Kearni Warren is running for a seat on Chester City Council. If she should somehow win, she would be the first Green Party member to ever sit on Chester City Council. Her main issue is the ever-present environmental environmental racism issue of Covanta i.e. Chester being a dumping grounds for Delco.
Kearni is running to unseat Portia West (D) who she feels has not done enough on the environmental racism issue. However, this has become a three way race as Stefan Roots (D), blogger and Swarthmorean columnist is also opposing her. It would seem two challenger candidates might consider working together but Democrats act as though they are not, historically, allowed to work with Greens on anything. Now if Warren was a Working Party Candidate, or a DSA Candidate…
Kearni is the daughter of the late Rev. Bernice Warren, who served for two decades (until 2016) as Pastor/Director of Chester East Side Ministries.
Kearni stated that Stefan’s win, in the Primary, against incumbent William Jacobs inspired her to run. However, it seems that Stefan, once an insurgent Candidate, is now aligning himself with the Democratic Establishment.
Also, Stefan had almost weekly articles in The Swarthmorean, which we all looked forward to, on the goings on in the City of Chester, These seem to have stopped,at least recently, Also his Campaign Manager, is one Todd Strine, a Philadelphian who is also co-Publisher of, you guessed it, The Swarthmorean.
Kearni is a graduate of Eastern University’s Business Administration program. She has worked in various positions for (SEIUHCPA) Service Employees International Union Healthcare Pennsylvania, and United Home Care Workers of Pennsylvania.
She’s a great believer in the Bible, especially Luke 12:48 ìFrom everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much will be demanded.î She wants to continue in the Social Justice spirit of her mother.
Though no fan of previous 20th century Chester governments, she stated that “In the 21st Century, we have a constant flow of Democratic Council Members who can’t even get the trash picked up on time, let alone address Chester’s severe social, environmental, and financial pitfalls”
The 2021 National Football League season is underway. In the Buffalo opener where two of last year’s AFC division champs faced off against each other, the six-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers dispatched the Bills 23-16.
Even though the Steelers played on enemy turf in Buffalo’s Highmark Stadium, the Yinzers felt right at home. The Pittsburgh contingent among the 70,000 football-starved fans encouraged the Steelers by waving thousands of Terrible Towels. Wherever the Steelers play, loyal followers wave their black and gold towels with abandon. No matter the occasion, there’s a towel to match.
Around Pittsburgh or online, fans can buy towels for about $10 that celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Independence Day, Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. Steelers’ fans have taken their towels to Iraq, Afghanistan, the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Everest’s peak, the International Space Station, the South Pole, the Great Wall of China and Vatican City. A pink towel, introduced in 2009, promotes breast cancer awareness.
At Heinz Field, a Terrible Towel Wall displays each of the special edition towels for the Steelers’ worldwide, stadium-visiting fans to admire. The towel is hung over televisions and radios during game time, and is often used as a fun drape for pets and babies. When Steelers’ receiver Hines Ward won the 2011 Dancing with the Stars’ Mirrorball Trophy, his former teammate and Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris urged him on by twirling his Terrible Towel.
But few non-Yinzers know the touching legacy behind the towel, which is much more than evidence of Steelers’ excellence, and the team’s passionate fan base. Here’s the towel’s wonderful backstory: Myron Cope, a beloved Steelers’ broadcaster, the team’s voice for 35 years, and a National Radio Hall of Fame member, created the towel in 1975, and it debuted on December 27 in a winning playoff game against the Baltimore Colts. From that moment on, fans and players considered the towel the team’s lucky charm, as the Steelers, in the following weeks, defeated the Oakland Raiders and the Dallas Cowboys, and then won Super Bowl IX, beating the Minnesota Vikings, 16-6. The Steelers’ successful play helped towel sales take off.
In 1996, Cope turned the towel’s trademark over to the Allegheny Valley School (AVS), which has several campuses and group homes throughout Pennsylvania, and operates more than 125 programs across Pennsylvania designed to help the developmentally disabled. Cope’s son, Danny, once attended. Danny, who has never spoken a word and is today 54, enrolled in 1992. Thanks to the loving care he received at AVS, Danny eventually moved on to a meaningful assembly line job at a major snack food company.
AVS receives each penny of profit from towel sales. Cope specifically outlined how the school must spend the proceeds. Each dollar goes to benefit residents and must not go into the general construction fund. The money is earmarked for, among other essentials, specialized wheelchairs and programs that will enable the most challenged to turn on lights or music by merely blinking their eyes. As the school’s then-chief executive officer, Regis Champ, said: “Our needs are daily.”
Steelers’ administration manages the marketing of towels and then cuts a check, usually in the low five figures, payable to the school. When the Steelers play in the Super Bowl, sales often exceed $1 million. Some eager fans have purchased 200 towels at a time. Since Cope donated the Terrible Towel’s trademark, sales have generated more than $3 million for AVS.
As Champ recalled the glorious day that the towel’s rights were transferred to AVS, Cope came into his office with a pile of documents, threw them down on his desk and said, “‘Regis, I’m giving you the Terrible Towel.’ I was speechless. I knew that this would be the legacy that outlived Myron.”
In 2008, Cope, age 79, passed away. His daughter Elizabeth draped Cope’s coffin with a quilt that a fan made out of Terrible Towels and sent to the Cope family. Whether you are a Steelers fan or not, remember that Terrible Towels promote a most worthy cause, helping autistic people get on the road to living normal lives.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.
International Student Enrollment Endures Despite Pandemic
By Joe Guzzardi
Amidst COVID-19 chaos and confusion, the new academic year has started. At some institutions, weekly COVID-19 testing for students, including those who are fully vaccinated, and mask requirements, regardless of vaccination status, are required indoors and outdoors. Faculty and staff members are subject to the same rigorous requirements.
To help end COVID’s spread, a few universities have implemented rigid protocols. The University of Virginia and Xavier University of Louisiana disenrolled students who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine prior to the fall semester. Duke University, specifically, stated they will fire unvaccinated faculty, the most extreme punishment that could set a new standard at other universities.
Since concerns about COVID-19 and its Delta variant are so widespread among campuses, the CDC and the Biden administration, issuing F-1 student visas to prospective enrollees from overseas nations struggling with the pandemic too is at odds with the cautionary advice that the establishment endlessly harps on. Nevertheless, more than 55,000 Indian students and exchange visitors will study in the U.S. this year, “an all-time record,” that exceeded pre-pandemic levels, the U.S. embassy boasted. Many more are expected to arrive as the year progresses.
The State Department’s approval of record numbers of Indian student visas is more incomprehensible in light of India’s battle to contain COVID-19. India, with its 1.4 billion population, has recorded more than 33 million COVID-19 cases, and rising, that have led to 442,000 deaths. Secretary of State Tony Blinken has rejected his own pandemic solutions. In his February remarks to the UN Security Council, Blinken urged global-wide participation in a transparent, robust process for preventing and responding to health emergencies, an impossibility for the U.S. if it persists in issuing temporary visas to foreign nationals.
The U.S. is poorly served when it continues to admit thousands from nations still coping with their own COVID-19 crises. India and China are the two largest student-sending nations. Open Doors, which conducts an annual census of international student enrollment in U.S. universities and colleges, reported that for the 2019/2020 academic year, the aggregate total hit 1.075 million arrivals.
Beyond the risky admission of hundreds of thousands of international students that may transmit the virus on the campuses and in the communities where they will reside is the other glaring negative. Republican and Democratic administrations have punished qualified U.S. high school graduates by allowing international students to occupy a fixed number of coveted, but limited, freshman classroom seats.
A partial explanation is that consecutive White Houses, beginning with President Carter up to and including President Biden, have been captured in globalism’s unrelenting grip. The local high school graduate may be a good student with impressive credentials, but the international student is the preferred candidate simply because he satisfies the White House’s globalism-at-all-costs goal.
The remaining, more specific clarification is that colleges and universities obscenely enrich themselves when they accept international students who pay significantly higher enrollment fees. At the University of Wisconsin, for example, instate students pay $10,800 per academic year versus $39,000 for an international student. At Wisconsin, the difference between out-of-state and instate tuition varies by a factor of nearly four, a typical nationwide discrepancy. A 2015 analysis found that the country’s public universities raked in more than $9 billion in foreign student tuition and fees which explains their determination to enroll as many international students as possible.
The quid pro quo for the foreign-born student is that exorbitantly high tuition fees may buy him not only a U.S. college degree, but also a white-collar job and, if he secures a sponsor, eventual permanent residency. Today marks a stark contrast to the original intent of the F-1 visa which didn’t include employment authorization, and required students to return home shortly after completing their coursework. Now, however, international graduates in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) can, through nonstatutory extensions that total 42 months, remain on the Optional Practical Training program (OPT) and get a tech worker job that otherwise might have gone to a worthy American.
Harvard Kennedy school labor economist George Borjas studied the long-term effects of admitting 1 million to-be international college graduates annually, and estimated that after a decade and a half, native-born college grads’ wages would drop by 15 percent. Furthermore, the reduced return on investment of the college education would, over time, translate into a 15 to 30 percent drop in native college enrollment. Wealthy overseas parents could afford to fund their children’s U.S. college education, but for native-born, the lofty tuition would be out of reach.
The winners in International enrollment are the international students, the universities, employers who profit from the cheaper labor that OPT workers provide and the elitists like immigration lawyers who promote but don’t suffer from endless immigration’s adverse consequences. The losers: high school students who, because of 1 million high-paying international students, are unfairly shut out from a college education opportunity; U.S. workers, especially minorities, displaced from their jobs in an over-immigration loosened labor market, and sovereign America.
Normally, my articles tend toward the Political, in one or another ways. However we will be discussing a yearly musical phenomenon (first heard in 1895) and how you can now hear it for free.
The BBC Proms aka Henry Wood Promenade Concert presented by the BBC began in 1895 as both Classical and Popular Music Concerts designed, via low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, to bring music to the masses.
Over the years, the eight-week festival morphed into jazz, world music and many etceteras. Because Britain is no longer an empire but now a Commonwealth, they use this, as BBC itself, as what they themselves call “soft power,” as opposed to the massive military force they once had.
To find the BBC Proms on your search engine of choice (I use Duck Duck Go, so as not to be searched myself.) to get to BBC Radio 3. Click on BBC Sounds or any other link but I Player. (I Player requires you to live in England,) Then you can choose your Concerts. As of this writing , most are still available for a month, the earliest ones expiring first. I listen sequentially, but that’s also how I read a book or watch a movie, whereas others choose by Composer or Conductor, whether Classical or Jazz. I now use my Smartphone, which seems to work easier for me on BBC Radio 3 BBC Proms.
The Last Night of the Proms has traditionally featured the Anthem “Rule Brittania”and other highly Patriotic songs. Lately, though, what might be termed the ‘Woke’ crowd has been protesting that, seeing this as inconsistent with the aims of the British Commonwealth, especially as Britannia no longer ‘rules the waves’ or anything else. (Possibly not even Scotland if they get another referendum.) Rather, the Proms, like BBC itself, is a form of soft power, witness the many people, self included, who listen to at least one BBC program daily.
The State Department has designated 19 U.S. cities as acceptable for refugee resettlement which made the Biden administration’s resettlement policy clear: pedal to the metal; damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead. Afghan resettlement deserves maximum caution; the administration took the opposite road. The official argument for speedy resettlement is that our allies – those who purportedly worked side-by-side with the American military – are in grave danger, and must be airlifted out of Kabul immediately. No doubt, there’s some truth in that assessment. But Americans want guarantees that only friends receive invitations.
Since Americans are, by and large, trusting people who want to help at-risk strangers, most would be accepting of new refugees if confident that they had been properly vetted, and the good guys were weeded out from the bad guys. The White House assures a wary public that incoming refugees are being processed by “intelligence professionals or law enforcement officials.” The Biden administration insists the vetting is “rigorous,” and dedicated officials are working “around the clock” to safely process Afghan refugees.
Safely vetting 83,000 refugees in a matter of hours is impossible. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican, visited his home state’s Fort McCoy where Maj. Gen. Darrell Guthrie told him that many incoming refugees had no identification and weren’t Special Immigrant Visa holders. The administration classifies unidentified Afghans as part of a vulnerable population, are therefore granted humanitarian parole – once a rarely used DHS option, but now commonplace – and are admitted, no questions asked. Afghan advocates are lobbying for a 50,000-person humanitarian parole.
Biden’s resettlement strategy is slipshod, begs for abuse and could lead to tragic homeland consequences. Comprehensive refugee vetting is a six-step process that, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ website, should take between 18 and 24 months. First, the prospective refugee must register with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees who refers the individual to a U.S. Embassy. Then, the State Department steps in, and begins several security checks carried out through myriad federal security agencies.
The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration will partner with other agencies to create an Overseas Processing Entity, a document ultimately given to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer. Eventually, the officer interviews the refugee face-to-face to determine if he can be resettled. Finally, the case returns to the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration for the final approval, subject to medical screening. The bottom line on faux vetting: the Taliban controls the U.S. Embassy. Documents that might help validate refugee petitions are inaccessible or have been destroyed. Anything other fable that the establishment elites’ offer up is smoke and mirrors.
Blood has been shed of Americans and innocent Afghans; trillions of dollars have been squandered, and countless establishment lies over two decades have been told and shamelessly retold. After American deaths, mountainous waste and brazen deceit, Biden adds insult to injury when he boasts about airlifting Afghans out of Kabul while citizens are left behind. Then, Biden, having done irreparable damage, forces his poorly managed resettlement plan on a skeptical public still coping with COVID-19’s fallout.
Although Americans never voted on the potentially nation-altering resettlement, taxpayers will fund the hundreds of millions of dollars the process requires over a multi-year period. No administration official has sought the opinions of the residents who live in the 19 cities. The administration is brazenly indifferent to deep doubts about the hasty decision to aimlessly resettle Afghan nationals. The refugees are, like it or not, on the way. Resettlement Biden-style is potentially a deadly Russian Roulette game of chance where Americans could be the victims.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
The State Department recently identified 19 U.S. cities as preferred destinations for Afghan refugees. Chosen because they’re “locations with reasonable cost of living, housing availability, supportive services, and welcoming communities with volunteers and resources,” the list includes Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Baltimore, as well as other Southwest and Rocky Mountain cities like Salt Lake, Denver and Phoenix.
The usual suspects – the White House, the media, the bicoastal elites, 100 percent of congressional Democrats, and 80 percent of virtue-signaling congressional Republicans, a rough estimate based on how few in the GOP have objected – can barely contain their glee over what promises to be, at least in the initial refugee wave, between 22,000 and 30,000 Afghan arrivals. Even former President Donald Trump, who slashed refugee resettlement to historically low annual levels, advocated for resettling Afghans who assisted U.S. military, a category that’s broad enough to include office personnel and other nonessential workers.
But few are more thrilled than the “volunteers and resources” groups noted above, also known as “volags” – voluntary agencies – the so-called faith-based organizations, often disparagingly called the refugee resettlement industry. In her 2018 research report compiled from the latest publicly available data, senior researcher Dr. Nayla Rush of the Center for Immigration Studies found that the federal government funded the nine major U.S. volags at the rate of 58 percent to 97 percent. Taxpayer funds go to provide refugees support with housing, food, clothing, community orientation, English lessons, enrollment in various benefits and welfare programs, referral to social service providers including health care, and employment. Volags’ chief operating officers earned, at the time of Dr. Rush’s research, annual salaries that range from a low of $132,000 to a high of $671,749.
Although many resettlement workers may be motivated by good intentions, the indisputable conclusion is that, since volags are reimbursed on a per-capita basis, fewer refugees also mean fewer jobs and less income for the agencies and their employees. Logically, volags anticipate that the Afghan crisis represents a potential pot of post-Trump gold, and are pressuring Biden to expedite the maximum total of refugees. As Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service’s president and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah candidly said, “We’ve been screaming from the rooftops for months now that we need to get these allies to Guam or another U.S. territory.”
Earlier this summer, the Senate, in anticipation of what it knew would be a significant Afghan refugee influx, unanimously passed a bill that provided $1 billion toward easing the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) application process. SIVs are issued to nationals of countries who have assisted U.S. military forces, often as translators. To coincide with the Senate bill, the State Department announced that it would confer Priority-2 (P-2) designation that grants access for permanent U.S. residency to certain Afghan nationals and their eligible family members that don’t or haven’t yet qualified for SIVs. Included would be Afghans who worked for U.S. government contractors, for U.S.-funded programs, or U.S.-based media or nongovernmental organizations, as well as their families.
John Kirby, assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, enthusiastically proclaimed that “we want to have the capacity to get up to several thousand immediately and want to be prepared for the potential of tens of thousands….We’re going to focus on getting as many folks [Afghan refugees] out as we can.” What total “many folks” might climb to, no one can predict. In a letter to Biden, U.S. representatives Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) urged the president to set the refugee cap at “no less than 200,000,” an increase of nearly 140,000 from the 62,500 established for 2021, and many thousands more than the 125,000 the White House previously said it would seek in 2022. Other advocates want 1.2 million Afghans resettled. In Congress, the progressive caucus speaks loudly, and has significant sway with its receptive audience in the White House. Reaching 200,000 refugees in fiscal 2022 sounds like a stretch, but it would be consistent with the Biden administration’s America-Last agenda which has been on full display at the Southwest border since Day 1.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
What Biden Left Behind comes courtesy of Stan Casacio who hosts the Don’t Back Down Show on WWDB AM 860
By John and Andy Schlafly
Some $85 billion worth of America’s most advanced military technology was left behind in Afghanistan, a shocking revelation that by itself would justify President Biden’s removal from office, along with his entire national security team. Biden has given new meaning to the term “cut and run” by abandoning American citizens while permitting an immense cache of advanced weapons to be used against them.
We are not just talking about a few guns or hand grenades. The abandoned American equipment includes more than 109 helicopters, 22,170 Humvees, 8,000 trucks, 64,300 machine guns, and 358,530 assault rifles, according to the non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Jim Banks (R-IN), who is in the House Republican leadership after serving with our troops in Afghanistan, observed last week that the Taliban has “more Black Hawk helicopters than 85 percent of the countries in the world.” At least 33 Black Hawk helicopters are in the Taliban’s hands now.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan previously admitted that the Biden Administration lacks a “complete picture“ of all of the military equipment it left behind. In addition, databases of Americans and our allies are probably with the Taliban, too.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan previously admitted that the Biden Administration lacks a “complete picture“ of all of the military equipment it left behind.
Since 2007, our troops have collected biometric data about residents of Afghanistan by using mobile technology including the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE). These tools include a fingerprint reader, iris scanner, and camera, in order to build facial and fingerprint watchlists.
Placement on a watchlist in the United States can result in being kept off an airplane, which is inconvenient. But inclusion in these watchlists in Afghanistan can result in death.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki gave an unpersuasive denial of a report, by the left-leaning news website Politico, that the Biden Administration had given the names of attempted evacuees to the Taliban. The reality is that Biden has no idea whether such a list has been given to the enemy.
“First let me say there have been reports that we provided lists of people who want to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban. That’s inaccurate. That’s misreported and misconstrued,” Psaki insisted.
But last Thursday Biden himself admitted that he did know enough about such a list to respond to questions about it. He declared that he could not state “with any certitude that there’s actually been a list of names.”
The biometric database, now presumably in the hands of the Taliban, is a deadly “kill list.” It potentially provides the Taliban with photos and fingerprints of Afghans who supported or assisted American soldiers, and those Afghans now face deadly reprisal.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was reportedly vacationing at his family’s luxurious home in exclusive East Hampton, Long Island, as the Taliban was overthrowing the Afghan government. Blinken has so misjudged the rapid takeover of Afghanistan that he should resign immediately.
Incredibly, the Western-installed president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, is a former Berkeley anthropology professor entirely unsuited for the challenge of his job, just as Biden is. As reported by the Washington Post, Ghani was more interested in early August in digitizing the Afghan economy than in defending against the invasion of his own capital.
“We never thought we would take Kabul so quickly,” a Taliban commander marveled. With Biden officials departed for an early weekend and the Afghan president having abruptly fled the country, there was no leadership for any earnest defense.
Military equipment can be replaced, but our trapped Americans cannot. Our equipment can now be used by terrorists against our own citizens there and elsewhere. “If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out,” Biden declared on August 18. But Biden then broke his promise by pulling out of Afghanistan before evacuating all of our citizens who want to leave.
“We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., admitted Monday evening as the final American troops were withdrawn from the country, even earlier than the deadline demanded by the Taliban. The remaining Americans are targets for terrorists as bargaining chips, or worse.
Under President Trump’s leadership, only 3 American soldiers died in the second half of last year in Afghanistan. Biden’s failure to secure Kabul airport and Bagram Air Base for the evacuation resulted in the horrible massacre of 13 American troops last week, nearly all in their early 20s and whose heartbreaking photos are being shared in eulogy across the internet.
While American citizens were left behind to face the Taliban alone, tens of thousands of Afghan men, women, and children are being airlifted and resettled inside our country, and there is no way to adequately vet them. Far from eradicating terrorism in Afghanistan, Biden has equipped and facilitated it.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
HB 162 was passed by the Pennsylvania Legislature, and signed into law as Act 50 on June 30 by the Gov. Tom Wolf. The Small Wireless Facilities Deployment Act was passed with only three dissenting votes and little notice. The idea is to accelerate 5G infrastructure in Pennsylvania
We all, of course, want the modern world of 5G and any route to this sounds like it must be harmless. Well, yes and no. First, we learned of this item at the July Swarthmore Borough Council Meeting. We learned that the mini-towers required for 5G could be planted on the grass strips that many of us have between sidewalk and street.
This is property we had thought was owned by the homeowners and, we assumed, was part of what we pay taxes for We assumed we had control of what goes on on these strips. Guess not.
Now, according to State Senator Tim Kearney (D-26 and a former fine Mayor of Swarthmore) there are but sevem exceptions whereas a municipality can “refuse the installation of small cells.” None of these 7 exemptions apply to these street strips already having a planting of any kind of tree, neither fruit trees or saplings, or… These would probably have to go, though that’s a small price for progress, one supposes.
The apple harvest we had this year may be our last.
There’s an exception for Historical Markers, but this would not necessarily apply to, say, Swarthmore’s Historically Black Neighborhood. Each case like this might have to be brought up individually. How this might effect Swarthmore College is still unclear.
We have also been told that all these initial requests will be coming to your town by the end of the†month.
According to Legiscan.com, the only three nays, in the State House, were Democrat Kevin J. Boyle, and Republicans Carl Walker Metzgar, and Brett R. Miller, none of whom mentioned it on their websites. Boyle, who participated in some forums I organized, did not respond as to his reasons to vote against this bill. No one in the Pennsylvania Senate opposed it.
Judicial Elections Hugely Important In Pennsylvania, forwarded from Leo Knepper of Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania
By Gina Diorio
While next year’s U.S. Senate race and, to a lesser extent, gubernatorial race are capturing much of the political media’s attention, Pennsylvania has another statewide election in just a few months. On Nov. 2, voters will elect four judges to open seats on our three statewide appellate courts.
Before moving to Pennsylvania, I lived almost all my life in Jersey, where the governor appoints judges. So when I realized some states elect their judges, I was befuddled. Then, when I learned Pennsylvania elects judges in partisan elections, I was dumbfounded.
You might be thinking, who cares? Why do these races matter? I’m glad you asked.
Pennsylvania has three statewide appellate courts: Supreme Court, Superior Court, and Commonwealth Court. Superior Court and Commonwealth Court are equal in ‘rank’, so to speak, but hear different types of cases.
The 15-member Superior Court hears appeals in criminal and most civil cases. And the court’s rulings can have a major impact on individuals, local businesses, and more.
For example, the Superior Court has ruled on “venue shopping,” the practice of allowing trial lawyers to cherry pick where they bring personal injury cases—regardless of where the alleged injury occurred—based on which court has a history of ordering big payouts. (Hello, Philadelphia.)
The Superior Court has also chimed in on whether workers can sue former employers for illnesses that appear long after they’ve left their jobs (another potential trial lawyers’ dream).
The 9-member Commonwealth Court, meanwhile, hears cases relating to state and local government.
Last year, when businesses challenged Gov. Wolf COVID orders, some of these cases went to Commonwealth Court. When the League of Women Voters challenged our congressional map back in 2017, that lawsuit began in Commonwealth Court. And when my organization, Commonwealth Partners, challenged our state’s unbalanced budget, we filed the case in Commonwealth Court.
Of course, our 7-member Supreme Court can overturn or sustain any ruling from the Superior or Commonwealth courts on appeal. However, it can also take any case directly, regardless of its status in the lower courts.
We saw this last year when the Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction over whether the General Assembly could terminate Wolf’s emergency disaster declaration without Wolf’s approval. As you’ll recall, the court ruled against the General Assembly—paving the way for the recently passed constitutional amendments reining in a governor’s emergency powers.
The Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction over whether the General Assembly could terminate Wolf’s emergency disaster declaration without Wolf’s approval.
Given that each judge in all three appellate courts is elected, the stakes and costs of judicial elections can quickly mount.
In 2015, Pennsylvania set a record for the most expensive state judicial races in history to date, at more than $15 million.
Spending was so high because three seats on our Supreme Court were up for election, and Democrats saw the chance to flip that court and have the final say over all the types of cases mentioned above—plus many more.
Democrats succeeded, and as a result we’ve seen the court toss our congressional maps, change the voting rules just before last year’s election, and uphold Gov. Wolf’s business shutdown orders, to name just a few things. (For more on harmful Supreme Court rulings since 2015, check out Commonwealth Partners President and CEO Matt Brouillette’s recent op-ed.)
This year, voters will choose one Supreme Court justice, one Superior Court judge, and two Commonwealth Court judges. (In full disclosure, Commonwealth Partners, has endorsed candidates in each race.)
All these seats are currently held by Republicans. Democrats hope to expand their 5-2 majority on the Supreme Court, flip the Superior Court (which currently has an 8-7 Republican majority), and make inroads into the 7-2 Republican majority on the Commonwealth Court.
Of course, seeking partisan gains for partisan ends is a barrier to an objective judiciary. Instead, we should seek judges who uphold the rule of law.
So as November approaches, Pennsylvanians would do well to recognize that, despite their lack of excitement, judicial elections are critically important—and vote accordingly.
Gina Diorio is the Public Affairs Director at Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs, an independent, non-partisan, 501(c)(6) membership organization dedicated to improving the economic environment and educational opportunities in Pennsylvania. www.thecommonwealthpartners.com.
Judicial Elections Hugely Important In Pennsylvania
No sooner had the Taliban taken control of Kabul than the establishment demanded that thousands of Afghans be given immediate U.S. resettlement privileges. Allegedly, and likely at least partially accurate, some Afghans are friendly to the U.S. government, and worked with American military. Now, so goes the standard patter, with our allies’ lives reportedly endangered, the Biden administration has a moral duty to invite them to America to find safe haven.
In a bitter irony, the most passionate cry to immediately resettle Afghans came from former President George W. Bush whose fallacious “weapons of mass destruction” claim first drew the U.S. military into a 20-year long Middle East quagmire. Bush, a devoted immigration expansionist, urged Biden to “cut the red tape” to expedite Afghans’ safe and secure exit out of the now Taliban-controlled country.
As the old English proverb goes, and as history has proven, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.” The first hurdle in a resettlement plan is President Biden’s demonstrated inability to effectively manage any immigration-related issue. The Southern U.S. Border, where last month a 21-year high of 210,000 aliens crossed, is the most shocking example, but other instances, all still in progress, are Biden’s unconstitutional refusal to enforce existing immigration law, his proposed 96 percent budget reduction in border security assets and his gutting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that protects the interior. Given Biden’s dismal immigration track record, only the most naïve could assume that his State or Homeland Security Departments could successfully vet tens of thousands of Afghans.
To be clear, fair-minded Americans want to help allies who have supported us in the extended Afghan War. But Americans don’t want the Afghan Special Immigration Visa (SIV) program to devolve into a similar situation to that of the fraud-ridden Iraqi SIV program. In June, Reuters reportedthat 4,000 Iraqis are suspected of filing fraudulent resettlement applications. The State Department is re-examining 40,000 cases that involve more than 104,000 people, 95 percent of them still in Iraq, and has frozen those applications until further clarification. More than 500 already-admitted Iraqi refugees have been implicated in the fraud and could be deported or stripped of their U.S. citizenship.
Despite documented fraud in the Iraqi SIV program, Biden initiated a similar program for Afghanistan. The Department of Defense reportedly will, post-Kabul, place 30,000 Afghan refugees in Wisconsin’s Ft. McCoy and Texas’ Ft. Bliss. Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs John Kirbyannounced that, “We want to have the capacity to get up to several thousand immediately, and want to be prepared for the potential of tens of thousands.” Kirby’s inevitable undertaking will cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
The border crisis is expected to result this year in 2 million aliens, unvetted and some COVID-19 positive, allowed into the country. On August 17, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a new “Case Management Pilot Program” to pay cities, counties and nongovernmental organizations to offer “cultural orientation,” medical screening, mental health services, legal orientation programs and other assistance for illegal immigrants who have been caught and released. U.S. taxpayers will fully fund the administration’s program, a version of which the Trump administration canceled because of cost inefficiency.
The 2 million-plus border surge, added to the as-yet-undetermined tens of thousands of Afghan refugees that will be resettled, will ensure that the nation’s transformation will continue unabated. Census Bureau datashowed that immigration, births to immigrants, the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession have contributed to a more diverse America.
The border fiasco and the Afghanistan mess are the direct consequences of wholly misguided, power-crazed elitists and inept military leadership. But, as always, Americans pay the financial tab and must adapt to whatever cultural changes and fallout that accompany the irresponsible politics that Washington, to citizens’ detriment, insists on forcing upon them.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
