Mark Rozzi’s secret deal to become Pa. House speaker isn’t the first time he’s left allies reeling

The deal that led to this week’s surprise election of state House Speaker Mark Rozzi stunned colleagues at the Capitol and has ushered in a new wave of uncertainty in Harrisburg.

But in it, some who have worked most closely with the Berks County Democrat during his decade-long political career recognized a familiar pattern.

Rozzi — a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and the legislature’s leading advocate for changing the law to allow victims more time to sue their abusers in court — shocked many in the survivor community in 2019 when, with no notice or consultation, he quietly abandoned a strategy they’d been pursuing for years and struck a deal with the bill’s foremost Republican opponent. The compromise they worked out left many of Rozzi’s longtime allies feeling burned and betrayed for years.

While tensions from that episode may have since eased, James Faluszczak, an abuse survivor who had worked with Rozzi on that earlier legislation, couldn’t help but see parallels as he watched the similar cross-party, backroom dealmaking that led to Rozzi’s elevation to the speakership Monday.

Now, as then, he said, Rozzi “surprised us all.” His history of striking out on his own, even at the risk of alienating allies, to accomplish his goals could offer clues to what type of speaker he might become — and qualities that could complicate his tenure.

“He’s a good legislator. He gets stuff done,” Faluszczak said. “But whether it’s the clergy abuse issue, the Child Victims Act, or anything else, if he’s acting independently and theoretically trying to cast a wide net, he needs to consult with others.”

Details of the accord that led to Rozzi’s election as speaker remain hazy.

In a closely divided House — with 101 Republican representatives sworn in to Democrats’ 99 — it was unclear going into Monday’s speakership vote whether either side could successfully rally the votes to put one of their own in the top job.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Rozzi emerged as a consensus candidate.

» READ MORE: Who is Rep. Mark Rozzi, the surprise Pa. speaker of the House?

Republican House leadership say their support came as part of a deal that required him to leave the Democratic Party and that they fully expect him to do so.

Rozzi announced Monday he did not intend to caucus with either party during his time as House leader — a decision that rank-and-file Democrats said left them blindsided. But several told The Inquirer this week that he later assured them he does not intend to leave their party for good.

Rozzi’s true intentions remain known to only him.

He has declined interview requests, and, outside of a brief news conference following his election Monday, he has said little publicly in the days since.

But Shaun Dougherty, a close friend who was molested by a priest as a boy in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, said the move shows a pragmatism and an eye toward capitalizing on political realities that Rozzi has demonstrated throughout his career.

“There’s what everyone hopes and wants,” he said, “and then there’s what’s politically possible.”

At no point were those characteristics more evident than the acrimonious and at times deeply personal battle over legislation for victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Rozzi, who represents parts of Reading and suburban Berks County, has said he was first inspired to run for elected office in 2012 after the suicide of a childhood friend who was abused by the same priest whom he has accused of molesting him in the ‘80s when he was 13.

And during every legislative session after, he sponsored bills that would temporarily suspend the state’s statute of limitations to allow abuse victims a new two-year window to file lawsuits alleging decades-old abuse.

For years, they went nowhere until a scathing 2018 grand jury report detailing decades of child sexual abuse and cover-up by the state’s Roman Catholic dioceses injected new momentum into the effort and attracted new high-profile allies, including then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who oversaw the investigation and will be sworn in as governor on Jan. 17.

Suddenly, Rozzi and the community of abuse survivors who had looked to him as their champion in Harrisburg believed they finally had a shot at the justice they say they’d long been denied.

Rozzi organized rallies on the Capitol steps. He called out big interests — like the Catholic Church and the insurance lobby — in increasingly hostile terms. His dedication and advocacy encouraged some victims to share their stories of childhood abuse for the first time and join the political fight.

“It’s not healthy for survivors to be coming around talking to senators and all that parading our trauma in public,” said Faluszczak, a former priest who was molested by a clergy member in his teenage years. “But [Rozzi] is one of us. He inspired us.”

But one opponent, in particular, stood in their way: Joe Scarnati, then the Republican leader of the Senate, for years had balked at the idea behind the so-called “window legislation.” He contended that reopening the statute of limitations after it had expired would violate the state constitution.

Still, with public pressure on the side of the victims, Scarnati proposed a compromise that would exempt institutions like the Catholic Church from being sued under the window.

But despite a spate of frenzied eleventh-hour negotiations, talks collapsed. Advocates ended up back where they started — with no concrete progress toward achieving their goal.

As the next legislative session started the following year, Rozzi returned with a new approach — much to the surprise of those whom he’d fought alongside.

Rather than seeking to pass a new law that would immediately create the two-year window, he quietly struck a deal with Scarnati and proposed amending the state constitution to allow for it instead.

That process would overcome Scarnati’s long-held objection that the “window” legislation was unconstitutional, but it threatened to delay any resolution by years.

A constitutional amendment requires the legislature to approve a bill, with the same language, in two consecutive two-year sessions and, after that, for voters to approve it in a statewide vote.

The move sparked outrage among some victims and their advocates — not just because they would have to wait at least three years to see if such a measure could pass but also because they felt Scarnati’s begrudging compromise offer the prior session suggested they had the momentum to push for a more immediate solution.

And there was no guarantee that when Rozzi’s proposed constitutional amendment passed in 2019 that it would get Republican backing the next session or win the support of statewide voters.

But the most upsetting aspect of Rozzi’s shift in strategy for many of the survivors and advocates he’d stood by for years, was that he’d done it without consulting or warning them.

“There was a lot of anger at the time,” said Marci Hamilton, head of the sexual abuse victim advocacy group Child USA. “The fact that this happened and none of the advocates in the community were notified or consulted, that’s not team building. That could potentially have been a major problem.”

» READ MORE: From champion to ... pariah? Pa. lawmaker behind clergy abuse reform on the outs with some victims

Tempers flared once details emerged during a closed-door meeting between Rozzi and many of the most outspoken survivors and advocates. Though few were willing to discuss the details of that private conversation, two survivors who were present — and agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity — said Rozzi dug in, telling them that he’d made up his mind and it no longer mattered whether he had their support.

“We were in throes of it with him and we’d all been working through him and his office,” said Faluszczak, who was not present for the meeting. “But it just went from having a floodgate of really open communication up until that point to having no communication at all.”

For his part, Rozzi said he’d accepted that compromise was the only way to accomplish the goal he’d been fighting for for years.

“Some people don’t want to wait” for a constitutional amendment, he told The Inquirer in 2019. “Too bad … I can’t do the same thing over and over [each year], only for a dog and pony show.”

In the three years since, tempers have cooled and any lingering tensions between Rozzi and the survivor community have mostly abated — chiefly because the legislature stands poised this month to approve the proposed constitutional amendment for a second time. That paves the way for the measure to be put before voters in the May primary ballot.

Dougherty, Rozzi’s friend and fellow abuse survivor, said ensuring that vote could occur in time for the proposed amendment to appear on the ballot this spring was, in part, what motivated Rozzi’s decision this week to accept the Republican deal that made him House speaker.

“There was a real question of if they adjourn [because they can’t elect a speaker] is this going to delay the vote?” Dougherty said.

Now, no matter how they got there, with Shapiro soon to be in the governor’s mansion and Rozzi holding the speaker’s gavel, abuse victims are as close as they’ve ever been to achieving the goal they’ve been pursuing.

“We not only have a seat at the table,” Dougherty said. “We have two big seats at the big table now. I honestly haven’t felt this good about a legislative session in years.”