SB 106 is an attack on our Rights and our Constitution

In the dead of night on July 7, the PA General Assembly advanced legislation to amend  the PA Constitution in multiple ways.

One of those amendment would prohibit the PA Courts from protecting the right to abortion and possibly even empower a Republican controlled court to  make abortion illegal. (The amendment is so badly written  that we have to assume the worst).

And that's not the only disastrous amendment that is in the is bill.  It also  contains four constitutional amendments that threaten to change the Pennsylvania Constitution in ways that do violence to the fundamental principles of American government. They would:

• establish new Voter ID requirements that would potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians.
• destroy the separation of powers and checks and balances by allowing the General Assembly to reject regulations made by the governor by a bare majority vote, rather than by a two-thirds vote as currently required by the Constitution, and by limiting the effect of executive orders and proclamations to 21 days without approval of the General Assembly. These provisions shift an enormous amount of power from the executive branch to the legislative branch in ways that directly and profoundly upset the design of the PA Constitution, which is based on the design of the U.S. Constitution.
• require that the Auditor General conduct an audit of each election. This proposal not only perpetuates the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election but would create a division within the executive branch that could be exploited to overturn the will of the voters in future elections, including the presidential election in 2024.

These destructive proposals all packed them in a legislative grab bag of constitutional atrocities, has all the hallmarks of the legislative tyranny that the founders consistently warned against in the Federalist Papers. It is driven not by calm reason but by passionate, unreasoned, and dishonest objections to both the outcome of the 2020 election and to Governor Wolf’s regulations and executive orders that saved tens of thousands of lives.

And these destructive amendments are being put forward by a majority party in the current General Assembly that has absolutely no moral authority to claim that it better represents the people of the state than a governor who was twice elected by all Pennsylvanians. For two decades, the majority party has been elected under highly gerrymandered districts that it has drawn to keep itself in power—even against the will of the people.

If the amendments in SB 106 are ever added to the Pennsylvania Constitution we will look back at the day it passed the General Assembly as the day that the right to abortion was destroyed and  representative democracy began to die in our commonwealth. Take action to stop it NOW!