Thank you, Pennsylvania!


Vote Russ Diamond for State Representative

I wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU for supporting our effort to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution to limit the powers of a governor during a disaster emergency and restore the governmental checks and balances created by our founding fathers.

Despite the Wolf Administration's efforts to twist the meaning of these proposed amendments by authoring ballot questions which perverted the actual meaning of the amendments, a majority of voters saw through it and provided a clear victory for Liberty on May 18th!

The People have spoken. So what's next?

What's next is navigating our way out of this mess. Approving the amendments was just peeling the first layer off the onion. Now the real work begins in determining the path forward.

I know, I know – you just want it to be over. So do I. However, we need to proceed with caution – much more caution than Wolf ever exercised while sending Pennsylvania spiraling down into the pits of one-man rule.

In the General Assembly, one of our biggest arguments was with how Wolf instituted mitigation measures without giving the people effected by them any fair warning. He closed down bars & restaurants, as well as "non-life sustaining" businesses (his term, not mine) with little notice. Businesses can't operate like that; they need to be able to plan ahead. As we move toward bringing this all to an end (and I assure you, it IS coming to an end), we don't want to jerk people around like Wolf did.

Although the manner in which Wolf ruled from his ivory tower during COVID has been horrific, there are some positive things that have come from this disaster emergency.

Let me give you just one example from my own life. I do an annual healthcare screening. The imaging center where I go for the test is right down the street from my house, but the doctor who orders it is located about 50 miles away. Prior to COVID, I had to spend about 4 hours in travel and waiting time to attend a follow-up appointment to discuss the results. But during COVID, I was able to do that online with video conferencing from my home in ten short minutes, due to a regulatory adjustment under the disaster emergency.

I happen to think this was beneficial for all Pennsylvanians, and while not every medical appointment can be conducted via Zoom, perhaps we should extend such regulatory adjustments until such time as we can provide actual legislation to make them permanent law. We have approximately 140 pages of such COVID regulatory activity to pour through and determine which to dump and which we may want to keep in place and try to make permanent.

Like I said, adopting the constitutional amendments was merely peeling the first layer of the onion. It took nearly 15 months to get where we're at, and we want to do everything possible to make sure we exit this nightmare in as positive fashion as possible.

I have to be honest with you here – given Team Wolf's tortuous twisting of the ballot question language, I was a little doubtful that these amendments would pass last Tuesday. However, when I began to hear that polling places were running out of Republican ballots (that's wholly unacceptable, and something we need to address going forward as we rewrite our election code), my hope was bolstered. In the end, you and the rest of Pennsylvania's electorate came through and delivered.

I can't thank you enough, and I pledge to continue working to bring this sorry chapter of Pennsylvania history to a close in the quickest manner possible.
Russ Diamond


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