Peter Hall, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Mack Trucks will lay off between 250 and 350 workers at its Lehigh Valley Operations center outside Allentown over the next three months, due to economic uncertainty caused by U.S. tariffs, a company spokesperson said Thursday.

“Heavy-duty truck orders continue to be negatively affected by market uncertainty about freight rates and demand, possible regulatory changes, and the impact of tariffs,” spokesperson Kimberly Pupillo said.

“Today we informed our employees that this unfortunately means we’ll have to lay off 250-350 people at LVO over the next 90 days,” Pupillo said. “We regret having to take this action, but we need to align production with reduced demand for our vehicles.”

Union leaders announced the company had confirmed layoffs Thursday afternoon. The plant in Macungie employs around 1,200 workers.

“Due to the market being in decline, there will be a rate and line reduction. I have heard all the same rumors you guys have heard. This is the first time I have an official word from the company that there will be a layoff,” United Auto Workers Local 677 shop chair Tim Hertzog said in a letter posted on the union’s Facebook page Thursday.

State Rep. Josh Siegel (D-Lehigh) said the layoffs are “a clear signal of the dangerous economic instability being fueled by the Trump administration’s chaotic tariff policies.”

“The tariffs — erratic, broad and poorly targeted — are crushing core U.S. industries like trucking and manufacturing. Supply chains are snarled, costs are soaring, and confidence among employers is collapsing,” Siegel said in a news release.

President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail last year that tariffs would return manufacturing to the United States and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury.

At the beginning of April, Trump announced tariffs on products imported from other countries beginning a universal 10% duty and increasing with additional reciprocal tariffs as high as 50% against countries with large trade deficits or other barriers to exports.

The announcement sparked a massive stock market sell-off that erased trillions of dollars in value that was followed by the largest single-day increase when Trump announced a 90-day reprieve for most countries. He doubled down on tariffs for Chinese imports, raising the duties to 125%.

Siegel called on U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-7th District), whose district includes the Lehigh County Mack plant, and Senators John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) to “take back Congress’s constitutional authority on trade and end this economic sabotage before more livelihoods are lost.”

Governor’s mansion arson suspect cited Shapiro’s positions on Israel-Palestine conflict, police say

by Peter Hall, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
April 16, 2025

Gov. Josh Shapiro flatly condemned political violence without commenting on the motives of the man accused of firebombing his official residence, after court documents revealed 38-year-old Cody Balmer made a reference to Palestine in a call to authorities after the attack.

“I know there are people out there who want to adopt their own political viewpoints or their own world views to what happened and why. I choose not to participate in that,” Shapiro told reporters Wednesday during a stop in Derry Township, Dauphin County. He and his family were awakened during the attack about 2 a.m. Sunday by a state trooper assigned to his security detail and directed to evacuate the residence.

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Shapiro noted he had similarly avoided speculation after the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in July and the arrest in Altoona of the man charged with shooting and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“This kind of violence has no place in our society, regardless of what motivates it,” Shapiro said. “This level of violence has to end, and it has to be roundly condemned by everyone, both political parties, people from all different walks of life.”

Cody Balmer, charged with attempted murder and terrrorism in the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence Sunday, is escorted from his first court appearance Monday, April 14, 2025. (Ian Karbal/Capital-Star)

In an interview Tuesday on WILK-AM in Wilkes-Barre, U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-9th District) expressed sympathy for Shapiro and his family, but was critical of Shapiro’s opposition to the Trump administration. He suggested that it was contributing to political tension, adding, “They got to tone it down.”

“I mean, every action Josh Shapiro has taken against the president has either been a lawsuit or a falsehood,” Meuser claimed in the interview.

Apparently surprised by a reporter’s summation of Meuser’s remarks, Shapiro said elected leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity. “It would appear that the congressman failed to measure up to that,” Shapiro said.

Members of Pennsylvania Islamic organizations condemned the attack but also expressed worry that Balmer’s statements could intensify Islamophobia across the nation.

Court officials released search warrants Wednesday for Balmer’s home, a storage locker and for a sample of his DNA that provided new information about his actions after the attack on the Governor’s Residence around 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

Balmer is charged with attempted murder, aggravated arson, terrorism, aggravated assault and related offenses. A Dauphin County district judge ordered him held without bail during his arraignment Monday. Relatives of Balmer told CBS news and the Associated Press that he had struggled with mental illness and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had been treated in a psychiatric hospital twice.

Police allege Balmer scaled a fence to enter the grounds, broke two windows and used Molotov cocktails to set fire to public areas of the residence including the state dining room where Shapiro had hosted Passover Seder with family and guests hours earlier. They said Balmer admitted that he hated Shapiro in an interview with investigators after his arrest.

Shapiro, who is Jewish, has drawn criticism for his support of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. It centered on his remarks labeling pro-Palestine protests against Jewish-owned businesses antisemitic and urging the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions to quell campus protests.

After fleeing the Governor’s Residence, Balmer called 911 and told a dispatcher his name, stating Shapiro needed to know Balmer “… will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

Balmer also said in the 911 call Shapiro needs to stop having Balmer’s friends killed and “our people have been put through too much by that monster,” according to the search warrants. He concluded the call by telling the dispatcher “all [Shapiro] has is a banquet hall to clean up,” police know where to find him, and that he would confess “to everything that I had done.”

The warrant concluded Balmer’s remarks demonstrate his political motives and requested court approval to seize electronic devices and writings that mention Shapiro, Israel, Palestine or Gaza.

Governor Josh Shapiro and the Pennsylvania State Police provide an update on the act of arson that took place at the Governor’s Residence. (Courtesy of Commonwealth Media Services)

Shapiro said it was for prosecutors to determine what motivated the attack, and referred further questions to the Dauphin County district attorney’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice. A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney John Gurganus said he had no comment Wednesday.

Under Pennsylvania law. ethnic intimidation is an offense that can be added to enhance another offense such as aggravated assault by increasing the possible penalties.

More than two dozen mosques and Islamic community organizations across the statehave signed a letter expressing shock and outrage about the attack and condemning violence. The letter says the group’s members pray for Shapiro and his family’s safety and noted that Shapiro and previous governors have opened the official residence to leaders of diverse faiths.

“The horrifying images of the damage inflicted upon this historic space have shaken our community and reinforced our concern that the rising tide of hateful rhetoric and the current political climate pose a grave threat to our shared vision of a peaceful, inclusive Pennsylvania,” the letter says.

Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the acts Balmer is accused of are not those of the pro-Palistine movement.

“It’s important to note the pro-Palistine movement in the United States has followed the tradition in American democracy of nonviolent protest,” Tekelioglu said, adding that while CAIR has disagreed with some of Shapiro’s statements, “We don’t think that this is, in a real democracy, how things get resolved.”

Tekelioglu said CAIR Philadelphia has provided Mosques, schools and community centers with additional guidance on security and increased communication with law enforcement.

“There’s already a heightened sense of risk given the current administration’s attacks on our communities,” he said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

If Gov. Josh Shapiro was able to win in deep-red Lancaster County, Democratic state Sen.-elect James Malone could too, his campaign co-manager Stella Sexton said.

Shapiro won the 36th Senate District in 2022 with a 0.2% margin over his Republican opponent, Trump-aligned Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin).

“If we could get to Shapiro-Mastriano numbers, I knew we could take this,” Stella Sexton, told the Capital-Star about the campaign’s approach to flipping the long-time Republican Senate district.

Malone did better with a stunning upset in the 36th District special election Tuesday. He beat Republican County Commissioner Joshua Parsons by 0.89%, according to unofficial results, and became the first Democrat to represent Lancaster County in the Pennsylvania Senate since 1879.

Parsons conceded Wednesday afternoon, saying in a post on the social media platform X that a review of the remaining ballots showed there were not enough uncounted votes to change the outcome.

Having reviewed the numbers from last night, including the fact that there are not enough provisional or other outstanding ballots to change the overall result, I have called Mayor Malone to congratulate him and wish him the best.
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— Josh Parsons (@Josh__Parsons) March 26, 2025

The Democratic victory drew national attention as the latest in a string of special election wins across the country. Although it did not change control of the Senate, it reduced Republicans’ majority in the Senate to 27-23.

Ryan Aument, who ran unopposed for the seat in 2022, resigned last year to work for U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick.

Democrats attribute the win, in part, to voters who feel betrayed by what they describe as President Donald Trump’s draconian and tumultuous first months in office.

“Folks are not happy with the chaos that we’re seeing in Washington and are not happy with Parsons,” Malone said, recounting what he heard from voters as he knocked on doors across the district, which President Donald Trump won by more than 15%.

Parsons campaigned on his reputation as a conservative firebrand who defied the state-ordered lockdown during the COVID-19 emergency, an abortion opponent and Trump ally.

But he also drew national attention for his harassment of a reporter at Lancaster Online/LNP and stoking anger over a drag queen story hour at Lancaster Public Library. The library ultimately canceled the event when a bomb threat and suspicious package shut down downtown Lancaster in March 2024.

“A lot of what we heard was they didn’t like his negativity and they didn’t like that he was voting against them,” Malone said.

Efforts to reach Parsons on Wednesday through his campaign’s website, Facebook page and campaign officials were unsuccessful.

A Republican official blamed Parsons’ defeat on a loss of focus after the 2024 election.

“This is a wake up call. We can’t rest on the laurels of last November’s great victories,” Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Greg Rothman said in a post. “We can’t be complacent and we must be unified. We need to keep the intensity of 2024 and fight together for every vote.”

Franklin & Marshall College pollster Berwood Yost said the outcome was both surprising and followed a trend so far in 2025.

“When you have a Republican who loses the district with a 23 point registration advantage, that qualifies as a surprise,” Yost said.

At the same time, Democrats have won five special elections across the country this year, Yost noted. That has a lot to do with the electorate in special elections, when turnout is typically low. In Lancaster county, 29% or about 54,000 registered voters participated.

The emphasis for national Democrats on Tuesday was the special election for the 35th House District in Allegheny County, where the party focused efforts to defend the one-seat majority it won in November. The seat was left empty in January when Rep. Matthew Gergely died after suffering a medical emergency.

Democrat Dan Goughnour won the election with 63.4% of the vote, according to unofficial results.

Special election voters tend to be more tuned-in and have more education, which favors Democrats, Yost said. It also tracks trends following presidential elections, when there is typically a swing toward the party not in the White House or in the majority in Washington.

“When you look back to Trump’s first term, there was a big swing toward Democrats in special elections at that time,” Yost said.

State Rep. Nikki Rivera (D-Lancaster) said Malone was a perfect foil to Parsons, who espoused many positions of the MAGA movement.

As the mayor of East Petersburg, a borough of about 4,500 people a short distance from Lancaster, Malone earned a reputation as a person who leads by example and shows genuine concern and compassion for people.

“He’s known for being personable and connecting with people on all sides of a topic,” Rivera said. “He is truly able to cross party lines to understand and be understood.”

But outside his small community, Malone had “almost no name recognition,” Sexton said. That called for a grassroots effort to introduce him to voters in more than two dozen municipalities.

Sexton said she found inspiration in Iowa Democrat Mike Zimmer’s victory, flipping a state Senate seat in January.

“I reached out to them and said we have to know how you did it,” Sexton said. “They gave us their whole plan.”

Lancaster Democrats enlisted phone banking help from county committees across Pennsylvania and launched a ground game that included “obsessively” tracking mail ballots and dispatching volunteers to retirement communities to follow up with voters, Sexton said.

She said Malone worked hard, meeting voters and attending a League of Women Voters forum that Parsons skipped. Libertarian Zachary Moore of Mount Joy was there too, and won 480 votes, almost exactly the margin by which Parsons lost, Sexton noted.

Sexton said Malone’s campaign spent about $215,000, an amount she estimates is tied with or slightly greater than Parsons’ spending. Campaign finance reports show money continued to flow to the candidates in the final 24 hours of the race.

Parsons’s campaign was supported by GOP activist Scott Presler, who helped turn out Amish voters in the 2024 general election. Presler, who has drawn criticism for his anti-Muslim language, rung early alarm bells about a possible Democratic victory, drawing the attention of billionaire megadonor Elon Musk, Lancaster Online reported this week.

Sexton said Musk’s post came too late to help Parsons’ fundraising. But it reinforced Malone’s message.

“Parsons was really being supported by billionaires and ours was a grassroots campaign and that was really a contrast that resonated with people,” Sexton said.

When Pressler posted on X late Tuesday night lamenting Parsons’ apparent loss, Musk replied with a one-word post: “Damn.”

On Jan. 6, 2021, Robert Sanford, a 27-year veteran of the Chester fire department, hurled a fire extinguisher into a line of police officers defending the U.S. Capitol, striking two in their heads.

Riley June Williams, a 22-year-old Harrisburg woman, entered the Capitol and “led an army up the stairs” into then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite, where, Williams later bragged on social media, she stole Pelosi’s laptop and gavel, according to court documents.

Robert Morss, of Glenshaw, went to the Capitol wearing body armor and joined a mob that used stolen riot shields to force police to retreat into a tunnel, court documents say, where Morss entered the building through a broken window.

Sanford, Williams and Morss are among at least 110 people from Pennsylvania who were charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol fomented by President Donald Trump and acolytes in the right wing media claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.

Behind Texas and Florida, Pennsylvania has the third largest number of residents charged in connection with the attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden.

On Jan. 20, hours after his inauguration, Trump made good on a campaign promise to free those imprisoned for the Jan. 6 attack, issuing “a full, complete and unconditional pardon” to more than 1,500 people convicted or charged with offenses related to the Jan. 6 attack.

He also commuted sentences but did not pardon 14 people, including Zach Rehl, the leader of a Philadelphia far-right Proud Boys chapter. Rehl was convicted with Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and three others of seditious conspiracy, a charge rarely used since the Civil War, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Gary Wickersham, who was 81 at the time of the Capitol attack, told the Capital-Star he thinks Trump’s pardons are “great” and that he has no regrets about his actions on Jan. 6.

Wickersham said he took a free bus that departed near his Chester County home to Washington, D.C. to hear Trump speak on Jan. 6. He ended up following the crowd to the Capitol.

When he reached the building, Wickersham, who was an Army paratrooper, said he climbed up the inside of the scaffolding where President Joe Biden was to be sworn in weeks later and walked through an open door.

Although he admitted that he entered the building illegally when he pleaded guilty, he maintained in a telephone interview Friday that police initiated the violence. According to court documents, he told FBI agents who visited his West Chester home in 2021, that he was justified in entering the Capitol because he was a taxpayer and that “the whole thing was a setup by antifa.”

Wickersham was sentenced to four months of home confinement and three years of probation for parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, but said he has no remorse about his actions. Wickersham said he avoided prison in part because of his age and concern that he would be vulnerable to COVID.

“It’s almost something I brag about,” Wickersham said, noting that he wasn’t even required to wear a monitoring device.

Wickersham was less braggadocious before sentencing Judge Royce Lamberth in 2021.

“It’s not like me to do that,” Wickersham said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. “In my whole 81 years, that 22 minutes I spent in there, it was a dark blot … I regret doing it. I shouldn’t have been in there.”

Others have expressed remorse and attribute their actions to lapses in judgment or indoctrination.

Andrew and Matthew Valentin are brothers from Stroudsburg, Monroe County, who were the last Jan. 6 defendants to be sentenced and are believed to be the first to be released, according to Matthew Valentin’s attorney Joshua Karoly.

They pleaded guilty in September to felony assault charges for joining a crowd that pushed metal barriers into a line of police.

Karoly said in a statement that both have taken full responsibility for their actions and blame no one else. Neither injured anyone, nor did they enter the Capitol or damage any government property.

“Each brother has apologized profusely and sincerely for their regrettable conduct on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. Both have lived law-abiding lives up to the moment of their lapse in judgment on that day,” Karoly said.

According to his attorney’s sentencing memo, Sanford, the firefighter who was sentenced to 52 months in prison for throwing a fire extinguisher at police, worked with a therapist who specializes in “cult deprogramming” to confront “the facts about the ‘stolen election’ conspiracy theory among others and how psychological manipulation is used to indoctrinate the followers of a conspiracy.”

Seth Weber, a former federal prosecutor who teaches law at DeSales University near Bethlehem, said the U.S. Constitution grants the president the power of executive pardon without limitations, exceptions or exclusions.

“It doesn’t need to be justified,” said Weber, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia for 26 years. “It needs to be done by the president for whatever reason he wants.”

President Joe Biden also pardoned about 70 people during his term including his son Hunter Biden, who was awaiting sentencing on felony gun charges.

A pardon forgives a person for any legal consequences of a conviction, and while it may infuriate those who disagree with the decision, it doesn’t erase the conviction or the facts of the crime, Weber said.

“You are exonerated, you are held not responsible but your conviction is still on your record,” he said.

Pardons for those who engage in acts of rebellion or treason are far from unprecedented, said Bruce Antkowiak, a former federal prosecutor and professor at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa.

President George Washington issued pardons for two Pennsylvania men, John Mitchell and Philip Weigel, convicted of treason as ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion against a tax on distilled spirits. And President Andrew Johnson issued a blanket pardon for thousands of Confederate soldiers and other officials, though high ranking officers had to apply for amnesty.

“There were certainly feelings among a great many of people that the South needs to be punished,” Antkowiak said. “There were also feelings that the war is over, there needs to be rebuilding, not continued animosity.”

Trump’s grant of executive clemency covers a range of Jan. 6 convicts, including those who pleaded guilty to merely entering the Capitol illegally to those found guilty by a jury of assaulting police officers. It drew criticism from some for failing to make a distinction. Even Vice President J.D. Vance said earlier this month that only those who “protested peacefully” should be pardoned,

“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” Vance said, adding that there was “a bit of a gray area” in some cases.

“As someone who believes that we need to treat our law enforcement with the dignity and respect that they deserve, the idea that you would pardon someone who’s been convicted of a crime for assaulting a police officer, that doesn’t sit right with me,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said Tuesday. “I don’t think it sits right with a lot of Americans.”

Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, who was among the first Democrats to meet one-on-one with Trump, said he disagreed with a lot of the pardons, just as he disagreed with some issued by Biden before leaving office.

“Some people are very deserving of a second chance and get a pardon, and there’s some that I don’t agree,” Fetterman said in an ABC news interview.

U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-9th District) told CNN on Wednesday that while the attacks on police officers were unforgivable, those who were convicted have served their time.

“There’s no question anybody who assaults a police officer … is a disgrace … But let’s face it, those who did that have been in jail now for three to four years” Meuser said, adding that their sentences have been comparable to those of others convicted of assaulting police officers.

While executive clemency is a powerful tool, it comes at a cost, Antkowiak said.

“Presidents understand the price they pay for using the pardon power … it gives their opponents ammunition. That’s undoubtedly why most presidents wait until the end of their administrations,” Antkowiak said, noting that Biden was aware that his decision to pardon his son would generate backlash.

“The limit on pardon power is political,” Antkowiak said. “You can’t challenge it.”

Republican U.S. Senator-elect Dave McCormick’s lawyers withdrew a request on Friday for a Philadelphia judge to intervene to prevent election officials from counting provisional ballots without adequate Republican observation, according to court records.

McCormick’s campaign filed the lawsuit Thursday after the Associated Press declared him the winner of the Senate race by a narrow margin over incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. Casey refused to concede, with his campaign saying that up to 100,000 provisional and overseas absentee ballots remained to be counted.

“The number of provisional ballots expected from areas that favor Senator Casey, like Philadelphia and its suburbs, is further proof that this race is too close to be called,” Casey campaign spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said. “As the McCormick campaign admitted in their own lawsuit this morning, the counting of these ballots could have an ‘impact on the outcome of the election.’ With more than 100,000 ballots still left to count, we will continue to make sure Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard.”

About 20,000 provisional ballots were in Philadelphia, the McCormick campaign said, arguing that the campaign should be permitted to make “global challenges” to large groups of provisional ballots with similar discrepancies.

McCormick’s lawyers noted that because Republicans had no candidate in a majority of races in the city, the GOP is entitled to 27 fewer observers of the counting process.

They also asked the court to order provisional ballots to be set aside if the voters who cast them had requested mail-in ballots. The filing says such provisional ballots should not be counted until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in an appeal of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling. In that case, the state’s highest court ruled that voters who learn their mail-in ballots have been rejected must be permitted to vote by provisional ballots.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of voters, allowing the state Supreme Court decision that the provisional ballots to stand, the Republican Party has filed an application to block enforcement of the decision arguing that the ruling violates the U.S. Constitution.

McCormick held a press conference in Pittsburgh on Friday where he thanked supporters, and expressed sympathy for Casey, noting he had experience losing a close election — McCormick lost the 2022 GOP U.S. Senate primary to Mehmet Oz by less than 1,000 votes.

“We obviously had an incredibly hard fought race but there’s no doubt that this is a family and Senator Casey is a man who has served this great commonwealth with honor,” McCormick said. “We knew on election night we had won, because the math was clear and there’s no way for Senator Casey to win, and the AP certainly recognized that yesterday by calling the race. But Senator Casey is going to have to work through this, and so I wish him the best and his family the best and thank them for their service.”

If the margin of votes between Casey and McCormick is at or below .5% it would trigger a recount under Pennsylvania law.

Details of a hearing held in Philadelphia on Friday were not immediately available online.

The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania have asked the state’s highest court to delay a ruling that could affect thousands of voters next month while it asks the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the election code requires county election officials to allow voters to cast a provisional ballot if their mail-in ballot is rejected and have the provisional ballot counted as long as there are no additional disqualifying problems.

In a filing Friday morning, the RNC and Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that the ruling goes against the court’s own admonition against changing voting rules while an election is in progress.

The state Supreme Court on Oct. 5 denied requests in two other cases to resolve questions about the commonwealth’s vote-by-mail law in the final few weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election. It said the risk of confusing voters with a change in voting rules so close to the election was too great.

“This Court should heed its statement from earlier this month and refrain from “substantial[ly] alter[ing]” the rules and procedures governing county boards’ counting of ballots in the current election,” the RNC and state Republican party’s filing Friday said.

The ruling Wednesday upheld a decision by a Commonwealth Court panel in favor of Butler County voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because they were returned without being sealed inside a second “secrecy envelope,” one of several reasons mail ballots may be disqualified.

A Butler County judge’s decision found that allowing the voters to cast provisional ballots to be counted amounted to “ballot curing” or allowing them to fix the errors on their mail-in ballots.

Commonwealth Court Judge Matthew Wolf said in September that the county election officials lacked a legal basis to refuse to count the provisional ballots.

The Republican groups argued in their petition that the state Supreme Court’s order affirming the lower court decision fundamentally alters the nature of the election by giving voters who failed to follow the rules “an unauthorized do-over.”

Further, they argue, the state Supreme Court’s decision violates the U.S. Constitution’s provision that state legislatures have the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections. The U.S. Supreme Court last year rejected an application of the so-called independent state legislature theory in a challenge by North Carolina Republicans of congressional redistricting decisions by that state’s high court.

If the U.S. Supreme Court takes the Butler County case, the Republican groups have a strong likelihood of winning, they argue. The Pennsylvania Legislature explicitly prohibited voters to cast a provisional ballot if their mail-in ballot is “timely received” but the law says nothing about whether the voter’s mail ballot is valid.

The Republican committees also say that the state Supreme Court should stay its decision because they would suffer an “irreparable injury” if the ruling is in effect on election day. Delaying the ruling would also promote the public interest and prevent harm to others because it would protect the integrity of the ongoing election, the filing says.

The cases the state Supreme Court declined to decide before the election deal with whether mail-in ballots should be disqualified because a voter wrote the wrong date or no date on the outer envelope and whether county election officials may notify voters who make a mistake and give them a chance to correct it.

A decision is still pending in yet another mail-in ballot lawsuit. The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Washington County election officials must accurately report whether mail-in ballots have been rejected.

The Washington County board of elections had adopted a policy days before last April’s primary of marking ballots as “received” in the state ballot tracking system when they had actually been segregated due to a disqualifying error.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Denise Alexander couldn’t remember the last time she saw her younger brother John.

Convicted in 2007 of second degree murder for a crime in which he contends he was also a victim, John Alexander is serving a life sentence in state prison without the possibility of parole.

His absence for the past 17 years has strained the siblings’ relationship, tested their parents’ marriage to the point of breaking, and left John’s two children, now adults, without a fatherly role model and provider, Denise Alexander said.

“I tried my best, my mom and dad tried their best. But ever since this happened, everything’s just been different. Our family just hasn’t been the same,” she told the Capital-Star.

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that offers a slim hope of freedom for 40-year-old John Alexander and more than 1,100 other people serving life sentences for killings they didn’t commit or intend.

Lawyers for former Allegheny County resident Derek Lee have been working to persuade the court to find that life in prison without parole for second degree murder is an impermissible cruel punishment under the Pennsylvania Constitution. Lee, 36, is serving life for a murder committed by his accomplice in a 2014 robbery.

A crucial part of the Supreme Court’s decision, if it finds the punishment to be unconstitutional, is whether it should apply to free people who have already been sentenced to life without parole, said Philadelphia attorney Teri Himebaugh, who is working to reopen John Alexander’s case.

“Until we know what they’re going to do, we don’t know whether Mr. Alexander has a basis for that,” Himebaugh said. “If they find it doesn’t apply retroactively, there’s not a lot we can do about it, and we’re going to have to continue reviewing other types of new evidence.”

Himebaugh, who specializes in wrongful conviction appeals, said life sentences have effects that radiate beyond the lives of those serving them. And although those sentenced to life without parole are disproportionately black and older, Himebaugh said the average age of the clients she represents has decreased over the last three decades.

“It impacts families. It impacts economically. It also is going to impact those children, if there are children, because they’re not going to have positive role models. And it is a vicious circle,” she said, adding fighting a wrongful conviction and supporting a loved one in prison is costly. “By the time most families get to the point where John’s family is, they’ve also worn out all their resources.”

Pennsylvania is the only state besides Louisiana that still mandates life without parole for second degree murder, also called felony murder.

Under Pennsylvania’s second degree murder statute, prosecutors can charge and convict a person of the offense without having to prove they intended to cause another person’s death; they need only to prove the defendant committed another felony and a death occurred.

In John Alexander’s case, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office and police said he was among several accomplices who kidnapped Renaldo Zayas in May 2003 in an attempt to obtain a $4,000 ransom from his family. Zayas, who was bound with packing tape and stabbed repeatedly, bled to death in a van parked on a north Philadelphia street, according to court records.

John Alexander told detectives investigating Zayas’ killing that he and Zayas were both kidnapped, that he was bound with duct tape, burned with cigarettes and beaten by three men who demanded money. But prosecutors contended that John Alexander had confessed to his girlfriend’s brother that he set up Zayas and pretended to be a victim too.

In a filing seeking to reopen his case under the state Post-Conviction Relief Act, Himebaugh raises issues with Alexander’s trial, including his court-appointed attorney J. Michael Farrell. At the time he represented Alexander, Farrell was “consigliere” for a Baltimore-based drug trafficking organization. Farrell was convicted in 2017 of money laundering and witness tampering.

Himebaugh argues Farrell’s criminal activities and other issues during trial meant that Alexander did not have adequate representation of an attorney. Himebaugh said she is also investigating whether two detectives in the case who have been accused of misconduct in other cases engaged in similar threatening and coercive interrogation techniques in Alexander’s case.

“Hopefully Lee will take it out of our hands,” Himebaugh said, noting that if the court finds life imprisonment without parole is unconstitutional, it could open a path to freedom for Alexander without reversing his conviction.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court to weigh life sentences for felony murder

Lee, 36, was convicted of second-degree murder, robbery, and conspiracy in the Oct. 14, 2014, shooting death of Leonard Butler in Pittsburgh. Butler’s long-term partner Tina Chapple testified that on the day of his death, Butler called her downstairs in their home where she saw two men with guns, court records say.

Although both men had partial face coverings, Chapple identified one of the men as Lee. She testified that Lee directed her and Butler to the basement and demanded money. After Butler gave Lee his watch, Lee went upstairs and the other man remained in the basement.

When Butler lunged at the other man, Chapple testified that she heard a gunshot. Butler was shot and died from his injuries, according to the petition asking the Supreme Court to hear Lee’s appeal.

“There was no dispute that Mr. Lee did not cause Mr. Butler’s death, nor was there any testimony indicating that Mr. Lee intended to kill Mr. Butler,” the filing says.

While the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishment, Lee’s attorneys from the Abolitionist Law Center and the Amistad Law Project argued the corresponding section of Pennsylvania’s Constitution requires only that a punishment be cruel to be impermissible.

The omission of the term “unusual” from the Pennsylvania Constitution permits challenges to common punishments “if there is a basis for determining they are cruel in a constitutional sense,” the attorneys argue.

Pennsylvania courts, and other state courts, historically have interpreted the prohibition on cruel punishments as barring those that are unduly harsh and not those imposed with cruel intent, Lee’s attorneys contend.

And Pennsylvania has unique policy considerations that support a finding that life imprisonment without parole is unduly harsh. In addition to being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s prison population serving life without parole is aging or elderly. Criminologists have found that involvement with crime correlates strongly to age and older incarcerated people pose little risk to public safety.

To help Lee, Alexander and others already serving life sentences for felony murder, the court would have to determine that the punishment is unconstitutional and that its ruling should apply retroactively.

Himebaugh said that while the current Supreme Court has ruled that mandatory life without parole is unconstitutionally cruel for juvenile offenders and applied the ruling retroactively, it’s unclear whether it would do so in Lee’s case.

“My big concern is that they’re not going to apply it retroactively, because the statistics, the numbers are too significant,” Himebaugh said, noting that Pennsylvania courts are still working their way through a backlog of reviews for more than 500 juvenile offenders sentenced to life.

In an amicus brief on behalf of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office, General Counsel Jennifer Selber urged the court to find mandatory life without parole for felony murder in violation of the state Constitution, but cautioned against making the new rule retroactive. Doing so would place too great a strain on the legal system, the brief says.

Denise Alexander said Lee’s case, nonetheless, gives her hope that her brother might someday come home. She remembers her brother as a jokester who invented card games for them to play. “He never wanted to be bored,” she said.

After graduating from Thomas Edison High School, John Alexander attended a technical school and got work renovating properties in the city to earn money for his son and daughter. “He was the one, you know, making sure the kids was okay. Had a place to live,” Denise said.

After John went to prison, his children bounced between their mother and grandparents’ care. And Denise Alexander said she worries that her brother has become hardened — “institutionalized,” she said — by prison, saying they don’t talk as much as they used to.

“I can’t get mad at him. But I just, I feel sorry for him,” she said. “I feel helpless. I just know that he’s not supposed to be there and I just think, like, how would I deal with knowing that I’m not supposed to be there and I don’t have a date to come home?”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

In a pair of decisions published Saturday evening the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied requests to resolve questions about the commonwealth’s vote-by-mail law in the final few weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Dismissing a request by the voting rights groups to block the enforcement of a rule requiring mail-in ballots to bear a handwritten date on the return envelope, the Supreme Court said the risk of confusing voters with a change in voting rules was too great.

“This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election,” the unsigned order said.

Chief Justice Debra Todd filed a dissenting statement in which she argued that voters and election officials need guidance in the upcoming election.

“We ought to resolve this important constitutional question now, before ballots may be improperly rejected and voters disenfranchised,” Todd said.

The court also rejected a request by the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to stop county election officials from allowing voters to remedy mistakes on their mail-in ballots that would cause them to be disqualified.

The flurry of weekend rulings exactly a month before Election Day leaves the rules in place during the April 23 primary unchanged.

That means voters casting ballots by mail in this election must complete the voter declaration on the outside of the return envelope by signing and dating it for their ballot to be counted.

Voters using mail-in ballots should also be certain to place the ballot in the unmarked secrecy envelope before placing it in the return envelope, as that is an error that can lead to a ballot being disqualified.

Counties where the boards of elections have adopted so-called “notice and cure” policies may notify voters of errors and allow them to fix their mistakes before polls close on Election Day. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania this week published a guide to such policies in all 67 counties.

The court said the RNC and Pennsylvania GOP had demonstrated a lack of due diligence by failing to pursue the challenge to “notice and cure” policies earlier. The Republican organizations had asked the court to exercise its King’s Bench authority to hear the case without first litigating it in the lower courts, a power generally reserved for exceptionally urgent cases.

“King’s Bench jurisdiction will not be exercised where, as here, the alleged need for timely intervention is created by Petitioners’ own failure to proceed expeditiously and thus, the need for timely intervention has not been demonstrated,” the order said.

In a footnote, the court said the Republican parties had also raised the issue before the 2022 midterm election but the Commonwealth Court dismissed the case for a lack of jurisdiction.

“Three election cycles have since passed, and the Petitioners have not challenged any of the county notice and cure policies in a court of common pleas,” the order said.

Justice Kevin Brobson said in a separate statement that he agrees that it is too close to the election for the court to decide the question

“Deciding these questions at this point would, in my view, be highly disruptive to county election administration,” Brobson wrote, adding that it would be difficult for the court to hear evidence and testimony in such a short timeframe.

Earlier Saturday, the court granted an appeal by the RNC and the RPP challenging a Commonwealth Court ruling last month requiring election officials in Washington County to notify voters when their mail-in ballots are rejected and allow them to vote provisionally at their polling places on Election Day.

The Washington County board of elections had adopted a policy days before last April’s primary of marking ballots as “received” in the state ballot tracking system when they had actually been segregated due to a disqualifying error.

Act 77 of 2019 introduced changes to the Election Code, including allow voters to cast ballots by mail without an excuse for not going to the polls. Mistakes by voters completing their ballot packets have been the subject of challenges in every election since. A study estimated that more than 10,000 voters were disenfranchised in the primary election because of such errors.

Proceedings in several courts since 2020, when no-excuse mail voting was first an option, have established that the date on the outside of the envelopes serves no official purpose.

The Commonwealth Court ruled last month that the dating requirement violates the Pennsylvania Constitution because it serves no compelling reason for the government to infringe upon the charter’s guarantee of the right to vote.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is set to attend a Christian revival on Saturday near Pittsburgh headlined by self-described prophet and apostle Lance Wallnau, who is a “rockstar” in the religious movement that aims to secure dominion over American society.

Wallnau’s “Courage Tour” is billed as a “celebration of Jesus Christ’s courage and triumph,” but, with stops in seven key swing states, its goal is to tap the voting power of suburban Christians to reelect former President Donald Trump.

A leader in the loosely affiliated but highly networked National Apostolic Reform movement, Wallnau has been a supporter of Trump since 2015. And since Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, Wallnau has been at the forefront of developing strategies to reelect him, experts on the movement told the Capital-Star.

The tour’s Pennsylvania stop kicks off Friday night at the Monroeville Convention Center in Allegheny County.

Wallnau and others who share his view on the role of Christianity in civil society launched the Courage Tour to engage with a largely silent faction of conservative Christians in strongly blue suburban counties, said Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Massachusetts.

“The idea of courage is to embolden those evangelicals to speak out and organize,” Clarkson said.

Wallnau, who grew up in Pennsylvania but is now Texas-based, also stumped in 2022 for state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), whose far-right gubernatorial campaign had elements of Christian nationalist ideals.

While the Courage Tour events have the veneer of a pentecostal revival, “It is a very highly coordinated Christian nationalist voter organization effort,” said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

In the lead up to the 2024 election, Republicans have continued to erode the massive registration advantage Democrats once held in the commonwealth. Taylor, who attended the tour’s stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on Monday, said evangelical Christians are likely contributing to the gains and are mobilizing their peers to become actively involved in elections.

In addition to connecting attendees with voter data to knock on doors and mobilize Christian voters, the events try to recruit people to work as poll watchers and election workers.

And while that might sound innocuous, Taylor said, the effort is led by a 2020 election denier who suggests that having Christians in a place of influence would be an advantage on Election Day.

“What happens is, when the polls start to close, or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out. You are actually going to be a paid election worker,” said speaker Joshua Standifer, the leader of a group called Lion of Judah, at the Wisconsin event.

“I call this our Trojan horse. Then they don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country, with spirit-filled believers,” Standifer said in a video from the event posted on the social media platform that used to be Twitter.

But why do evangelical Christians support Trump, who has faced credible accusations of sexual assault, bank fraud, and 34 felony convictions for falsifying records to cover up his adulterous consortium with an adult film star.

Wallnau, who evangelizes through his podcast, YouTube, and Facebook posts to more than a million followers, made his mark early in the arc of Trump’s presidential saga by making a case for why Christians should vote for a man they might consider immoral, Clarkson said.

Wallnau drew an analogy to the story of King Cyrus, the Persian emperor who, according to the Bible, freed the Jews from captivity and helped them build the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Wallnau posited that if a heathen king could be an instrument of God, so could Trump, Clarkson said.

And Trump would play a role in the Christian revival and reform of America by helping evangelicals conquer what Wallnau has described as the seven mountains of civil society — family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government — necessary to achieve Christian dominion.

“In Wallnau’s realpolitik … [Trump] doesn’t have to play by Christian rules and the Christians can sit back and not be infected by the dirtiness of politics and Washington, D.C.,” Taylor said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Ten voting rights groups have asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to block enforcement of a rule that disqualifies mail-in ballots returned without a date.

Lawyers for the voting rights groups say that if county election boards disqualify ballots that are returned by the Election Day deadline but don’t have a correct date on the outside envelope, more than 10,000 voters could be disenfranchised in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

“The counties know that these ballots are from eligible voters. They know that they received the ballots by the submission deadline because they’re holding them in their hands. This requirement is meaningless for administering the election, but it’s damaging because it disqualifies otherwise eligible voters for a meaningless paperwork mistake,” Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center, said.

The Republican National Committee has intervened in prior efforts to have the dating rule declared unconstitutional or violative of federal voting rights laws.

“The RNC has successfully defended this law three times,” spokesperson Claire Zunk said. “We’re confident the court will reject this latest challenge also.”

The new lawsuit comes less than a week after the Supreme Court dismissed a similar case in which a lower court found the rule was unconstitutional. In an Aug. 30 decision, a Commonwealth Court panel of judges ruled 4-1 that the dating requirement violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote.

The Supreme Court threw out that decision on a technicality because the voting rights groups had not included each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties as parties. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the lower court’s decision.

In the new suit that includes all of the counties’ boards of elections and Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, the voting rights groups ask the Supreme Court to use its authority as the commonwealth’s highest court to hear their case immediately. Although the Supreme Court seldom exercises its King’s Bench power, the “imminent disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvanians” justifies its use in this case, the groups argue.

They also argue that the requirement to date the return envelope of mail-in ballots violates the free and equal elections clause of the state constitution because the requirement restricts the fundamental right to vote but serves no compelling governmental purpose.

How election officials should handle voters’ mistakes in completing and returning mail-in ballots has been a subject of lawsuits since voting by mail without an excuse for not going to the polls in person was first allowed in 2020.

In prior lawsuits, testimony by election officials has established that the date that voters are supposed to write on their ballots is not used to determine whether the ballot is received in time to be counted. Rather, the county election offices put a time and date stamp on the ballots as they are received. Ballots received after polls close on Election Day cannot be counted.

The voting rights groups suing the boards and Schmidt are the New PA Project Education Fund, NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference, Common Cause Pennsylvania, The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Black Political Empowerment Project, POWER Interfaith, Make the Road Pennsylvania, OnePA Activists United, Casa San José, and Pittsburgh United.

They are represented by the Public Interest Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

(This article was updated at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, to include a comment from an RNC spokesperson.)

Thrust into the national limelight as a leading candidate to become Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential running mate, Gov. Josh Shapiro is brooking criticism from groups that both support and oppose expanding public funding for alternatives to traditional public schools.

Since his campaign for governor two years ago, Shapiro has said he backs an expansion of Pennsylvania’s programs using tax dollars to help families pay for educational expenses, including private and religious school tuition.

But after President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would not seek reelection and support for Harris’s nomination solidified, Shapiro’s credentials as a moderate Democrat with a record of success at several levels of government and strong appeal in a crucial swing state put him into the running as a potential vice presidential pick.

In response, political groups that oppose Shapiro’s school choice policies or say he hasn’t made good on campaign promises have taken their messages to a national audience.

The conservative Commonwealth Foundation is airing a television ad starting this weekend in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., media markets that flips Shapiro’s “Get S**t Done” slogan on its head, claiming Shapiro “Ain’t got s**t done.”

The ads are critical of Shapiro’s record, claiming he’s the least effective Pennsylvania governor in 50 years, but highlight Shapiro’s decision to veto a Republican plan to fund private school scholarships for students in the state’s lowest performing public schools.

The group has also published full-page ads in The Washington Post and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel during the Republican National Convention and plans to run the ad in the Chicago Tribune during the Democratic National Convention next month.

“Certainly he’s in the spotlight right now and we’re going where the attention is,” Commonwealth Foundation Senior Vice President Erik Telford told the Capital-Star.

“Ever since he was forced to veto his own promise … his rhetoric has shifted to pointing fingers to the legislature and saying he has to deal with a divided legislature,” Telford said that in addition to vouchers, Shapiro has not delivered on commitments to speed reductions in the state’s corporate net income tax or negotiate an alternative to a challenged regional carbon credit trading agreement.

Kamala Harris needs a VP candidate. Could a governor fit the bill?

A grassroots coalition of public education advocates led by the Network for Public Education Action (NPE) released an open letter to Harris this week urging her not to choose Shapiro and claiming that he supports “education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the conservative presidential transition plan promoted by the Heritage Foundation.

Among the more than two-dozen groups that signed the letter are Pittsburgh-based 412 Justice and its education justice arm Education Rights Network.

Carol Burris, executive director of NPE, said Shapiro’s support for expansion of the programs that currently divert public money to pay for private education is puzzling when support for public education is a core value for Democrats.

Shapiro nonetheless has refused to engage in discussions or back away from support for vouchers when allies have asked, Burris said.

“Kamala Harris has a deep bench to choose from,” Burris told the Capital-Star. “All of them are stalwart allies and friends of public education and all of them are opposed to vouchers.”

Asked for Shapiro’s most recent position on vouchers, a spokesperson touted the administration’s achievements in public education funding increase in the 2024-25 state budget.

“In his time in office, Governor Shapiro has consistently delivered historic increases in public education funding and finally, after decades of inaction, moved Pennsylvania towards adequately and equitably funding our public schools,” spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement. “Despite being the only Governor in the nation with a divided legislature – and despite bad faith attacks from all sides – Josh Shapiro has been a champion for public education and delivered real results.”

Bonder noted that Shapiro has increased support for public education in the last two budgets, including the largest investment in state history with a $1.1 billion increase in total K-12 funding.

During the 2022 gubernatorial campaign Shapiro’s positions on education cast a stark contrast with those of his Republican opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), who spoke about drastically reducing per-student funding and eliminating property taxes, upon which school districts depend for much of their budgets. A group of school board members from across the state called Mastriano’s plan “ dangerously out of touch with the vast majority of Pennsylvania parents.”

Shapiro, then-attorney general, touted his backing of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state that resulted in the historic 2023 ruling that declared Pennsylvania’s education funding system unconstitutional. He called for increased spending on public education while backing legislation to provide “Lifeline Scholarships” to students in the bottom 15% of schools based on reading and math scores.

While Shapiro’s support for the scholarship proposal surprised some, it also had support from Democratic Philadelphia state lawmakers Sen. Dwight Evans and Rep. Amen Brown. And although the state teachers union opposed Lifeline Scholarships, it still endorsed Shapiro as governor.

When Senate Republicans included the scholarships, then rebranded as the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success, in their response to Shapiro’s first budget proposal in 2023, House Democrats, who fiercely opposed the program, killed it. Finger pointing ensued and Shapiro said Republican Senate leaders had failed to negotiate with Democratic House leaders. Shapiro then agreed to veto the $100 million line item to obtain the House’s approval of the spending bill.

The most recent budget, which Shapiro signed July 11, does not include the new voucher program, although it includes a $75 million increase for two existing tax credits for businesses and individuals who fund scholarship programs for students to attend public schools.

Burris, of the Network for Public Education, said there is concern among public school advocates that Shapiro’s support for a voucher program stems from ties with conservative mega donor and school choice advocate Jeff Yass. Spotlight PA reported Shapiro received contributions from a political action committee funded by Yass before and during his first campaign for attorney general in 2016

“If none of this is true, Shapiro needs to make a statement that he is not in support of vouchers,” Burris said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

The head of Pennsylvania’s state House GOP caucus called for an investigation of security measures at the rally where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump, wounding him, killing a spectator and seriously injuring two others.

House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster) on Friday introduced a resolution to establish a select committee to review planning and coordination between federal, state and local law enforcement before and during the event Saturday in Butler, Pa.

A hotly contested swing state, Pennsylvania is expected to be pivotal in the presidential race and for control of the U.S. Senate this year and the site of numerous high profile political events. The commonwealth is also set to host a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year.

“As federal law enforcement increasingly relies on state and local partners to supplement security protocols, it is imperative we identify what happened from a state and local perspective on July 13, as we seek to perfect our effectiveness at keeping citizens and candidates safe as they host campaign events in Pennsylvania,” Cutler said in a statement.

To pass, Cutler’s resolution would need support from House Democratic leaders, whose spokesperson indicated that was unlikely.

“We’ll let the FBI and U.S. Congress handle this investigation with the full cooperation of the State Police and local law enforcement,” Elizabeth Rementer, spokesperson for House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D-Montgomery), said in a statement.

Authorities say 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired shots from a nearby rooftop toward Trump and the crowd at a rally on the Butler County Fairgrounds around 6:15 p.m. July 13 using a semi-automatic rifle purchased legally by his father.

Since the shooting, questions remain about how Crooks, who was killed by a security team sniper, was able to avoid the U.S. Secret Service and other law enforcement to carry the rifle to a vantage point with a clear view of Trump.

The proposed committee would be responsible to work with state and local law enforcement agencies to identify security practices that can be updated and implemented among law enforcement agencies “to ensure the safety and security of the public and highly visible individuals visiting Pennsylvania.”

“The purpose of this committee is not to assign blame, but rather give state and local law enforcement a voice so we can collectively identify what happened and learn to improve upon current practices,” Cutler said.

The committee would consist of three Democratic House lawmakers appointed by Speaker Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia) and three Republicans appointed by Cutler. The speaker of the House would also select the committee chairperson.

The GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has called for hearings into the shooting, with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle slated to testify before the House Oversight Committee next week.

Mysterious lights following a motorist on a dark country road, a saucer-shaped craft hovering over a suburban subdivision, and a flaming orb falling into the woods are among phenomena Pennsylvania residents have reported to authorities, state records show.

After the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) casually mentioned during a legislative hearing earlier this year that the agency tracks UFO sightings, the Capital-Star obtained records showing PEMA has investigated more than a dozen such events in the last decade.

“We take all reports and we share it with the appropriate agencies to be able to investigate,” Padfield told members of the state House Appropriations Committee in February.

Often dull and tedious, state budget hearings nonetheless are a chance for the Legislature to grill administration officials about how they plan to spend the taxpayers’ money.

The cabinet secretaries flesh out the details of the governor’s budget proposal but deliver few bombshells. Every once in a while, however, an answer prompts lawmakers to look up from their stacks of white papers with surprise and demand more.

It was thus as Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency Director Randy Padfield fielded a question from state Rep. Ben Waxman (D-Philadelphia) about potential threats to the state’s nuclear power plants from drones and unmanned aerial vehicles.

“We have had reports of unidentified flying objects in the past,” Padfield said before quickly moving on to the role of the Federal Aviation Administration in regulating drones.

“So, wait. Run that back again. What did you say about UFOs?” House Appropriations Committee Chairperson Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) asked when Padfield had finished his answer.

Padfield replied that PEMA occasionally gets reports of lights in the sky from county 911 centers and upon investigation authorities can attribute them to astronomical or earthly sources, such as helicopter traffic around the Pennsylvania National Guard base at Fort Indiantown Gap.

“Most of them are unfounded, or they’re attributable to some other mechanisms,” Padfield concluded, prompting another follow up from Harris.

“So, what about the un-most?” Harris asked. “You’re talking like ET phone home or something?”

Padfield conceded that some sightings are “undefined” and are difficult to understand unless the person reporting the phenomenon gets pictures but everything is passed along to the appropriate agencies.

Not satisfied with Padfield’s answer, the Capital-Star filed a right-to-know request with PEMA seeking records of unidentified flying objects and aerial phenomena and, for good measure, “encounters with unknown beings including those of suspected extra-terrestrial or cryptozoological nature.”

PEMA responded, perhaps appropriately, on April 1, with 40 pages of records on UFO reports passed to the Commonwealth Watch and Warning Center, which receives reports of certain events from county emergency dispatch centers and distributes them to appropriate state and federal agencies.

The records PEMA provided in response to the right-to-know request go back to 2013, when the agency received a half-dozen UFO reports.

Padfeild said during the budget hearing that some sightings are easily explained. That was the case last year when multiple people called 911 in Lebanon County to report suspicious lights and a hovering object that made no sound.

One caller in Bethel Township reported that the lights had followed his wife from Hamburg in Berks County to their home and that the object was stationary in the sky above their house. Another in the city of Lebanon reported seeing an oval shape that changed colors from gray to black to transparent and all she could see were the object’s lights.

Those calls happened on March 1, 2023, which was the height of a convergence of Jupiter and Venus in the night sky, when the planets appeared to almost merge into a single point of light. The spectacular astronomical event had been widely reported in the news, PEMA’s records noted.

Stan Gordon, a Westmoreland County resident who operates a 24-hour UFO, bigfoot and cryptid reporting hotline, said he regularly receives reports from across the state. Gordon said he became fascinated with UFOs as a kid in the 1950s. He describes himself as the principal investigator of Pennsylvania’s most famous UFO case.

In 1965, residents across six states saw a fireball cross the sky. Residents of Kecksburg said they saw an object shaped like an oversized acorn make a controlled crash into the woods not far from where Gordon lived. Four years later, Gordon set up his hotline.

“It’s never stopped ringing,” Gordon said, adding that the number of cases, including reports of unexplained objects in broad daylight and at close range, has increased in recent years.

Many are resolved with a little bit of research, he said. “We’ve always taken these cases very open mindedly. We approach them scientifically.”

Starlink satellites, which are launched dozens at a time from a single rocket, appear as a train of lights in the early evening sky and have prompted many recent reports. High altitude balloons and plumes of rocket exhaust and other space research activities also look unusual but are attributable to human activity, Gordon said, adding that he has never seen a UFO himself.

Other reports are less easily explained.

On Sept. 21, 2023, a Shermans Dale man reported a UFO with eight vertical lights he described as white, yellow, and a hint of green hovering about 200 feet above the road near a Perry County gas station. The man attempted to take a video with his cellphone before the lights disappeared but he later discovered the video had not been saved, the PEMA records say.

A Lower Saucon Township man called the Northampton County 911 center Dec. 19, 2021, to report a flying saucer with seven or eight lights on its underside over his development. Police responded but it’s unclear from the records whether they took any action. PEMA provided the caller with contact information for Gordon’s hotline, the records say.

Montgomery County authorities investigated after an Upper Pottsgrove Township man reported a glowing orb about the size of a small aircraft fell from the sky on Sept. 15, 2014. The object, which he described as orange and yellow fire-colored, floated behind the treeline and did not reappear. An officer who responded reported seeing flashes in the area but no other suspicious activity.

“There are a lot of cases that are very, very detailed that are not easy to explain away,” Gordon said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

A state senator who was the 2022 GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor has proposed legislation to outlaw experimental weather modification techniques falsely associated with the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.

The false belief that condensation trails left by high flying aircraft are actually trails of chemicals released by the government for nefarious reasons has become conflated with techniques being explored to reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere.

In a memo seeking support for his bill, Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) said new technology and a proliferation of weather modification patents “owned by a combination of Federal Government Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations, and large multinational corporations” have brought forward the need to update Pennsylvania’s law.

Mastriano notes the Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”

“Spraying unknown, experimental, and potentially dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution,” Mastriano’s memo states.

The legislation would ban the release of substances within the borders of Pennsylvania to affect the temperature, weather or intensity of sunlight. It would mirror legislation that passed in the Tennessee Senate on Wednesday.

Mastriano, an election denier who lost his 2022 gubernatorial bid to Gov. Josh Shapiro, has made repeated references to the chemtrail conspiracy theory on social media.

In a November Facebook post with a photo of condensation trails in the sky above Chambersburg, Mastriano wrote, “I have legislation to stop this … Normal contrails dissolve / evaporate within 30-90 seconds.”

Shortly after his loss to Shapiro in 2022 Mastriano posted on Twitter — now called “X” — four photos of condensation trails above his district. In a reply to his own tweet, he linked to an article detailing a proposal to distribute reflective material in the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s energy back into space, implying the two are linked.

Calls to Mastriano’s offices in the state Capitol and Chambersburg were not returned Friday.

Condensation trails, or contrails for short, form when the hot moisture-laden exhaust from aircraft engines hits the frigid air at the altitudes where commercial and military jets cruise. The moisture condenses and becomes visible in the same way you can see your breath on a cold day.

A claim among chemtrail believers is that condensation trails dissipate immediately and trails that persist consist of chemicals. The longevity of the trails depends on the amount of moisture already in the air, with drier air leading to shorter-lived contrails, according to the National Weather Service.

Cloud seeding, in which particles of silver iodide are sprayed into clouds, has been used since the 1950s in attempts to induce precipitation or to prevent damage to crops from hail. The crystalline silver iodide particles attract water droplets which cluster together until they grow too heavy to stay in the air and fall to the ground as rain or snow.

It is employed by several western states in efforts to alleviate drought and can increase precipitation from storm clouds by 5% to 15%, the Associated Press reported.

The practice has spawned its own chemtrail-adjacent conspiracy theory, in which California residents blamed flooding and landslides during a pair of February storms on a local water authority’s cloud seeding pilot program. The agency said there was no cloud seeding during the record-setting rainfall, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In Pennsylvania, a 1967 law inspired by unauthorized attempts to suppress hail in central Pennsylvania requires anyone who wants to try cloud seeding to get a license from the state Department of Agriculture.

The department’s Weather Modification Board has never received a license application and has never investigated unauthorized cloud seeding, Deputy Press Secretary Jay Losiewicz said in an email.

The process referred to in Mastriano’s tweet is even more experimental. Called solar geoengineering, it could provide a method to mask global warming as a result of accumulated greenhouse gasses. But if it is ever used on a large scale, there’s a risk of physical harm and socio-political impacts, according to Harvard University Applied Physics Professor David Keith, who leads a group researching the idea.

The group said on its website it is confident that there is no program testing solar geoengineering outdoors.

Mastriano’s memo cites a February Wall Street Journal article, claiming the newspaper had confirmed active field tests of the proposal in Israel and Australia, however the article states that the substances used in the tests are smoke and sea water.

“We are not now involved in outdoor experimentation, though we are indeed actively developing proposals for field experiments. This experiment will proceed only if it is conducted in a fully transparent and public manner, and only if it passes a comprehensive independent safety review,” Keith said in a response to letters and emails from people concerned about chemtrails.

On the subject of chemtrails, Keith said there’s little evidence to support the conspiracy theory, with the main claim being that “airplane contrails look different.” Keith added that if such a program existed, it would require a vast operation and tens of thousands of people. Keeping it secret would be impossible.

“If such a program was intended to cause harm to their fellow citizens — as is alleged by people who believe in the chemtrails conspiracy — then people working in the program would have very strong personal motivations to reveal it,” Keith said.

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