At 11 p.m. July 6, 2005, Pennsylvania's General Assembly finally had adopted a new budget, and lawmakers were wrapping up an 11-day session that had gone around-the-clock through the holiday weekend.
One last order of business remained before the summer recess -- a pay-raise vote that came in the early morning hours of July 7.
The political upheaval that vote triggered was about to become unprecedented in Pennsylvania.
Ten months later, after Primary 2006 votes were counted May 16, the overall toll became clear:
• First, in November, a Supreme Court justice ousted on a retention vote;
• 30 lawmakers over the fall and winter decided to retire, rather than face the wrath of voters in the spring;
• 17 incumbent legislators defeated last Tuesday in the primary election, including the top two Republican leaders in the Senate.
This is the story -- gleaned from interviews with legislators, staffers, challengers and political observers -- of the 10 months of events that resulted in what defeated Republican Sen. Robert Jubelirer calls "a political earthquake in Pennsylvania."
The beginnings
Shortly after midnight July 7, rank-and-file lawmakers, now done with work on the new state budget, got the call to meet in caucus to discuss the pay-raise vote.
The prospect of a pay raise had been on the table for months, and now was the time.
The late-night caucus meetings were brutal. Exhausted legislators demanded details. Democrats and Republicans said tempers flared, voices were raised.
In the House Democratic Caucus, leaders warned that those who voted "no" would be stripped of leadership positions.
In the closed-door GOP caucus meeting, Rep Elinor Taylor of Chester County, the caucus chairwoman, presided. It was loud and contentious. Only three lawmakers stood and objected -- Rep. Paul Clymer of Bucks County, Rep. Mike Turzai of McCandless and Rep. Bob Bastian of Somerset. There were warnings not to criticize the pay raise.
At 2 a.m. July 7, the House approved the pay hike 119-79. In the Senate, it won approval 27-23.
Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell signed the bill.
The legislation boosted salaries for lawmakers, judges and executive branch officials from 11 percent to 54 percent. It included a special provision permitting lawmakers to sidestep the constitutional prohibition on mid-term raises and collect the money immediately as unvouchered expenses.
"It was legal," Rendell said.
Lawmakers immediately left for the summer -- staying low, avoiding reporters.
The outrage
It's not unusual for the talk-show circuit to bash legislative pay raises, but this time it was different. Russ Diamond realized that July 14.
Diamond walked into the Downtown Lounge, a sports bar in the mid-state town of Lebanon, for dinner. Instead, he got an earful from his nephew, a 20-something who usually couldn't care less about politics. On this particular night, he couldn't stop railing against Senate Majority Leader David "Chip" Brightbill, R-Lebanon, one of the pay-raise architects.
"He laid into me," said Diamond, a business owner who had flitted in and out of politics with a failed congressional bid in 2004 and an aborted local school board race that year.
His nephew's belligerence gave Diamond more to chew on than his pub food: If his usually-uninterested relative was so angry, Diamond reasoned, perhaps he wasn't alone.
The next day, Diamond bought the domain name >a href="http://www.pacleansweep.com">www.pacleansweep.com for $182.47, threw together a Web page featuring a clip-art sheep, and wrote a screed about the need to send packing each of the 228 state legislators up for re-election in 2006.
"I just got slammed with e-mails" after a talk show on Pennsylvania Cable Network mentioned the campaign, Diamond said. "I got 2,300 e-mails in two days."
Elected officials were hearing the wrath as well.
"After a week or two, it became apparent (the pay raise) was a huge mistake," said Rep. Tom Tangretti, D-Hempfield.
By mid-August, 40,000 different people had visited the Web site.
Momentum builds
Around this time, Diamond started meeting regularly with a small group in Harrisburg formed to oppose the slot-machine law that had passed the year before -- also in the dead of night and with no public input.
Tim Potts also attended the meetings. A former Capitol staff member who had founded Democracy Rising to protest the clandestine manner in which the slots law was passed, Potts already had a year of anti-incumbency work under his belt.
Potts, though, wanted more than legislators' heads. He wanted to toss out the state Supreme Court justices, too.
"The Legislature operates the way it does because the Supreme Court has told them it's OK," Potts said.
If someone wants to change Harrisburg, that's the place to start, Potts told Diamond. He had to go after the two judges who were up for a retention vote last Nov. 8 -- Sandra Newman and Russell Nigro.
Diamond bought the argument.
When results came in on Election Night in November, Nigro was out -- and the anti-incumbent floodgates were open.
Groundswell for repeal
In the halls of the Capitol, people started to sweat.
On Sept. 13, at a Capitol news conference, Tangretti had joined 10 other lawmakers pushing for the repeal of the pay raise. He publicly apologized for remaining silent when it passed.
"It became necessary for me to be at that press conference and to say I was regretful for not saying it was wrong, for not saying publicly what I'd said in caucus that night," Tangretti said.
Many lawmakers were incensed. Tangretti was barred from speaking on the floor of the House.
"I started getting the cold shoulder (from fellow lawmakers). I heard from staff and lobbyists that I had broken an unwritten rule, that you just don't do those kind of things," he said.
Even so, it soon became apparent there was a groundswell building for the repeal.
In late October, Jubelirer's office received internal polling results showing the Senate president was in serious trouble in his Blair County district.
"They were showing that people were extremely unhappy with the situation, and that it wasn't just a superficial feeling. It was visceral," said David Atkinson, a top aide to Jubelirer. "It was showing up statewide. This wasn't that we had just discovered a pocket of opposition."
Chris Lilik, leader of the Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania, had begun putting up billboards in Jubelirer's district and running $60,000 worth of radio ads there and in Brightbill's district criticizing them for their role in the pay raise and their spending records.
Jubelirer moved to quell the furor.
He told his Democratic counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Robert Mellow of Lackawanna, about his plan to try repealing only the unvouchered expenses. Mellow, however, knew Sens. Sean Logan, D-Monroeville, and Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, wouldn't let only a partial repeal fly -- they would try to sink the entire pay raise.
The night of Nov. 2, they did just that -- and caught Brightbill flat-footed. He hastily called for a recess and a caucus meeting. Then, a half-hour later, the Senate voted unanimously to kill the raise. It would be another two weeks before the raise was finally dead, as the fractured leadership fought among themselves over how to word the final bill.
"Some people said you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, and we did. It was the right thing to do. Heaven only knows what would have happened from voter standpoint if we hadn't," Tangretti said.
Damage already done
Even so, the repeal did little to stop the anti-incumbency movement.
PACleanSweep bought yard signs with the now-famous sheep logo and bold letters demanding that voters "Throw the bums out."
Finally, on Jan. 30, PACleanSweep introduced its slate of opposition candidates at a news conference in the Capitol rotunda.
In some races, there would be no incumbents. In the days between the pay raise and the primary-filing deadline, 30 lawmakers -- most of whom had supported the pay raise -- had announced plans to retire.
While Diamond was launching a wholesale effort, others were targeting specific lawmakers.
Former lawmaker Jeff Coleman was among the latter group of anti-pay raise activists.
Coleman was 25 when he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 2000 as a conservative Republican. He left in 2004, disillusioned with the conservative movement's lack of progress.
Coleman was living in Hershey and working for the Commonwealth Foundation late last summer when friends encouraged him to drive to Hollidaysburg to meet John Eichelberger.
Eichelberger, a Blair County commissioner, wanted to challenge Jubelirer. He needed a campaign manager.
"I drove out to Hollidaysburg and spent a couple of hours at a Dunkin' Donuts with 'Eich,' and asked him every question I could think of," Coleman said.
Coleman signed on to help, knowing it would not be easy.
First, they would have to raise money to run against a powerful incumbent leader who could tap thousands of donors and political-action committees for cash. And Jubelirer's organization was tried and seasoned.
"By reputation and record, Sen. Jubelirer had the political A-Team in Pennsylvania," Coleman said.
While Coleman was meeting with Eichelberger, members of the Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania were debating what they could do against incumbents in the Pittsburgh area.
Mark Harris, home in Mount Lebanon on summer break from George Washington University, was a member of the group that had coalesced during Republican Pat Toomey's unsuccessful 2004 U.S. Senate primary.
As they discussed their options and began targeting vulnerable incumbents, the group zeroed in on the 42nd District -- a House district centered in Mt. Lebanon. They decided five-term incumbent Republican Tom Stevenson, who had voted for the pay raise, was beatable.
Finally, Harris headed back to Washington, D.C. for his last semester at George Washington.
Harris and his visiting parents were having dinner at Shula's, a Foggy Bottom eatery, when he broke the news that he had decided to run against Stevenson.
He came home for good at Christmas, and the 21-year-old candidate began knocking on doors in the rain Jan. 2.
In all, 61 of 198 incumbent lawmakers had primary opponents -- more than at any time in the last 26 years.
'When people realized'
Kathryn English, executive director of the Pennsylvania Club for Growth, was watching it all.
English, whose group promotes conservative, small-government issues, said the developments that enabled Eichelberger, Harris and 15 others to unseat incumbents last Tuesday were so subtle that many lawmakers missed them entirely.
"I think the real turning point was long before the pay raise, when the media got involved and started helping get out the records of these lawmakers," she said. "When people realized Chip Brightbill had voted for his own 50 percent increase in pension benefits, that was huge."
English got a taste of real politics this spring, when she knocked on 2,000 doors for Mike Folmer, the 50-year-old tire salesman who would unseat Brightbill. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Club for Growth spent $120,000 to obtain and publicize legislative voting records.
Eric Epstein, a Holocaust scholar who launched RocktheCapital.org, a Web-based reform movement, said such efforts had a cumulative impact.
"Things had gotten so out of whack in Harrisburg that (lawmakers) couldn't help themselves. One took (unvouchered expenses) to finance a divorce, one for a chimney, one for a heating system and one to go to college.
"It seems to me that it was death by a thousand cuts. There seemed to be a steady drumbeat of investigative reports on the misuse and abuse of power. ... You had Brightbill and the per diems, the pension bounce, the lawmakers' nonprofits. It was death by a thousand cuts," he said.
As those cuts grew deeper, challengers noticed a change in the political landscape.
Coleman said Eichelberger, whose early efforts were hampered by money-raising problems, got a boost from Republicans from various corners of the state that finally allowed him to launch TV ads.
In Mt. Lebanon, Harris was on the incumbent's radar screen.
"We knew we were close. We knew we were within striking distance when Rep. Stevenson began attacking," Harris said.
While the challengers were rallying, lawmakers were fumbling desperately to pass something to appease their constituents.
Democrats tried repeatedly to raise the minimum wage. Members on both sides of the aisle tried in vain to reach consensus on tax relief. And the so-called reform caucus -- a small bipartisan group of House members who rallied against the pay raise -- made one last unsuccessful push to end Pennsylvania's status as the only state in the country without a lobbyist-disclosure law.
At the same time, many incumbents were campaigning. There were a few new twists.
The legislative leaders who typically helped fund caucus campaign coffers instead were forced to spend money on their own re-election efforts.
Jubelirer and Brightbill mounted what many believe will end up being million-dollar campaigns. In the House Democratic Caucus, Minority Leader H. William DeWeese, of Waynesburg, and Whip Mike Veon, of Beaver Falls, also mounted vigorous, costly campaigns to overcome the stigma of the pay raise.
On Election Night, DeWeese, another architect of the pay raise, breathed a sigh of relief at his margin of victory and shouldered his share of the blame for the upheaval that had claimed his colleagues.
"If we had voted in the middle of the day for 8 percent ... and made it effective January '07, this seismic reaction in the commonwealth would not have occurred," he said.
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