Reform or The Pig Gets It!
by Chuck Brown
I’ve known Dennis for several years. If this is your first exposure to Dennis’ take on politics, then you’re in for a real treat! Is Dennis a Progressive, a Libertarian, or a Conservative? Answer: NO, NO, and NO. But he is unique. After covering so many politicians for CS2, I can’t tell you what a great pleasure it is to talk to one who knows what he believes and why he believes it, without the aid of polls and the fear of losing the election driving his thoughts. You may not agree with every stance and every issue Dennis espouses, but you will be startled at the degree of study and thought he has put into his proposals. It’s a refreshing change to not have a candidate who insults your intelligence by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Originally scheduled for a one issue interview, we found so much of the material so compelling that we are making it a two issue interview. We didn’t want to cut out any of Dennis’ discussion. We trust the voters of his State Senate district will give Dennis every consideration before casting their vote in November. We believe a vote for Dennis would be a vote for reform and a vote for good government.
CS2: Hi Dennis.
Dennis: Chuck.
CS2: What office are you running for and why?
Dennis: I’m running for State Senate in the 29th district. It’s in 6 counties. It’s in Berks, Schuylkill, Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon and Monroe.
CS2: Wow! You got all six. You deserve to be in office for that!
Dennis: (laughs). For a long time I’ve been involved in political activism. I got more and more involved after the pay raise of 2005. I circulated a petition for a citizen’s constitutional convention. Gradually I got involved with some of the other reform organizations. Through Taxpayers and Rate-Payers United, I got involved with Gene Stilip. We did a lot of demonstrations together and often joked about how we were pretty old to be standing out in the cold, maybe someday we would be better off, reforming from inside the building (we both laugh). We both decided this election cycle to attempt to get inside the building-to reform where it’s warmer.
CS2: You may get a cold reception if you’re really pursuing reform once you get inside the building, wouldn’t you think?
Dennis: Oh, I’m destined to get a cold reception, once people become aware of my candidacy. There will be incumbent senators from other areas who will oppose my candidacy. I’ve demonstrated against a number of them across the state with the inflatable pig, people like Robbins up in Erie, not to mention Brightbill, and Jubilaire who’s are no longer there. I’ve riled a lot of senators. Over the years as tax reform has been proposed in the General Assembly, I’ve Senator Mike Opake and other senators a letter pointing out that if they really wanted to save the taxpayers some money, they should consider eliminating the senate. There’s absolutely no reason why the State of Pennsylvania has a senate. For a citizen’s Constitutional Convention, that could be a major item to consider to restructure our government. Even though there is no reason for a senate anymore, I don’t think that if you’re a senator you’re going to welcome that message.
CS2: Let me see if I have this straight. If elected you are willing to lose your job if your reform goes through?
Dennis: Absolutely. I want the reformation of our government to be a citizen project though. I don’t think that our constitution has in mind that 253 people decide how our government should be structured. I think our constitution’s tradition requires that all citizens get involved. I’d like to see the political types actually shut out from the process in restructuring our government. I would be delighted to see the senate go.
CS2: You’re running as an Independent. Can you tell me why you chose Independent rather than aligning yourself with one of the parties? Do you feel that reform is not possible with the way the two parties are?
Dennis: That’s part of the reason. That’s one reason why I’m no longer a Democrat, or the member of the other organized party, is because both the parties hate reform. Both of them do. Both of them have a whole lot to lose if reform gets in because all the tools of incumbency are gone once we reform our government. Advantages like gerrymandering and the free mailings and public service announcements and the district offices. You take the parties out of the equation that way. I don’t think you can be a messenger of reform in government and be from one of the two parties. Citizens are kind of like a fish between two cats when it comes down to the parties. You know what I mean? The parties just bat the taxpayer back and forth. But they don’t accomplish anything. You’re just their pawn-sitting in the middle of the two party system stranglehold. This campaign is about breaking that stranglehold. Lastly, I think parties are passé. In the past, parties have been required to organize people in the community so you could get their support. You had a brand like Democrat or Republican and you rallied everyone in the community around you to get their support, and to get on the ballot. I don’t think that they’re necessary any more. I think, the people think, parties suck. The only good parties are the ones that have beer and dancing.
CS2(laughs): Right. One thing that backs you up is the ratings. Whenever there are polls taken, the parties are in the 20’s or below. There’s not very high regard for the two parties. Let me ask you this: What obstacles do the two parties present to someone like you, being an Independent, to get on the ballot?
Dennis: Believe it or not, the Democrats and the Republicans are allowed under a Byzantine series or labyrinth of laws they’ve created, to specify how many signatures you need for ballot access.
CS2: Do they not need those same signatures?
Dennis: They need some signatures but not nearly as many as I do. If you’re coming from outside the party system, for example, in the 29th Senate seat I need 1,355 signatures to get on the ballot. My opponent needs 500. You need 2% of the highest vote ever cast for that office to get on the ballot as a non-Democrat or non-Republican.
CS2: So the two parties are saying to you: This is our gig. Stay out!
Dennis: Yeah. It gets worse for larger offices. Russ Diamond, I happen to know Russ Diamond well, ran for governor and he was required to have over 90,000 signatures to get on the ballot. In contrast, Ed Rendell could get on the ballot with 2,000 signatures.
CS2: Let me ask you this before we get off of this signature/ballot access: Is this constitutional? I don’t think the U.S. Constitution mentions political parties at all. Is it constitutional? Has anyone ever challenged that parties can arbitrarily pass laws to set the limiting of our democracy?
Dennis: No. I don’t know that anyone’s ever challenged it. There are a lot of ways that this pops up that don’t really occur to you until you get into the inner workings of government. For example, right now we are going to have nominations for president. And all these states are putting on presidential nominating events. Those events are for the parties. The state funds that. No one benefits but the parties. You know, you wouldn’t have to have them. They aren’t essential to the taxpayer at all. But the state of Pennsylvania funds it. The parties on top of it get to say, well if you’re an Independent you can’t vote in these- stay out! One thing I’m for is an open ballot. An open primary ballot like they have in states like Michigan. In the 22 states that voted on February 5th, I think that of the 22-14 of them are open ballot states. I think that’s somewhat different. In those states you can justify the states financing them; they aren’t turning anyone away
CS2: How do you think the parties get supposedly independent groups to do their bidding? To give you an example, I’m not familiar with the state level, but I just recall that in one of the presidential elections, I think maybe Gore vs. Bush, the League of Women Voters had a criteria for you to participate in the presidential debates of 5% in selected polling. Ralph Nader was achieving that 5% a few weeks before the election and all of a sudden the rate was raised to 15% to keep him off.
Dennis: Right.
CS2: Why do supposedly independent groups that stand for good citizenship cave in to the two political parties?
Dennis: The people who kept Ralph Nader off were The Commission on Presidential Debates. This is a private organization. Not a non-profit or whatever. All they do is organize Presidential debates. There’s a movie called An Unreasonable Man about Ralph Nader and his quest to get on the ballot. My friend Gene is in the movie and went to the opening in New York City and I got to talk to a lot of people in the Nader campaign about ballot access, oddly enough. Ralph Nader is still in litigation in about 25 states over his run. In Pennsylvania they wanted to get Ralph for, I think, $89,000 for fees for someone challenging his signatures to get on the ballot. It’s such a mockery of law that this could occur. I can’t think of any case where you could be the defendant and have someone challenge your evidence and then you’ve got to pay the costs for that challenge of your evidence. That’s what happened to Ralph Nader. It happened to Romenelli too. Pennsylvania’s judiciary is a third and co-equal branch of government, yet it reinforces this policy of the two-party stranglehold on government. They’re right there with the executive and the legislature-it’s Democrat or Republican or stay out. They come up with these aberrant rulings that stand democracy on it’s head. Romeneili ended up having to pay because someone challenged his signatures. It just isn’t right. You know, I face that prospect in running as a third party candidate. I know that. I don’t care.
CS2: Let me ask you about your particular race. You’re running against a long-time incumbent, Jim Rhoades. What are Jim’s stands or attempts at reforms in the past? Where was he on the pay raise and other issues that are near and dear to your heart?
Dennis: Well, Jim Rhoades voted for the pay raise. He took the pay raise. Then when the State Supreme Court said that the advance money that people got for unvouchered expenses was unconstitutional, he made a deal with the state that he would pay it back over a 3 year period. He’s one person who is paying back. He’s paying back into the treasury. But, in essence, he got a tax free loan from the state to clear his good name, which I don’t agree with. If he wanted his good name he could have anted up his money right away. He’s an unusual person in the sense that as an active senator he’s kind of like a Rip Van Winkle or the Ground Hog or something. He goes into long periods of inactivity in between elections and then election time comes around and Jim Rhoades is proposing a bill every day. He’s proposed a bill about tax reform. I personally disagree with the bill. I think it’s a real slap-in-the-face to the citizens of Pennsylvania who have wanted tax reform for thirty years. Here’s a guy who’s been in there almost every day of those thirty years and now he says he has the solution. We’re just going to tinker with some percentages. They’ve had percentage keys on calculators for a long time. He could have come up with that two decades ago and kept a lot of Pennsylvanians in their homes. I don’t think that his is a realistic solution either. To hide the burden of pain of tax to support our governmental institutions is bad policy and I think that it’s very regressive. Old people and the poor will be paying taxes that they’ve never been subjected too if we see any of these tax shifting plans go into effect.
CS2: Okay. Let me ask you as a reformer to itemize the reforms you would propose were you to win this election. Let’s start with gerrymandering. Has the incumbent participated in these gerrymanderings? What would your policy be towards gerrymandering?
Dennis: The district will be redistricted during my term in office should I win. The census comes out in 2010, but that re-redistricting won’t take effect until 2011. Reform of how we reapportion Pennsylvania is a really hot topic. But a lot of people are snowing the public by saying they’re going to do something about it. There’s a date that everybody should keep in mind that reads CommonSense2 and that’s June 8th, 2008, which is the very last day that the legislature can pass and get on the Governor’s desk a bill calling for a Constitutional Amendment to change the way we redistrict. In other words, to avoid the 2010 census from bringing us another government which doesn’t fairly represent Pennsylvanians, the legislature must act by then. Otherwise government will continue to pick you before you get to pick them. I bet they will not act by June 8th.
I sued the Reapportionment Commission over the 2000 redistricting, because the legislative districts which are supposed to be composed of about 60,000 people, are unequal in my area, the adjacent district, the 125th legislative district has 5 prisons in it. One district has 5 prisons in it. It’s a penal colony. At least one-tenth of all the people that show up in the census in the 125th can’t leave there. If you left their door open over night you just lost a constituent (laughing). That district is so fluffed up by these artificial votes of prisoners, that this is one of the grounds that I objected to the 2000 census on.
As well as, the shapes of the districts in my area. One of the districts looks exactly like the cartoon that we get the word gerrymander from. There’s a cartoon done in the late 1800’s that was a dragon’s head put on a chameleon or a salamander. It’s called gerrymander because it was Governor Gerry of Massachusetts’s who did it. So it’s Jerry Salamander or whatever. But the 124th district put side-by-side with that cartoon-it’s hard to tell the difference. It really is. The 29th district isn’t any better. If I’m holding this office when it comes time to redistrict, I’m not going to do anything to defend my position in the district. If good districting in Pennsylvania means that I get districted-out, my pledge is that I’ll go along with that. I want to see good districting in Pennsylvania because it’s important. It’s one of the cornerstones of government. You have representation that preserves your community of interest. Everybody who votes for a given politician has the same social, economic, and historical background. It isn’t fair to lump people together arbitrarily. If you want to do that, you can just pull names out of the telephone book.
CS2: So basically to sum up, it’s impossible to have gerrymandering reform if incumbents are putting their self-interest into the mix. You have to step back and allow good reform to happen without regard to how it affects you personally?
Dennis: Right. This is another thing about the parties. This is another one of those instances where people talk about some things being non-partisan. Redistricting is kind of like the evil form of non-partisanship. It’s a collusion by the two parties so that incumbents can keep their seats. That’s all it is. The two parties conspiring. It’s the old fish between two cats. You’re the victim. These people colluded to prey on you. That’s what redistricting is.
CS2: Let’s move on to another issue. If you were the head of the senate for Pennsylvania, the majority whip, what would your tax reform proposal be to the people of Pennsylvania?
Dennis: One of the things that really make tax reform difficult is the rhetoric that has painted people into a corner. Everything that you can portray as a tax increase, won’t go anywhere because people are going to say: so and so is going to raise your taxes 10 billion dollars. 10 billion dollars on a statewide level is a big number. That’s the number that you have to shift to have educational tax reform in Pennsylvania. At a minimum you have to be talking about coming up with about 10 billion dollars. That’s difficult to do because of our rhetorical history on taxes. All these “no-new-tax” pledges. Another problem is that this has been a nasty problem, a cancer, for the last three decades. Our past legislatures dealt with it piecemeal. They put band-aids on the problem, and now the band-aids have become part of the problem. Real tax reform, in my mind, in Pennsylvania, can’t be accomplished as long as you have property tax rebates and rent rebates. All that money has to be returned to a fund and be reallocated.
The direction our legislature is going in now, unfortunately, is further down the band-aid road. By taking all the money that’s been raised by gambling in Pennsylvania, and only eliminating the property taxes for elderly poor instead of spreading that money around. That just makes the problem a lot worse. If we re-examine how we tax in Pennsylvania there is a place for a property tax. 1 don’t believe in property tax elimination. I believe property tax, if properly administered, would give seniors far more relief then they are receiving now and would put the burden of these institutions of government squarely on the people who benefit from them. If you’re an 80 year old woman, like my mother is, whose last child saw school 40 or 50 years ago, I don’t believe you should be paying at the same rate as someone else. Revenue has to come from somewhere. One thing is we got to get our fair share from the federal government. This money we’re pissing away in Iraq is not helping matters at all. We’ve got to straighten that out. We’ve got to get these band-aids off the problem, take a blank sheet of paper and reconfigure how we do taxes. Nobody likes to hear that they’re not going to get their property tax rebate anymore – even though their level of taxation is going to go down. But people have got to be prepared to hear that.
CS2: I always love to listen to politicians play the tax cut game. Am I right to believe that in this state, as in all states, you have to balance the budget? Is that correct?
Dennis: That’s technically correct. We don’t balance the budget though. We borrow to balance.
CS2: I hear politicians talking tax cuts all the time. With all the promises I’ve had from pols over the years I should be paying nothing by now. If every pol cut my taxes who said he was going to I’d be paying nothing by now. Nothing! They’d be sending me checks. But the fact is, my taxes have gone up just like everybody else’s. I’m just wondering, can there be any real tax relief without spending relief?
Dennis: Absolutely not!
CS2: Why won’t politicians tell us that and tell us where they would cut their spending?
Dennis: Well, this is another reason why I’m running. I think it is the height of contempt, a lot like Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake”, for our legislature to come with these tax shifting schemes to allow us a more painless way to fund their extravagance. We have without question the most extravagant state government in the United States. The most extravagant state government in the nation. What are they doing about that? What are they doing about the junkets and the perks and their salaries? They’re doing absolutely nothing.
CS2: How about the staffs? How much staff do you need at taxpayers expense if you’re a state senator? I hear the size of some of these staffs is outrageous. Can you talk about that?
Dennis: Sure, I can talk about that. Some of them are, by definition, redundant and superfluous. Every caucus. There are Senate Republican and Democratic Caucus; and House Democratic and Republican Caucuses. Each of the four caucuses has their own research bureau. Is there Democratic and Republican research? Even if there were Democratic and Republican research, couldn’t you just consolidate the House and the Senate? The Federal Government has just one, the General Accounting Office. That’s the research arm of Congress. In Pennsylvania we have four. We have four research bureaus. These are just niches for political hacks to do campaign work out of. That’s what I think we’re going to find as we get deeper and deeper into “Bonus-gate”. The people that inhabitant these jobs-it’s pure featherbedding. These are the extra people you send out into the field, when you need somebody to work out in the district. They can do polling and opposition research. Stuff like that. All that has got to go.
CS2: You mentioned something I’m not sure our reader’s will be familiar with. You mentioned bonusgate. I would guesstimate that 90% of the Pennsylvania people don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell us what it is.
Dennis: “Bonus-gate” surfaced around Christmastime 2006 when Majority Leader Deweese sent out a letter to the Democratic staffers in the House, along with a check, telling them that they were getting merit bonuses for the swell job that they did and they should be very careful not to mention the fact that they were receiving a check. They should be careful not to discuss the amounts with anyone, because other people didn’t get the same as what they got. This was actually in the letter. And that naturally drove people receiving the letters to do a couple of things. One was the idea that somebody got a bigger check than you started an envy problem. When you say don’t tell anyone…
CS2: (laughing) My antennae goes up.
Dennis: …It’s an invitation to say hey, I got this letter from Bill Dewesse. Why do you think he doesn’t want me to tell anyone? One of the people that got his hands on the letter was Gene Stilip, who went to the Attorney General about it. Gene believed that staffers were being paid for political work. Bonuses were just a way of covering that up. Initially the Democrats refused to say how much they doled out. They said it was just a couple of hundred thousand dollars, as it had been in the past. It turned out that for just the Democratic House caucus, it was1.9 million dollars. In a non-election year the figure would have been about $200,000 dollars. So as the amounts leaked out, people started to make stronger connections between campaign activity and these payments.
Then the Attorney General started to look into it and the payroll records for comp time, the time sheets which would have been used to establish whether a person actually had comp time from overtime, were shredded. So “Bonus-gate” is just this evolving mess. The grand jury has had about 50 witnesses, and there’s a chance that they could go for three or four years. It’s going to take time to get to the top of this because of all characters and all the evidence. 31,000 emails that were thought to have been erased popped up. Emails dealing with “Bonus-gate” 31,000 emails, can you imagine? A prosecutor has to sift through all that evidence. Understandably, it’s taking some time. It’s a horrible story. People should not be propagandizing you with your tax money. They shouldn’t be allowed to take the money we send to Harrisburg and turn around and use that money to lie to us. To often, that is what is happening in Harrisburg.
CS2: I’d like to switch gears here. Dennis, I’ve known you for several years and I’ve heard you advocate on various occasions for a Constitutional Convention for the state. Can you tell us why you advocate that and what the purpose of it would be in your mind?
Dennis: Well, I advocate it for a really simple reason. The state has had five constitutions, and 6 frames of government. Originally we were a proprietorship. William Penn owned all of Pennsylvania, but we had a General Assembly since the mid-1600’s . We existed under that form of government until 1776, and at the time of our country’s Declaration of Independence, Pennsylvania enacted a constitution based on the meeting of a Constitutional Convention. Since then we’ve had four others. The last one was in 1967.
In 1967, there was a limitation put on the convention specifically dealing with the issue of taxation. The Constitutional Convention was not allowed to do anything about the Uniformity Clause, which is much like the 14th amendment to the Federal Constitution. It means that you can’t treat people differently. It has been rigorously interpreted to mean that you can’t have anything but a flat tax in Pennsylvania. The only thing enacted in the 1967 Constitutional Convention was that reapportionment was added to the Constitution and they changed the membership of the House from 200 members to 203. Those numbers are very important for a reason.
In the 1960’s the Federal Supreme Court issued the landmark decision creating the doctrine of one man-one vote, Baker vs. Carr. What happened prior to that time, states like Pennsylvania modeled themselves on the Federal Government. Most of them had a two-body legislature, with a House and Senate. The House was the democratic body that was created by the basis of population. For every 50,000 (or whatever the number was) people, you got a representative. On the Senate side the seats were awarded by geography. Every county, except for the really sparsely populated northern tier counties, had a Senator, irrespective of the population. So you had a system where, (and this is how the Federal Government has functioned for hundreds of years), a little state in population like Montana can cancel out a giant like California in the Senate. Because the counties had equal power, the majority (Philadelphia and Pittsburg) were prevented from riding roughshod over the minority. The Supreme Court said you can’t do that any more. One man-one vote means, that even for Senate seats, they have to be apportioned by population.
CS2: You mean the State Supreme Court?
Dennis: No, the Federal Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court, for states that resisted-Pennsylvania never resisted-went state by state by state and neutered the senate side of their governments. So what we ended up with in Pennsylvania was two chambers apportioned by population. It’s like a Junior and a Senior Varsity team in basketball. The good and the evil twins-any kind of analogy you want to have. They are basically identical bodies. That’s why I say the senate can be eliminated.
The reason the 1967 constitutional convention added the three representatives was because they wanted to avoid having the legislative and senate seats coincide. When it was 50 senators and 200 reps., within every senate seat you could have put exactly 4 legislative seats. That way you could go out and redistrict the entire state easily, but it would have been apparent to the constituency that all you had were junior and senior legislators.
If you go back to the last unlimited constitutional convention, it was held in 1874 as a reaction to wide-spread corruption that was occurring in Pennsylvania. The Constitutional Convention of 1967-68 was a very limited convention and it really didn’t do anything to change government in a major way. The 1874 convention was short on the heels of the prior convention in 1838. That constitution was only in place for roughly 40 years. There was so much government corruption that the people went nuts and said this has to stop. So they had the 1874 convention. One of the things they did in that convention was they increased the size of the House of Representatives from 100 to 200 members. Because they thought that the surest way to stop the corruption was to put too many people there to corrupt (laughter). We saw how long that worked. So that’s one reason to revisit that. If you look at the prevailing times then and the culture from which we have our constitution today; at that time Pennsylvania was the world’s leading exporter of oil, and in terms of capital investment, the largest economy on the face of the earth. With all the railroad and steel investment, right after the Civil War, huge banks sprung up here. The coal money, the oil money, the railroad money; it was a golden age. This state was awash in money. We were like California is today. The style of government, its size, its complexity, reflect those times. If we remained as prosperous as the people were in 1874, that constitution would continue to serve us today. But, we’re no longer the biggest economy on the face of the earth. The largest corporation in the world at that time was The Reading Company. Where’s The Reading Company today? We don’t export any oil today. Times have changed so drastically, yet we still have a tax system, and government that was designed for that time.
CS2: The only way to change it would be to have a Constitutional Convention?
Dennis: Yes. There’s an awful lot of things that have to be changed. Even now with the tax reform measures. People want a total elimination of the property tax. We’ve come to discover that the constitutional amendment that they just passed several years ago and which was ratified by the voters and everything is inadequate. Because it only allows them to cut taxes down to 50%. So if you want to eliminate it they need another constitutional amendment. The five constitutions we’ve had have been amended over 180 times.
When you hear Constitutional Convention you can’t think about it in the way you think of the Federal Constitution. Because something as simple as a law passed by Congress can change our constitution and make whole hunks of it obsolete. One thing that’s changed it is how we vote. The Help America Vote Act, a Federal law, is superior to our constitutional law in the field of elections. The Help America Vote Act means that counties can’t pick their method of voting any more. But in our constitution there’s expansive language explaining how counties are to go about doing just that. So periodically, just to weed things out, you’ve got to either amend the constitution or have a convention. And there are some things that politicians will never have the political will to come to grips with, things incident to their offices. Things like term limits. 75% of the people in Pennsylvania support term limits. I spoke at the Reform Commission Hearings. They refused to allow anyone to mention the words term limits (laughter). You know, the House Speaker convenes this big Reform Commission and you can’t talk about any of the reforms that the people believe Pennsylvania needs. I talked extensively about reapportionment. They censored my entire testimony. You can go on the website of the Commission on Reform and you won’t find my testimony. You’ll find everybody else’s testimony but you won’t find mine. They just can’t come to grips with things like term limits. And they shouldn’t, average citizens should decide the form their government takes. Just average Joe’s. People who are not vested politically but aren’t naive politically. Put them in a room for several months and let’s see what they come up with. Get a new government in Pennsylvania. Government is killing us. We can’t afford a gilded age of government as it existed in the mid-1800’s.
CS2: Let me play devils advocate for a minute. A person who argues about this issue with you might say: This reminds me of Ronald Reagan calling for a Constitutional Amendment to balance the budget. He submits the budget to Congress and he doesn’t submit a balanced one. He’s asking for a law to put a gun to his head to make him do the right thing because he won’t do it voluntarily. Likewise, if 75% of the voters are for term limits why don’t they just vote the bozos out? Why do they need a law to make them do what they say they want to do? If they don’t want these SOBs there for 30 years just vote them out. We seem to need laws to protect us from ourselves.
Dennis: There’s an idiosyncrasy about term limits. Everybody likes term limits. They like them at the state level. They like them at the federal level. I came up with this principal that I call “everybody else’s congressman is the idiot”.
CS2: Right.
Dennis: You know. It’s not your guy. We need term limits for everybody else. In one respect that’s true because, for example, I could never vote Strom Thurmond out of office. When Strom Thurmond had just a few cells in his body functioning they could prop him up and get him into the senate everyday. He was still affecting my life. I couldn’t do anything about him.
CS2: Right.
Dennis: Terms Limits would have. Why those people didn’t see fit to pull the plug on old Strom is beyond me, but people don’t. Look at Bill Deweese. He should have been long gone.
CS2: If you make it and get into the Senate I was wondering if you’ll go into this area. I think one of the reasons that people think their guy is the nice guy is the franking privilege and the tools that incumbents have to supposedly communicate with their constituents. They’re really nothing but propaganda tools to say to the people look at what a great guy I am. How I’m working tirelessly on you’re behalf. These advantages are funded by the taxpayers that his opponent doesn’t have. And so when election time rolls around, I get look at all the wonderful things that Tim Holden has done for me. I’m not going to vote him out because I get mailings all the time from this guy. Shouldn’t there be some kinds of controls on the franking privilege?
Dennis: Well, let me say this about that. The franking privilege exists for the Federal Congress. The state guys get an expense account.
CS2: An expense account?
Dennis: The difference being for example, when you get a mailing from Tim Holden all that has to be on his envelope is his name. His name is as good as a stamp. Your local representative has got to put postage on his.
CS2: Who pays for that postage?
Dennis: The taxpayers do.
CS2: In essence the same thing then.
Dennis: Yeah. One reform we pursued with our Capital Crime-watch Program, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this (laughs). (he’s shows me a Capital Crime Watch handbill-see end of interview for particulars). We have color ones that are bigger than these. We went through the capital and we put up posters for Capital Crime Watch and we got a post office box for people to give us tips on violations of the campaign finance laws. Also, of other Pennsylvania state laws which don’t allow you to use any state property for conducting your campaign. You can’t use state computers, cell phones, office staff, and so forth and so on. We had a handout for staffers. We went to every office in the capital and gave the staff this list of 50 things that legislators couldn’t do to shore up the power of their incumbency; things that they routinely do. Nothing, including buildings, that are paid for by the taxpayers dollars can be used as a resource in political campaigns. But it’s done all the time. One thing that just drives me absolutely crazy are district offices. District offices and PSA’s are in the same category..
CS2: What’s a PSA?
Dennis: Public Service Announcements. You’ll see these on your local TV. It’ll be Dante Santoni telling you about the tax rebate program, or about whatever. It’s your legislator linking himself visually to a message that you’re paying to produce, to tell you something that the executive branch of government should be telling you. They don’t want it to be that anonymous. So you associate them with tax relief. Same thing with the mailings that you get. All of it is nonsense, and should be done away with. Take an incumbent’s District Office, I don’t mean to say that the function that they provide should be eliminated. The good they do for the public shouldn’t be eliminated, but they (District Offices) should be. Instead we should have plain vanilla state offices. If you have a problem with your driver’s license you could go in there and it wouldn’t be Carl Mantz who helped you or Carl Mantz’s brother who helped you. The state should straighten it out. They shouldn’t screw up to begin with.District offices are nothing but ways to ingratiate yourself with the taxpayer’s at considerable taxpayer expense. You go into some areas of Pennsylvania, for example Downingtown, where the legislator’s offices are as close together as ten miles. You know, you could go to any of them and find out about your senior benefits, your Pace applications or whatever. These things should not be connected to any individual. The mailings you get, if there’s a legitimate need to inform the public about something that state government is doing, that branch of state government as a cabinet level position should be doing that. The Department of Revenue should be sending you a notice, hey, you qualify for this or that. Rhodes recently sent me such a letter, a physical letter suggesting that maybe I or someone in my household qualifies for the property tax rebate, even though he knows how old everybody in the household is from campaign records. They can tell the birthdays of everyone in the household. So this is just a way of getting their name in front of your eyes at taxpayer expense.
CS2: When you add all this up it’s all about keeping incumbents in power.
Dennis: Right. 
CS2: Your saying that District Offices which are thought of as constituent services offices really should be handled by the government agency involved.
Dennis: In the structure of Pennsylvania government the legislature does far too much in some areas. They intrude too much on the executive. The executive should be doing a lot more than the executive does in Pennsylvania. All these kind of notices to the public come from the legislature. Sometimes you’ll see the Governor. Even that bothers me, when it’s the Governor. We go through this nonsense every election cycle when you get a new Governor and we need to change the names on everything. Ed Rendell welcomes you to Pennsylvania. What does it mean? It’s of absolutely no benefit to anybody. Not even to Ed Rendell. Everybody whose here already knows who he is. Everybody who’s coming from the outside can’t vote for him anyway. All the papers, all the manuals and stuff like that. All they have is a foreword by Ed Rendell. It’s all nonsense. It’s pure waste. We have to do away with that. Think about calendars. Everybody sends you a freaking calendar. If you’re connected to politics at all, you get a calendar. The calendars cost like a buck to print, roughly a buck and a half to mail and in Pennsylvania the bill for doing that is like a half million dollars. A half million dollars doesn’t seem like much but if you’re doing this about everything it adds up. I’d gladly take the half million dollars (laughs).
CS2: Absolutely. I believe you have some other issues that you’re basing your candiacy on. Usury is one of them. What is it about usury that you’d like to do?
Dennis: I’d like to see regulations back about usury. Usury, to express in the vernacular, is loan-sharking. Usury is a common law crime. For years, it was a crime in this country to charge more than a certain amount of interest. If you did charge more than that amount of interest, no court of competent jurisdiction would award you that part of a claim. So when revolving credit came into existence with credit cards, there was a thing called the National Banking Act. Pennsylvania had usury laws until then, preventing charges of more than 8%.If you have a credit card, (I’ve never had a credit card in my life,) and you default on that, your credit card issuer is going to seek from you probably a minimum of 15%, all the way up to something like 29% interest. At one time in Pennsylvania, the court would say no. If you want more than 8%, you’re not getting a cent. They would not allow that part of your claim.
CS2: This is an issue that’s near and dear to me.
Dennis: I think it’s an issue that’s near and dear to everybody. We talk about these pente-ante tax rebates or I’m not going to raise you tax pledges but look what they allow here. Your taxes are being raised, but some lunatic is allowed to charge you 15% interest on your home mortgage.
CS2: And you know what else they’re allowed to do-and this didn’t used to be. Unfortunately, unlike you, I’ve had credit cards all my life. When credit cards first came out..
Dennis: That’s just part of my conservative credentials, never having a credit card. How conservative can you get?
CS2: Sounds like a smart policy to me. Credit cards used to have to issue a second tier for credit card charges at the new rate. You’d get a statement, let’s say you have $5,000 charged on an 8% line of credit. Now the card is raising it’s rate to 12%. They would charge all new purchases at 12% but the previous pre-raise $5,000 would have to continue to be charged at 8%. On the grounds that was the contract you entered into when you charged those goods and services. Now, and this is a personal experience I’m reporting to you, I had a credit card where I had 7.5% on it for my store and I had $10,000 charged on it. I get a bill informing me that my rate has been raised from 7.5% to 29%. When I call up and inquire, and I haven’t been late once because they take the payment out electronically and automatically, they said yes, but you paid your phone bill late last month. Two issues here. Number One, what business is it of there’s when and how I pay the phone bill? And second, isn’t it a stick-up? All they need is the mask and the gun. They’re going to take $10,000 that I owe them at 7.5% that I’ve never been late on and there going to take it to 29%? How can this be legal? When did it happen? In the middle of the night? Where’s the so-called party of the people? It didn’t used to be legal to do that.
Dennis: Some of this is in the area of Federal Law. Some of it has to be rolled back even if it is Federal Law. I think as a representative of state government you can’t have a blind eye to what your Federal brethren have done.
CS2: Federal?
Dennis: It is Federal. It was part of the Bankruptcy Act. Whenever your credit score changes, everybody that issues you credit is free to change your rates based on your credit score.
CS2: Even on previously borrowed amounts? That’s the part that bothers me. Money you’ve already borrowed at one rate now is subject to a new rate. Does this stuff strike you as something fair or legal??
Dennis: No! No! No! No! No! It isn’t fair. The interest rates themselves aren’t fair. When you look at what’s happening with the mortgage crisis and everything like that and you see that people are proposing that we back out of this problem by allowing people to refinance their rates. We have this insane mentality in this country that the people that are least able to afford credit deserve the highest rates. You know it’s the check cashing places. All that kind of stuff doesn’t belong in a healthy society. Pay Day lenders-all that should be gone.
CS2: You mention the federal area. What is the state area. I know this for a fact: When a lot of changes weren’t being made in some states the credit card companies moved to Delaware or Omaha.
Dennis: Or North Dakota.
CS2: So there must be something at the state level that allows them to run wild within those states. What is that? Do you know what that is?
Dennis: Yeah. I know what that is. Part of it is The National Banking Act. The National Banking Act literally destroyed state banking and state banking regulations. What The National Banking Act said was that if you have a bank entity in your state, the state’s regulation can not be so great as to put them at a competitive disadvantage. That’s pretty much a way of saying there aren’t any rules anymore. It’s Dodge City here. The states that were real quick to adopt the Dodge City attitude found that the banking and credit card operations anxious to move there. Even though the bank itself didn’t go to Delaware. For example, if you had a National Central Bank account years ago and a regional account, the credit card operation was run out of Delaware. The headquarters of the bank may be in Lancaster, Pa. They all did that because the states like Delaware, North Dakota; South Dakota don’t have any rules.
CS2: Yeah. So what can states like Pennsylvania do to reel these wild-west creditors in? Can anything be done at the state level to help the consumer and the average citizen?
Dennis: When you have a financial problem and someone wants to collect money from you, that is usually done through the state court system. I would like to see Pennsylvania go back to a usury system that 8% is the maximum credit rate we will enforce. It doesn’t make any difference what laws have allowed you to charge more. If this person is delinquent and you’re using the resources of the state to collect from Chuck Brown you can only collect this much. It’s a moral question. That’s all the state should do, they should not be aiding and abetting loan-sharking. These rates of interest for the lending of money are just insane. The banks themselves have to recognize that at some point in time this is going to be a problem. But they simply can’t get enough. Bank of America, one of the biggest credit card issuers, had 10 billion dollars in income this last quarter. They made less than a quarter of a million dollars profit – because of lending practices. They have fees for every time you scratch your ass. They’re charging exorbitant interest rates. What’s required to make these people profitable? There’s no reason that government should be cooperating with these crazy ponzi type schemes that they’re all involved in.
CS2: I guess you don’t expect contributions from credit card comanies to your campaign?
Dennis: No. (laughs) I won’t be getting any contributions from them. And I won’t take any in the form of credit either. Good American cash. I’ll use green.
CS2: I’ll move on to something that I guess as you know is important to me. Facing life without Healthcare insurance and being in my case basically uninsurable. Having had cancer and a stroke they’re not lining up to insure me. What can the state do about healthcare? What should it do?
Dennis: Let me pander to you Chuck (we both laugh). Occasionally I’ve been in the boat that you’re in now. When I was a small kid I burned both my legs from the knees down, when I crawled unto an old style kitchen stove. I was less than two years old. It was about 1952, and then parents often didn’t have health insurance for children. Although I wasn’t insured, I was under continuous hospital care for six months, mostly in hospitals in Philadelphia. So I wasn’t insured but I was under continuous hospital care for six months. Both my legs were rebuilt from the knees down, and the small town we lived in at the time, Schuylkill Haven, conducted blood drives, and collected donations for my medical care. My parents lost their home. I was probably about 5 before I started to walk, and the extensive skin grafts required medical attention through grammar school. Follow-up care and therapy until I was in college. That was without insurance. Then shortly after college I began to experience a variant of migraines called cluster headaches, I was employed at the time and well insured, and consequently had every neurological test known to man, at least once. For over a decade, they defied diagnosis, worsened and were soon accompanied by seizures. I was in intensive care a number of times. All the while the medications to control the headaches became more powerful, until one day my aorta collapsed and my heart stopped. I had health insurance through a company I did freelance design work for, and I will never forget the day the President of the company came to the cardiac intensive care ward and fired me on the spot.
CS2: What a guy!
Dennis: A real sweetheart. They “self-insured”, so his action had the effect of immediately terminating my insurance, leaving me with a pile of bills, and a pre-existing condition that barred future coverage for years. I was uninsurable then for the next seven years. I was sued by about a dozen providers, and because of the seizure history I couldn’t drive. In that era, an asset such as the roof over your head disqualified an individual for Medicaid. I was flat broke, couldn’t afford medicine, ate oatmeal for every meal and lived without heat or electricity for a year. After being “symptom” free for three years, I could drive again, and after seven, I was once again insurable for my pre-existing conditions. Since then, I have had three additional heart attacks. It’s an odd kind of situation. Depending on what kind of problem you have. If you have a problem that’s stress related you really can’t go out and be competitve in a stressful world. It’s like putting a gun to your head to do that. 
CS2:So What is your conclusion from all this?
Dennis: I do not see the answer to what is wrong with healthcare as coming from state government, and I think that all the focus on the single-payer insurance and universal care questions are a distraction. Money isn’t the problem, and doctors not getting paid is not the problem; but to completely remove the issue from consideration, I think socialized medicine is the way to go. Which is probably what the single-payer crowd is really wanting, they’re just afraid to use the words. I have an extensive resume when it comes to illness. I’ve had probably every physical test ever made. Belive it or not I don’t really like a lot of what I’m hearing about healthcare reform. I think the concentration on how many people are insured vs. how many people aren’t insured is a false argument. Because doctors always get paid. I had this conversation with Kathi Ember a few weeks ago and I thought she was going to kill me. I kept saying, Kathi don’t focus on the money because people always get paid in one way, shape or form. Show me an area where they’re not being paid. Because they are always paid. Trying to put more money in the system, trying to insure more people to me is counter-productive because that’s where all the problems lie. Some of the solutions lie in the area of making medicine better. I am appalled, and I don’t know if you ever looked at your medical record, that those records are kept by anything calling itself a science. Stint work for blockages in my heart were cartoons. There weren’t any sonograms. I had catscan work done and all kinds of work done that gives images. Those images aren’t in your medical record. Data on all the blood tests and stuff like that isn’t in your medical record. You’re astounded when you see your medical record. How little is there and the quality of it. Hillary Clinton has come out with a proposal to become electronic in how these records are kept. It baffles me that I can’t carry in my pocket an insurance card that I take to everybody who can run it through a swiper and have my complete medical record with all scans included. It would have a complete listing of all the tests so that I’m not re-tested. They would see accurately the prescriptions I’m taking so they don’t mis-medicate me. I just took my 80 year old mother to the urologist the other day. I completed nothing less than 12 pages of forms that were her medical history that they should have been able to get from her medical history. That should be something that she carries around and there shouldn’t be a couple of stooges at the front desk that shuffle that paper and send that paper out. There are a lot of ineconomies there as well as in filing. Everybody points to single-payer as creating some economies and that’s true. But some of the problem lies in the very dangerous practice of having patients in charge of generating their medical history. And it doen’t provide the best care. We pay more in this country for medicine than anyone else. And our healthcare is not any better. It’s worse in a lot of respects.
CS2: Why wouldn’t you trade our system for a single-payer system since it insures everybody? Countries like England and France on many levels of comparison are ahead of us.
Dennis: You’ve got to start splitting issues. You have single-payer, you have insure everyone. If you want medicine to be universal and free I’m for that. Because then you get all those economies and that’s got to come from the Federal government. The Federal government is running the big insurance programs. Unless you can capture Medicaid, Medicare and Veterans Insurance for starters, as something you can roll into a state single-payer program, you can’t have single-payer. You’re just kidding yourselves.
CS2: I think the state bill for single-payer in the senate, I think it’s SB300, is a bill that wouldn’t bring single payer? You’re saying it can’t do that?
Dennis: No. That’s true. It’s all an illusion. Until you can put all this money into one big pile you can’t have single-payer.
CS2: Is it because these other folks are having their bills being paid by a Federal entity?
Dennis: Yeah.
CS2: So even a single-payer that would be designed to make everybody part of the medicare program could no longer be done at the state level. Is that what you’re saying?
Dennis: That’s right.
CS2: Let me ask you this then. You’re in the senate right now. You’re being confronted by Ed Rendell’s health care package. Are you voting up or down?
Dennis: The one thing that Ed Rendell did that I salute, that Ron and Rosie and other people that are pushing health care reform probably don’t agree with, is that he’s taking a stand that we are not going to pay for malpractice. In other words, medicaid in the state of Pennsylvania as per Ed’s plan, you don’t get paid for mistakes. This may seem logical to everybody else who has not been as sick as you or I, but you are charged for the goofs. The guy who killed me wanted to be paid. It was the guy who stopped my heart-the man who literally killed me. He wanted to get paid. I think that it’s a step foreward-not paying for mistakes. It’s one of the things that will have to be done to straighten the problem of medical care out. In America we need cost controls. If you have a disease you get X dollars. For a broken arm there’s $300.00 dollars to make Chuck right. That’s all you get. Period. Take all the treatable and curable conditions and put a price tag on them and that’s all you get. Consider what I was saying when I had to take my mother to the urologist. My mother had to go to the urologist because she had blood in her urine. We go to the urologist and he takes a test to tell us: she’s got blood in her urine. We’ll schedule a visit for you…and repeated tests and for this he collected $177.00. Now my mother has to go back. She has to go back for two things which can be done in the office both of which take 5 minutes. But she can’t come back 1 time. She’s got to come back 2 times. Medicine does that. If you put a flat price on things and you say this is all you get they will put some efficiency into it. Costs will start to come down. We don’t care about costs. Everybody who wants health care reform aren’t talking about the outrageous costs that are in healthcare. And they are absolutely outrageous. Some of that comes from cost shifting. Some of that comes from doctors always getting paid. If you aren’t paying them, your insurance is.
CS2: In the practical political world you are confronted with bills when you’re in the senate. If SB300 comes to the floor are you voting up or down?
Dennis: I don’t think any of the bills would address what I consider the problems of health care to be. It’s going to be really hard to roll back the problems of healthcare. You’re not going to do that with one hail-Mary pass. It’s going to take some real work. As an interim measure I might support some bills that go in a direction that does, solve the problems I think need solving. I’m completely committed to the idea that we can make health care a lot cheaper in our country. We can improve it and we can make it available to far more people. If we force medicine to behave like a science.
CS2: You say far more people but you don’t say that as a citizen every person has a right to health care?
Dennis: Yeah I do. Everybody has a right to healthcare.
CS2: Everyone?
Dennis: Everyone.
CS2: All right. Let’s move on to the environment. There’s a lot of local issues, state issues, land preservation and sludge, using inner-city abondoned buildings. Give me your environmental policy as a future state senator.
Dennis: Doing the activist thing, I’ve been all over Pennsylvania. In single weeks I’ve put a couple thousand miles on in Pennsylvania dragging the pig around and stuff. I’ve seen a lot of it. The thing that impresses me is that Pennsylvania isn’t growing. Contrary to everything you see, the fact is that Pennsylvania is not growing. The population of Pennsylvania has been flat for a considerable period of time. Yet it’s astounding at the rate we’re consuming open space. Just looking at places like Exeter Township and what’s happening there you would call me a liar for asserting a proposition that Pennsylvania’s not growing, because everything you see tells you to the contrary. It seems we must be growing. We’re not. We’re just using up land. Some of that is because of tax policy. I would venture to say that if we went to a system where there was no proberty tax consequences for commercial properties that problem would just get worse. It would make that problem many times worse. Property tax administration and planning, and putting equity into the system would make it a lot more expensive to bust up a farm for development. It should do that. That’s one of the reasons I’m not really keen on seeing property tax go away. If you enacted a measure as simple as your proberty tax is based on what you paid for the structure, you would change land use in Pennsylvania dramactically. Because the burdens that these new properties put on government should be shouldered by them. If you put in a new delvelopment which calls for increased police and fire protection, those developments aren’t paying anything to that. There’s been some talk about an impact fee and stuff like that, why not have them have to pay more because of their effect? Say the average house in an area costs $150,000 and you put in a development and now all of a sudden the prices on houses are a quarter of a million dollars those are the people who should pay. The person who has been in that community for 30 years has paid off bond issue after bond issue after bond issue to build schools and roads. Those people should get a break. If you bought your house 50 years ago you paid your taxes based on the cost of that house 50 years ago. It would make inner-city housing units more attractive. It would price out-of-reach this idea of using up land like we’re using it up in Pennsylvania just because we got tired of the old buildings. We’re leaving abondoned properties all over the place to build new crap. We can’t continue to do that. It’s wastefull and it’s stupid. On environmental issues Pennsylvania really needs to look at the resources that we’re blessed with and manage those better. Some of that would be in the area of electrical generation. One of the things you need to make electrical energy is water. Just about every method relies on copious volumes of water. Pennsylvania has a lot of that but it doesn’t have an unlimited amount.
CS2:Who or what had the greatest influence on how you turned out? What makes you the person you are today.
Dennis: I had a really great father. A fiercely independent man, who would not hesitate to tackle any challenge, and was willing to teach himself whatever he needed to know so that he might succeed in a new undertaking. I also have a wife, Sylvia, who is the best human being I have ever met, and knowing her makes me a much better person. They influenced me a lot, but the thing that almost exclusively steered my life along its course during my formative years was my accident. I didn’t start walking until I was over 5, and was never allowed and/or lacked the strength to participate in sports. If you were faced with those limitations in the 1950’s, you ended up reading a good deal. When I was a kid, I read almost every great work of Greek literature, and throughout my life have enjoyed the classics. So for influence, I would say, part Dad, part wife, and part Homer, Socrates, Virgil, Voltaire, Hesse etc. Last but not least, there is also my friend Gene Stilp, who appears in many of the pictures that are part of this interview. Gene and I have traveled across Pennsylvania many times, in pursuit of one political objective or another. Events pictured here, like Capitol Crime Watch, the Pink Pig, the Pig Bus etc. are just a small fraction of Gene’s creations. He has done more to improve government than anyone I know.
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Crime Watch
Things not to be used for campaign activities
Use of any computers
Use of any mails
Use of any rooms or offices
Use of telephones
Use of any staff members
Use of any government paid for vehicles, leased vehicles to attend any election function whatever, in the Capital area of back in the district
Use of any reimbursement for time, mileage or expenditures for election purposes,
Use of any hand held computing device (Blackberries, etc) provided by the legislature
Use of any staff member to help coordinate fundraising activities in Harrisburg area of back in district
Use of government offices to meet with potential candidates
Use of government offices for meeting with possible election donors
Use of offices safes to store political contributions
Use of government purchased food for office entertaining for election purposes
Use of government products to send to potential voters, e.g. calendars, birthday letters, etc.
Use of staff to put out mailings for election purposes
Securing election materials from department of State.
Use of staff to file petitions with Department of State
Sending election materials with State postage
Use of staffers to opponents Ethics statements and petition filings
Use of district office staff and office for election purposes
Use of any staff for election purposes
Use of demographic staff for election purposes
Use of House or Senate caucus computed and IT services for election purposes.
Use of research offices for position papers, speeches, etc.
Use of media offices (television or radio or press offices) for election material development, recording messges, etc
Use of the paid Public Service Announcement scam in 2008
Use by members of any cell phone, land line, fax line, computer, car, office, capitol event for election related purposes
Gifts purchased with taxpayer money
Use of staff vacation time supposedly used for election related matters.
Use of shifting staff to district office during election season.
Use of legislative bill development or introduction for political gain and contributions.
Staff attendance at political affairs during work hours.
