Editorial: Pa. Senate shouldn't be childish with open records

Malicious compliance is a passive-aggressive response to authority.

Tell your kids to clean their room, and they shove everything under the bed. Tell your kid to get in the shower, and she does — but doesn’t turn on the water. Tell your kid he can have one bowl of ice cream, and he finds the biggest mixing bowl in the cupboard and fills it to the brim.

There’s a reason these examples all involve crafty children. Malicious compliance is recalcitrant, mulish and extremely childish.

However, it’s not a children-only phenomenon. You might find it in the petty response of a teacher to a student request. A union rep could pounce gleefully on malicious compliance with an employer demand. Neighbor disputes can definitely devolve there with little effort.

But malicious compliance is the kind of thing that has no business in government. It especially shouldn’t come from lawmakers.

That’s what makes the Pennsylvania Legislature so disappointing.

The people elected to create the state’s laws are answerable to the people who did the electing. Because of that, the things they do and the money they spend have to be freely and openly reported.

That should be common sense, but in case it isn’t, there’s actually a 2013 Commonwealth Court ruling to back it up. If the people are paying for legislative legal bills, they get to know what was spent and why. And yet an investigation by Spotlight PA and The Caucus shows that the state Senate chose to turn its back on what the law demanded.

In eight cases, they ignored it entirely, blacking out the reasons for hiring private law firms. In some ways, that might seem the most egregious behavior.

But there is something more insidious about the other cases, the ones in which the Senate was maliciously compliant, giving answers that are uselessly vague.

Private firms pull in about $5 million a year working for the lawmakers. Sometimes they represent both sides of the same fight as different parties spar or the Legislature fights the governor. In 2021, it was $3.5 million from January through October. Of that, just under $35,000 was spent fighting Spotlight PA and The Caucus over the right to not release information.

Between the redacted cases and the vague descriptions, almost 10% of the Legislature’s legal bills are unable to be identified.

This is public money. It is the public’s right to understand how it is spent. More than that, it is public policy that is being debated in these court battles.

These are important issues that deserve grown-up attention and mature response. What it doesn’t deserve is the state’s lawmakers acting like kids who don’t want to show their parents their report card.