Editorial: What is the point of a fight in the Pennsylvania state House?

Every day is a new fight in Harrisburg.

Lately, it’s been about the three-months-overdue budget. Discussions on the contentious spending plan are an all-too-familiar battleground. It’s a long-running soap opera that has gotten even more dramatic as the political lines become more deeply etched.

Pennsylvania is one of just 12 states where there is not a government trifecta of party. Fifteen states have a government where both chambers of the legislature as well as the governor’s mansion are in Democratic hands. Another 23 states have the same hold by Republicans.

On top of that, Pennsylvania is one of just two states with a divided legislature. The state Senate is solidly Republican and has been since 1993. The state House has a tendency to lean Republican but has been narrowly — very narrowly — in Democratic hands since 2023.

That can make for some stubborn standoffs, like the current budget battle. With lines so thinly drawn, it’s hard to get much accomplished. While the Senate might pass something, the House probably won’t and vice versa — something that gets even more true the closer you get to an issue closely tied to a party plank.

And that’s what brings us to Wednesday — when the Pennsylvania House took a political battle and turned it into something closer to a bar fight. A debate over a proposed gun bill turned into shouting and insults, prompting House Speaker Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, to shut down the session and chastise her colleagues.

“Our neighbors did not send us here for us to have schoolyard fights, to be bullies,” Pennlive.com quoted McClinton as telling the lawmakers.

It is tempting to lean on the passion of the topic for pushing legislators with closely held convictions too far. Gun control is important to the left; gun rights are just as important on the right.

But the gun law in question is about “Glock switches,” a device that can take a semiautomatic handgun and bump up its speed to automatic levels. If the bill is passed, Pennsylvania would join 26 other states that have outlawed the devices, including very red states with no divisions, like Alabama and Mississippi.

Then there’s the fact that Glock switches are already illegal on a national level. Federal law has made not only fully automatic weapons but any conversion device prohibited for almost 40 years. The technology to make a switch on a 3D printer might be new, but the outcome has been banned for decades.

So why the fight? We have to recognize that the Legislature has been here before.

There was the Jan. 6, 2021, shouting match during which Republicans demanded the removal of then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman from his role leading the Senate. That was over the swearing-in of state Sen. Jim Brewster, whose win was still being contested by Nicole Ziccarelli, now the Westmoreland County District Attorney.

In June 2019, Fetterman and then-Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman had a similar screaming session over Sen. Katie Muth reading a letter from a constituent over a welfare bill.

These three incidents have one thing in common: Pennsylvania lawmakers have trouble talking about important issues without tantrums. That would explain why so many good bills wither and die before getting a vote.

Like the budget, it all comes back to the fact that government and politics are not the same thing. One is important. The other is not.

The more politics is stirred into the cauldron of government, the less Harrisburg seems to accomplish.