A look at the political wrangling over house speakerships in state legislatures

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• Geoff Bennett:

  While Republicans in Washington were fighting over the vote for how speaker, two states face their own high-stakes tensions as they chose who to lead their statehouses.

  In Ohio, moderate Republicans banded together with Democrats to elect a new speaker, despite the fact that the state's Republican Party endorsed a more hard right member. And, in Pennsylvania, a group of Republicans also agreed to support a Democrat to serve as the statehouse's speaker, but only if he changed his party affiliation to independent.

  Now legislative business is at a standstill as the parties wrangle over control.

  For more, Karen Kasler is with us. She's statehouse news bureau chief for Ohio Public Radio and TV. And Katie Meyer is a government and politics editor for the nonprofit news outlet Spotlight PA.

  Welcome to you both.

  And, Karen, at one point during the protracted House speaker race in Washington, there was talk, short-lived talk, of Democrats and Republicans forming a coalition majority. In Ohio, the parties were able to band together and basically do that. How?

  Karen Kasler, Ohio Public Radio and Television: Yes, it actually happened here.

  And what was interesting is, the successful speaker candidate, a man named Jason Stephens, was able to pull together more Democratic votes than Republican votes. He got all 32 Democrats in the Ohio House to vote for him and got 22 Republican votes. The other candidate, who was the speaker-elect coming into this — he had been chosen speaker by the Republican Caucus in November, a man named Derek Merrin, he got 44 — 43 votes.

  So he had more Republican votes than the speaker who was elected. And so now there is a real question among these two camps over what's going to happen next. And, today, the group of folks who backed Derek Merrin got together to talk about what they plan to do, and if they plan to oppose or try to push forward legislation that maybe Speaker Jason Stephens doesn't want to see.

  So it's — like you said, it's kind of bringing everything to a standstill.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Yes.

  Well, what led the moderates, the moderate Republicans, to push back?

• Karen Kasler:

  I think there were some questions during our lame-duck session in December about some of the bills that were proposed that didn't go forward, some that did.

  There was one night where the House was meeting for 16 hours straight, ended at 6:00 in the morning. There were some questions about whether that was something that might have really caused some Republicans to be frustrated. There are Republicans, moderate Republicans, who say that Derek Merrin, who was the speaker-elect, did not reach out to them after he won that vote. And they were concerned about that.

  His supporters, Merrin supporters, say his father was in hospice and dying at the time, and so he didn't have the ability to do much other than try to make phone calls.

  So there are a lot of hurt feelings all the way around. And Democrats have tried to capitalize on this by teaming up with those more moderate Republicans and voting for Jason Stephens for speaker. What that will do to legislation going forward is really a question.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, that was my next question for you, in fact.

  I mean, how does this affect the broader legislative agenda in Ohio, such that anybody knows at this point?

• Karen Kasler:

  Democrats said that they worked with Jason Stephens because they feel that he could work with them on issues they're concerned about, primarily education.

  Derek Merrin, the speaker they didn't vote for, has shown a lot of support for universal school vouchers, which Democrats oppose. There's also a proposal here that would make it so that voters would have to approve constitutional amendments by 60 percent in Ohio. Right now, it's just a simple majority. Democrats didn't want to see that happen, because there are some potential ballot issues on reproductive rights and redistricting that they want to see go forward.

  They say Jason Stephens has agreed to work with them on that. And that, of course, is some of the back-and-forth among Republicans, because they support these things. But they are wondering what Jason Stephens told Democrats about what he will work with them on and how he will actually get that done.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, let's shift our focus to Pennsylvania now

  And, Katie Meyer, the Pennsylvania Statehouse is in limbo. Help us understand what happens.

• Katie Meyer, Spotlight Pennsylvania:

  Yes, so this really goes back to November.

  In that election, this House came away with a razor-thin split. So, it had been Republican-controlled for a decade. Democrats won — of the 203-member chamber, they want 102 seats, so a very, very slim majority. Republicans won 101.

  But now, today, Democrats have three vacancies. One of their members passed away and two others had to resign to take higher offices. So, the Republicans actually have on the floor of functional majority. And so that's going to be temporary. Special elections will probably give Democrats back those seats.

  But, in the meantime, what it's done is create a situation where Republicans have been actually having trouble keeping their caucus together, and they were unable to get full support behind one of their own candidates for speaker, a speaker who'd probably only serve temporarily.

  Democrats, meanwhile, weren't able to flip enough Republicans to vote for their choice of speaker, a Philadelphia Democrat, Joanna McClinton. She's pretty progressive. So what happened instead was a very strange episode last week, where Republicans engineered basically a power-sharing agreement, but not one that's really predicated on moderation.

  They convinced a Democrat, Mark Rozzi, who's kind of a backbencher, to run for speaker. And then once he was accepting the nomination, Democrats voted for him, and a handful of Republicans did as well. It got him the votes. He announced that he was an independent.

  Again, this was engineered by Republicans. Democrats knew at some point, Democratic leadership, but the rank-and-file from both parties were totally taken by surprise. And what has happened since has been even more complicated. There was a lot of talk about bipartisanship, getting along, but these are bitterly divided chambers.

  And so Rozzi has since refused to — or at least has not committed to switching his party registration, which Republicans said he told them he was going to do. And then the policy at the center of all of this has kind of been thrown into limbo.

  One of the reasons we're told that Rozzi took the speakership was that he had hopes to avoid a standoff and get a constitutional amendment passed that would basically give sexual assault survivors, people who've been assaulted in childhood, more options to sue even after the statute of limitations has passed.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So, if he switches his party affiliation, if there's movement on this amendment, I mean, could that break the stalemate?

• Katie Meyer:

  It could.

  There's a lot of moving parts right now. And what Republicans have said is that they will pass these amendments. They want to pass the amendment. They have passed it before. And that's a whole other story. These are complicated to pass in Pennsylvania. But they also want to roll it into a bunch of their own priority amendments, which includes voter identification, a new requirement that the state operate election audits, and some things like that.

  And these are things that Democrats generally oppose. And so now Rozzi is in the middle of this. He's not saying too, too much about his own policy preferences, but Democrats have made it really clear they don't want those things.

  And so all of these are a big question mark.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And so, moving forward, Katie, how does this affect the legislative agenda in Pennsylvania?

• Katie Meyer:

  I mean, a lot is going to hinge on special elections. They will either happen — one of them's happening in February. Two more might happen in February. They also might get delayed, depending on what a court says.

  These are all, like, very highly contested things. But I think, even when the Democrats are back up to full strength and have — likely, if they win those elections, and have a very narrow majority, what we're going to see is really tough legislative deadlocks all the time in Pennsylvania, just because, again, this is a narrowly divided body, and they have shown very little indication that they're going to be able to happily work together, with people crossing the aisle to support certain things.

  So I think we're in for a lot of standoffs.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Katie Meyer of Spotlight PA and Karen Kasler of Ohio Public Radio and Television, thanks to you both.

• Katie Meyer:

  Thank you.