A state panel voted against subjecting Pennsylvania’s school mask mandate to its lengthy regulatory review process – a decision that legislative Republicans rebuked as unconstitutional and dangerous.
“Although not surprising, today’s ruling blatantly ignores our foundational constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, local control, parental and student rights, and especially individual liberty,” said House Health Committee Chair Kathy Rapp, R-Warren.
The Joint Committee on Documents agreed Thursday morning that the Department of Health’s Aug. 31 order directing students and staff at all schools – public, private and parochial – to wear masks amid a rise in COVID-19 cases in children does not qualify as a regulation and need not go through the public review process.
Rapp, whose committee voted to send a letter last month to the committee requesting it intervene in the matter and subject it to the traditional regulatory process, maintains that acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam lost the authority to implement statewide orders when the Legislature terminated the COVID-19 disaster declaration in June.
“With the governor’s emergency declaration no longer in effect, the unelected health secretary’s ‘broad emergency powers’ to impose mandates outside the normal and required parameters of the regulatory review process no longer apply,” she said.
The administration said Beam signed the order using authority granted to her by a clause found in the state’s Disease Prevention and Control Law of 1955. Republicans and a group of parents – led by Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Bellefonte – challenged the administration’s use of the statute as unconstitutional in a lawsuit filed in Commonwealth Court last month.
House Speaker Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, said in a lengthy statement issued Thursday that “the law must be followed” and warned of the dangers of any one branch of government having too much power.
“No unelected government bureaucrat should ever have the sole and unilateral authority to issue open-ended “orders” – whether they focus on public health response or something else,” he said. “To give such limitless discretion would elevate the acting secretary’s power above at least two branches of our tripartite government.”
The masking order took effect Sept. 7, after Beam said COVID-19 cases among school children skyrocketed 300% between mid-July and the end of August. The policy also includes child care centers, where cases have likewise risen in recent weeks. Children younger than 2 remain exempt from the order, per federal guidelines.
