Jun 13, 2015 4 min read

HARRISBURG – Pennsylvania’s top state senator was leaving Gov. Tom Wolf’s office after a brief meeting with the Democratic chief executive when he stumbled onto someone he wanted to meet.

That someone was Wolf’s press secretary, Jeff Sheridan.

“I just want to tell you,” Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati said striding over to a nonplussed Sheridan in the Capitol corridor and shaking his hand, “that I don’t take any of that stuff you said about me personally.”

In the Pennsylvania Capitol, where personal grudges are as pervasive as rumors and lobbyists, the tension between Wolf’s newly minted administration and the entrenched Senate Republican majority is making people sit up and take notice.

It started practically the day Wolf was inaugurated, Jan. 20.

Wolf fired the brand-new appointee to head the state Office of Open Records, a longtime Senate GOP aide named to the job just days before Wolf took office. Senate Republicans countered by suing.

The next month, Wolf balked at a Senate GOP choice – the hometown president judge of Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman – to fill a temporary position on the state Supreme Court amid news reports that the judge had sent a racially insensitive email to colleagues in 2013.

In May, aides to Corman and Wolf all but accused each other of lying about the terms of an agreement to consider 12 of the governor’s nominations that had been stuck in limbo.

Then it escalated.

On May 18, Wolf’s chief of staff, Katie McGinty, in a speech before a group of lobbyists and business insiders, slammed a Senate Republican bill to overhaul benefits in Pennsylvania’s two big public employee pension systems as a maneuver “to line their own retirement pocket.”

Corman asked Wolf for an apology from McGinty, but hasn’t gotten one.

“She has nothing to apologize for,” Sheridan said.

This past week, the Senate GOP rejected Wolf’s nominee for Pennsylvania State Police commissioner — after Republican leaders refused Wolf’s request to withdraw and resubmit the nomination, a concession that past Senate leaders have made to give an embattled nominee more time to win over skeptical senators.

Such is the environment just three weeks before the July 1 start of the new fiscal year and the soft deadline to enact legislation granting spending authority to Pennsylvania’s state government. The sides are far apart on the size of the state government’s projected deficit, how to resolve it, and Wolf’s drive to increase state taxes on sales, income and the booming natural gas industry as part of his wider plan to cut property taxes and boost state support for public schools.

The Republicans’ rejection of Wolf’s state police nominee – the first such rejection of a nominee in more than two decades – is not sowing hard feelings or threatening to scuttle budget negotiations, Democrats said. Senate GOP leaders met with Wolf twice within 24 hours of last Monday’s rejection vote and Wolf did not raise the subject, said Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny.

Still, any insistence that nothing is personal still comes with a punch.

“I’m disappointed in the rhetoric and the campaign-style that’s going on,” Scarnati said of Wolf’s administration. Said Sheridan, Senate GOP leaders criticize Wolf and then whine when he or other members of the administration respond.

Senate Democrats, who have had a front-row seat to the fight, called the quarreling reminiscent of 2003, the first year for Pennsylvania’s last Democratic governor, Ed Rendell. At the time, leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature were intent on blackening Rendell’s eyes and wounding him politically, they said.

In any case, Republicans still like Wolf more than his Republican predecessor, Tom Corbett, who was an unenthusiastic, inflexible and uncommunicative dealmaker, Senate Democrats say.

“They think there’s a possibility of getting stuff done, they’re just setting the terms of how to get stuff done right now,” said Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia. “Because once it gets set, we’re going to be going through this year after year.”

As for his handshake with Sheridan, Scarnati insisted that he was being genuine and not trying to imply that Sheridan had crossed a line.

“But I wanted him to know I want to see who you are,” Scarnati said. “And maybe when you look someone in the eye, it’s a little tougher to make these off-the-wall remarks.”