09/01/2026
The Republican mayor of Slippery Rock, J.D. Longo, sums up Gov. Josh Shapiro's recent moves in the state health arena perfectly. We cannot allow another four years of Democrat governance in the Pennsylvania state capitol!
The Shapiro Administration’s latest power grab is not public health. It is a deliberate attempt to resurrect the very machinery of control that Pennsylvanians rejected five years ago.
On August 8, the PA Department of Health unveiled a sweeping rewrite of the state’s disease control regulations. The proposal would authorize state agents to enter private homes, apartments, schools, and other buildings without a warrant simply by flashing a badge. It would empower bureaucrats to pull children aside at school for private interrogation. It would expand the legal justification for statewide mask mandates, exclusion from in-person education, and other coercive measures from active outbreaks to the far broader categories of “prevention” and “containment.” It would compel the reporting of every vaccination into a statewide database and, perhaps most concerning, create a mandatory birth-defect registry.
These are not modest updates but a calculated expansion of state power designed to survive the constitutional limits voters imposed after the last crisis.
I’ve seen this movie before. As mayor of Slippery Rock during the Wolf years, I saw what happens when Harrisburg decides it knows better than parents and business owners. Then Attorney General Shapiro was the enforcer. He defended indefinite business closures, gathering bans, and school mask mandates in court. He dismissed parents as “self-centered.” Small towns watched their Main Streets hollowed out, their children isolated, and their citizens treated as subjects rather than free people. Pennsylvanians finally had enough. In 2021 they amended the state constitution to restrain unilateral emergency powers. The current proposal is an attempt to achieve through regulation what the voters stripped away through the ballot box.
The irony is bitter. The same political class that spent years demanding zero tolerance for unvaccinated citizens has overseen a national policy that allowed millions of people to enter the country with unknown vaccination status and limited screening. If the primary concern is truly the spread of disease among the public, the foremost danger to Pennsylvanians is not a parent exercising a long-standing statutory exemption or a small-town school board resisting another mandate. It is the deliberate decision to prioritize open borders over the health security of American communities. Selective enforcement of “public health” is not science. It is politics.
No government agent should be empowered to meet privately with a child at school about sensitive medical matters while telling the adults responsible for that child to stand down. No administration should be handed the authority to impose sweeping measures in the name of prevention alone, free from the checks that ordinary legislation and the courts still provide. The 2021 constitutional amendment was a hard-won recognition that temporary emergencies cannot become permanent licenses for control. This regulation seeks to render that amendment meaningless by circumventing the will of the people.
Pennsylvania does not need another layer of centralized police power under the banner of public health. We need accountability, transparency, and respect for the people who live here. The Independent Regulatory Review Commission and the General Assembly still have the opportunity to reject this proposal.
Citizens who remember what it felt like when government treated their livelihoods and their children’s education as negotiable should make their voices heard before it’s too late.
