Governor Josh Shapiro and Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman continue to speak out on the state budget impasse that now enters its seventh day.
Shapiro held a news conference yesterday, one day after the state house approved what he called a bipartisan budget agreement. That approval came after Shapiro said he would line-item veto his plan to put $100 million to a school voucher program that would allow students in underperforming schools to receive scholarships to attend private or religious schools. The budget that passed the Senate last Friday did contain the school voucher program. During yesterday’s conference, Shapiro blamed Senate Republicans for sending the state house a budget that they knew would not be approved.
He reiterated that the reason he would veto the plan was to keep Pennsylvania out of a long-term budget impasse and implored both the House and Senate to return to Harrisburg to finish the budget.
Yesterday, Senate Republican Caucus Leader Joe Pittman said that while the House did agree to the bipartisan budget program, there is still a long way to go before the budget is complete as the senate has to concur the budget before it goes to the Governor’s Desk. In a direct response to the Governor’s statement yesterday, Pittman said in his own statement that he saw “a fundamental weakness and breakdown of leadership with the governor’s willingness to jettison one of his top priorities and acquiesce to the House Democrats’ demand that educational opportunities not be afforded to every child of God.”
Unless the senate President Pro Tempore calls the senators back to Harrisburg, they are not due back in session until September 18th.
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