A new vocabulary and lexicon obscures what’s long been going on at Pennsylvania’s infamous patronage dumping ground
” I became interested in the Pennsylvania turnpike’s fall from grace. From hallowed ground to dumping ground makes an interesting cautionary tale. I’d come to see the story of the turnpike as emblematic of the state’s rise and fall, and perhaps even America’s. I’d come to see it as a story of a people who’ve lost touch with their roots, of unresponsible government out of control, of a road leading from a rich past to an uncertain future.”
– When the Levee Breaks; 1993 by Bill Keisling.
Things have sunk so low in Pennsylvania that state officials can no longer tell a proper and convincing lie, using real words, involving real people.
Nothing drives this home more than the recent prosecutions of a few poor low-lying patronage toadies who were caught holding the bottom end of the patronage bag at the Pennsylvania turnpike.
This March newly elected Democrat Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced criminal charges in the long-running turnpike patronage case.
Kane’s case had been lying around the state AG’s office for years while her Republican predecessors, and their patronage hires, ran the place.
Whether Kane knows it or not, Pennsylvania’s Republican AGs for decades refused to investigate the turnpike. This was only partly because Republican AG’s themselves profited from turnpike patronage.
A few years back, the Republicans started the current investigation when the Democratic Rendell Administration appeared to be gaining the upper hand in the patronage game.
So none of these secret patronage practices are much new.
What is new, and what old hands may find amusing, and what Orwellians may find reassuring, is that an entirely new vocabulary and lexicon has been employed to distract the public from what has been going on for decades.
Patronage mentioned only once in grand jury presentment
For more than two decades, since an obscure 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Rutan v. the Republican Party of Illinois, the awarding low-level public jobs by basis of political patronage has supposedly been illegal in the United States.
To get around this inconvenience, since the 1990s we’ve had unwritten, secret policies to allow patronage hirings and all sorts of other patronage practices in state government.
So fear not: patronage is alive and well, and continues unabated at the Pennsylvania turnpike, and elsewhere in Pennsylvania state government.
Patronage is brought to you by an unstoppable ménage of both political parties, and all three branches of state government.
And it’s not just about jobs.
Despite this reality, or perhaps because of it, in March 2013 AG Kane filed charges against eight turnpike administrators, vendors, and a single retired (and already convicted and imprisoned) state senator, charging them with what amounts to corrupt patronage practices.
But the word “patronage” tellingly was barely found in Kane’s criminal papers.
The word “patronage” only appears once, in passing, in the entire 85-page grand jury presentment.
As such, the 85-page grand jury presentment itself is shockingly incomplete about what it both says and does not say about what’s been going on at the toll road, and in the state. So rest assured, secret patronage practices continue to prevail, even in the AG’s presentment.
The only thing that’s clearly spelled out in Kane’s grand jury presentment is that things have been wildly out of hand at the turnpike for years.
How things got this bad, and what’s really going on at the toll road, and in state government, is sadly left for the presentment’s readers to figure out on their own.
How did we get here?
If awarding jobs by patronage has been illegal since 1991, why then has nobody for 20-odd years at the Pennsylvania AG’s office bothered to stop patronage-related job hirings at the turnpike? we, and Kane, might now ask.
It’s because of course top GOP officials in the AG’s office and their partisans were benefiting from, participating in, or otherwise ignoring wholesale illegal activities at the turnpike, and other places in state government.
That the Pennsylvania turnpike has been a patronage dumping ground for both political parties for decades is not disputed, at least privately, by anyone.
“Over the years the turnpike became a figurative dumping ground of state patronage. Endless revenues from the tolls early on made it a cashbox for state politicians. Turnpike commissioners over time have had their share of scandal and prosecution. Pennsylvanians will tell you this isn’t saying much, as every state agency seems to bubble scandal in bottomless reserve,” I wrote in my 1993 book, When the Levee Breaks, the Patronage Crisis at the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the General Assembly, and the State Supreme Court.
Patronage, of course, is a top-down exercise involving high-ranking political officials who award jobs and other largesse in return for various loyalties from those below.
Patronage continues in Pennsylvania in no small part simply because partisans at the state attorney general’s office allowed it to continue, in order to help their own political ambitions, and those of their friends.
But the problem isn’t only with the state’s politically hobbled attorney general’s office.
For a variety of reasons, blatant patronage practices for the past two decades have been both denied and strenuously protected by the state’s leaders, of both political parties.
In order for the state AG’s office to now file criminal charges for patronage practices at the Pennsylvania Turnpike, some pretty big and unbelievable stretchers and half-truths have to be told.
As George Orwell reminds us, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
In Pennsylvania, when it comes to patronage and corruption, officials have to fudge and ignore large chunks of history.
Words and concepts also become important, and have to be changed or glossed over.
Newspeak: No use talking about patronage
Let’s call it ‘Pay for Play’
In order to protect the all-important patrons and our beloved patronage system, AG Kane’s grand jury presentment necessarily offers us new words, and no meaningful perspective.
Most important: No use talking about patronage. That venerable term by its very nature implies the participation of both political parties, and an unbroken chain of patronage beneficiaries from the lowest turnpike pole painter all the way up to the governor, legislative leaders, supreme court justices, and state attorneys general.
In order to get around all this trouble, some patronage legal hire and pole painter in the AG’s office took to using the phrase “Pay for Play.”
“Pay for Play” was a derisive term first bandied about by GOP operatives in the last five years or so to criticize Democrats in Philadelphia, and, by extension, Gov. Ed Rendell. Rendell of course hails from the City of Brotherly Democratic Corruption, which upstate GOPers also like to call “Filthydelphia.”
But patronage is something else.
For years, until their involuntary retirements in the last decade, the turnpike patronage show was run (very effectively, I might add) by Democratic state Senator Vince Fumo and Republican Senator Robert Jubelirer. Both senators for years unabashedly practiced patronage at the turnpike, in the legislature, and the courts, for themselves and their parties. Their ousters ultimately brought about the current criminal charges at the turnpike, and other severe legislative problems.
But there’s no use talking about any of that now if we’re trying to loll an unsuspecting public into thinking Pennsylvania’s running a lawful, above-board government, that supposed offenses happened only recently, and you want to give taxpayers the misimpression you’re actually cleaning anything up.
Patronage is a gentlemanly art and science. It’s a glass bead game of delicate balances, tremors, and repercussions.
Abraham Lincoln adroitly practiced patronage during the civil war.
Pay for Play, on the other hand, describes hustlers on a city street corner luring unsuspecting three-card monte suckers.
Lincoln did not play three-card monte.
Lincoln stacked the deck using patronage.
Patronage: the delicate, well-mannered minuet
There are other compelling reasons why neither political party wants to discuss patronage.
To understand the practice of patronage, the public must necessarily come to grips with the fact that both political parties, for their own survival, ends and enrichment, regularly and secretly cooperate with each other.
“The Democrats pick a lawyer. Next time, the Republicans get one,” I wrote in When the Levee Breaks. “We should all take heart by this high-level of cooperation. I’ve come to see this patronage dance as an intricate, genteel, well-mannered minuet. In matters of their own business, the two parties never miss their turn, their bow, their cooperative wink.
“Just try to pass a budget, fund a library, feed kids at school, buy books, make our tax system more fair, rebuild our cities, provide opportunities for our young people — in short, all the things that make our society work — there the inter-party cooperation ends.”
The cable news myth of partisan gridlock would be unseemingly exposed if the public understood for a minute just how much both parties regularly cooperate to butter each other’s toast, and to pour each other’s morning coffee.
Using the term “Pay for Play” is a way of distracting us from the unsettling truth that both political parties regularly wash each other’s backs, and other private parts.
The phrase is also a convenient way of demonizing, and, if you will, Filthydelphiaizing, the Pennsylvania turnpike (and perhaps forcing its privatization), without discussing the decades of underlying outrageous bi-partisan patronage practices that led to all this.
The airbrush: you’ll wonder where the patrons went!
Now that the lexicon has been changed, and mention of patronage for the most part rubbed out with erasers and sharp sticks, like all mention of Pharaoh Akhenaten at Luxor, patronage lawyers in the AG’s office next naturally have to use the favorite tool of all political revisionists since Joseph Stalin: the airbrush.
The top perpetrators — called, incidentally, the patrons — of Pennsylvania’s patronage crimes — governors, wannabe governors, state senators and attorneys general — naturally must be air-brushed out of the picture, less the public come to suspect the involvement of higher-ups pulling the strings of the poor working schmucks we now must throw in jail in order to pretend we’re cleaning something up.
In some criminal cases, as in the prosecution of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, the names of victims are not used in court papers to protect their identities. In the Sandusky case, we read confusingly about Victim 1, and Victim 6, and so on.
Remarkably, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has now taken this same fig-leaf approach in her 2013 turnpike patronage prosecution.
This time, anonymity is used to protect, not the victims, but the patrons.
In Kane’s court papers, instead of reading about personages like Gov. Rendell and Sen. Fumo, we read about characters mysteriously called Gubernatorial Candidate #1, and Senator #6.
Who are these poor, victimized and anonymous political leaders, and why were they dragged so ignominiously and helplessly through the muck at the Pennsylvania turnpike?
Patronage, and patrons alike are being protected in this case.
To understand why, we have to understand political patronage, and its place in the history of Pennsylvania government.
Good job Bill. I thought Kathleen Kane, the new Democrat AG was going to fix things. I’m sure she will do a fine job with the low hanging fruit like rehashing the Sandusky affair and killing lottery changes. But it looks like she avoids the heavy lifting.