Generally the only way to do that is to amend the State Constitution. Of course, with all that, Wolf would still need the Legislature to approve his budget and it’s not clear he has support for this to pass.

For PA racing’s sake, I hope I’m wrong.

And with that, I’ll stop nerding out about the legislative budget process.