Politics: Cleaning House

SHAPIRO AND SOME colleagues had been disappointed, in 2005, in their efforts to expand environmental spending, and they recognized that as long as the chamber was ruled by a Republican like Perzel, they had zero shot at getting their agenda through. Shapiro was acutely aware of the impotence of minority rule: His tenure on Capitol Hill had occurred during the 12-year stretch when Republicans dominated Congress. In the Pennsylvania House session that was about to begin at the start of 2007, the Democrats had a mere one-vote margin over the Republicans. And just before New Year’s, Shapiro got a call from Democratic leader Bill DeWeese, who was hoping to become Speaker of the House. DeWeese told him a Democrat was going to defect — costing him the speakership.

Shapiro scrambled to try to find a way the Democrats could salvage the situation. “My motivation was, How can we control the agenda?” recalls Shapiro, who keeps an inspirational Abe Lincoln quote under the glass of his district-office desktop: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

Thinking that O’Brien might be amenable to some sort of compromise, Shapiro placed a call. His next was to DeWeese.

“What’s up, Scout?” said DeWeese, who calls the young legislator that because “in the Old Testament, I believe, Joshua was the main scout Moses sent into Canaan.”

“I think we’ve got Denny O’Brien,” Shapiro said.

DeWeese’s joy was uncontained. “He’s going to vote for me for Speaker?”

“No,” Shapiro said. “He wants you to vote for him.”

DeWeese really had no choice, and quickly signed on to the idea. “DeWeese was never going to be Speaker again,” says a veteran Harrisburg player. “Do you want to be the minority leader the rest of your life and get Perzel’s drippings, or do you want to be the majority leader?” DeWeese says that in wooing O’Brien, it was the promise of energetic bipartisan leadership of a reform effort by Shapiro and David Steil, a Republican representative, that “was the allure that brought him within our ambit.”

The next day, Shapiro, DeWeese, Dwight Evans and O’Brien met at the Conshohocken Marriott to hash out the deal, with Governor Ed Rendell on speakerphone. The Democrats wanted O’Brien to become a Democrat, but O’Brien was firm about staying a Republican. The next day, the coup went down largely as planned. O’Brien was in, Perzel was out.

DeWeese says Perzel knew what was coming “about as much as Admiral Nimitz did Pearl Harbor,” but adds, “To Perzel’s inestimable credit, he was very gracious. He saw me a week or two later in one of Harrisburg’s famous eateries, and shook my hand with a shit-eating grin and said, ‘I’da done it to you.’”