It appears increasingly likely that Kamala Harris will tap Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her vice presidential running mate. If so, it is a foregone conclusion that Republicans in the Keystone State will not only fight hard for its all-important 19 electoral votes but make Shapiro a top target for attack.
Lowman Henry, head of the conservative Lincoln Institute in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, offered Newsmax a taste of what to expect if Democrats nominate a Harris-Shapiro ticket.
"Gov. Shapiro is no moderate," Henry told us. "He has defunded organizations that provide healthcare to pregnant women because they also counsel women to give birth to their child.
"He has supported the job-crushing greenhouse gas initiative that has resulted in the closing of power plants and the loss of high-paying union jobs. He has trapped minority children in underperforming schools by line-item vetoing the lifeline scholarship program.
"He has failed to keep his promise to accelerate the cutting of the corporate net income tax that would boost business and create new jobs. Conservatives will have to engage aggressively to prevent him from taking this radical agenda to Washington." Henry added.
Already, the governor's flip-flop on school vouchers has come under heavy fire.
As a candidate for governor in 2022, Shapiro endorsed school vouchers. And during budget negotiations last year, he reached agreement with Republicans in the Legislature to fund a program with $100 million in "lifeline scholarships" for "low-achieving" children in the inner city.
Republicans, in return, supported higher spending on education.
But it was not to be. When state House Democrats refused to support any budget that included vouchers in any form, Shapiro used his line-item veto to kill Pennsylvania's first-ever voucher program.
"Betrayer!" shouted angry Republicans, with Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward telling the Wall Street Journal that Shapiro "failed to lead the Democratic House to see why this is important, and he failed because he left all of these kids out there floundering."
Like Harris up until recently, Shapiro had been an opponent of fracking while state attorney general and pursued fracking companies over environmental harm caused by shale gas production.
As governor, however, "he's not done anything I'm aware of to inhibit fracking," former Republican state Rep. Curt Schroder, who served in the Legislature with Shapiro, told Newsmax.
But Schroder and others point out that as governor, Shapiro has done nothing to inhibit the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which Pennsylvania joined in 2022 under his predecessor and fellow Democrat, Tom Wolf. With Pennsylvania and 11 other states comprising RGGI, rules are laid down that limit greenhouse gas emissions and require utilities to buy more electricity from renewable sources.
A ruling by the state Commonwealth Court issued an order last November declaring RGGI rulemaking void on grounds that its regulation "constitutes a tax" and thus usurps the power of the state Legislature to levy taxes. The state Supreme Court has yet to take up an appeal of this ruling launched by environmentalists.
Regardless of the outcome of the RGGI litigation, Shapiro has his own plan for taxing energy.
"Officially dubbed the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act or PACER, Shapiro's plan would produce a massive new tax further exacerbating costs for Pennsylvania businesses and households already beset with high inflation," wrote Kevin Mooney in the American Spectator. "Like RGGI, Shapiro's PACER plan is built around trade 'regulations that would limit greenhouse gas emissions in the name of climate change.'"
"The carbon tax under RGGI and Shapiro's own proposed carbon tax would badly hurt" the state's "natural gas industry," said David Taylor, president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. "These policies were chosen specifically to suppress domestic energy production."
While Shapiro so far has remained scandal-free as governor, press attention has begun to focus on one of his closest associates, who raised eyebrows by resigning from office last September.
Mike Vereb, a onetime Republican colleague of Shapiro in the state House, was legislative liaison when Shapiro was attorney general and then his legislative secretary after he became governor. Last September, Vereb abruptly resigned from office — three weeks after the Shapiro administration paid $295,000 to settle claims from another employee of the governor's office who accused Vereb of repeated sexual harassment and lewd remarks about her to others.
As of late Monday, signs were growing Harris would turn to Shapiro in large part to secure Pennsylvania's electoral votes. It was also clear that conservatives in his own state would come out swinging against him.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.