Now that the deadline to pass a state budget has come and gone and there's no prospect of an agreement anytime soon, you might be wondering: What makes this year different?
It is true that the Legislature and Gov. Ed Rendell haven't been able to approve a spending plan before July 1 in any of the last six years.
But all but one of those stalemates lasted days — not the weeks, or maybe months, many believe this impasse will drag on.
So why is this year different?
One crucial reason: The players — specifically the members and ideology of the state Senate Republican caucus — have changed.
Gone are the pragmatic deal makers — the Chip Brightbills and Bob Jubelirers and Gib Armstrongs and Noah Wengers — who, in the end, voted for tax increases.
The new folks — the Dominic Pileggis and the Joe Scarnatis, not to mention rank-and-file members like Mike Folmer, Lloyd Smucker and Mike Brubaker — are not so willing to budge.
"The current Senate Republicans have made 'no tax hikes and budget cuts' their mantra," said G. Terry Madonna, a Franklin & Marshall College political analyst. "They've made it part of who they are. It's huge."
Their unwillingness to give an inch on the issue of tax increases stems in part, some believe, from the backlash over the numerous corruption scandals such as Bonusgate and the notorious 2005 legislative pay raise.
"There's a different attitude in the Legislature, at least among Republicans and some Democrats in working-class areas, because of the pay-raise outrage. It's, 'We don't want to get too far out of whack with the voters,' " said Jim Broussard, chairman of the conservative group Citizens Against Higher Taxes.
Statewide polls have found that voters prefer spending cuts to tax increases in balancing the budget.
Two dozen incumbents including Brightbill, then the Senate Republican leader, and Jubelirer, then the Senate president pro tempore, were swept from office in 2006 following the later-repealed pay raise, which increased salaries as much as 54 percent. Several others, such as Wenger and Armstrong, did not seek re-election in the following years.
Still, voting for tax increases has not proven similarly career-ending. In fact, no lawmakers lost their jobs after the tax hikes of 1991 and 2003. But, Broussard said, times have changed.
"I think a lot of the legislators are feeling the basic level of voter discontent is higher," Broussard said. "An event like a tax increase might kick it up to the next level."
State Rep. Mike Sturla, a Lancaster Democrat, said the newest batch of Senate Republicans is living by an unrealistic ideological mantra.
"Somebody said the other day, 'We have to realize the players have changed.' And they have," Sturla said. "Some of the guys have come in pledging they would never raise taxes ever — and very unrealistically so."
He said he believes some of the more pragmatic leaders in the Senate GOP are bowing to more ideological members of the caucus.
"The guys who are currently in leadership there and won their leadership posts by very narrow margins are afraid of losing their positions," Sturla said. "The guys that didn't win the leadership elections are controlling the agenda anyway. You have the minority of the Senate Republican majority in control."
Armstrong, the Senate's former appropriations chairman, doesn't buy that explanation.
"One of the things I tried to instill on the caucus before I left was, you need 26 Republicans (to agree) on the budget. We will determine the budget, and we can't let them (Rendell or Democrats) pick off six or seven of us," he said.
"They're holding the line."
Pennsylvania's budget year ended at midnight Tuesday, and Rendell said he was resigned to starting the new fiscal year without a spending plan in place for the seventh straight year.
The state has an estimated $3.2 billion revenue shortfall for the current year and a similar gap to fill for the 2009-10 year.
Rendell supports a mixture of cuts and higher taxes — including a three-year, 16 percent jump in the personal income tax — while Senate Republicans propose cutting spending but no tax increases.
Interestingly, while Armstrong said he supports the Senate Republicans in their effort to resist such tax hikes, the former lawmaker said just before retiring at the end of 2008 that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to bridge the looming deficit with cuts alone.
Armstrong said the deteriorating economy and rising costs for such big-ticket items as health care and prisons are leading the state government on a path to a massive deficit that will require a tax increase to erase.
"I don't know of any program up here that we can get going the other way," Armstrong said at the time.
E-mail: tmurse@lnpnews.com