The One-Vote House: How a Pennsylvania Amendment Died Without Anyone Voting It Down

On July 8, 2022, the Pennsylvania Senate and House passed the same proposed constitutional amendment. To reach voters for ratification, it needed to pass once more. That second vote never happened.

The measure, SB 106, bundled five amendments. One would have declared that the state constitution confers no right to abortion and requires no public funding of it. With Republicans controlling both chambers, it passed the Senate 28–22 and the House 107–92.

The November 2022 election produced a House of 102 Democrats and 101 Republicans, and in Pennsylvania (and many legislatures) the majority party decides what reaches the floor for a vote. A one-seat majority was enough to keep the amendment from coming up for a vote. Control of the legislative calendar is, to a large extent, control of the outcome.

The question itself did not go away. In April 2026, the Commonwealth Court held that the state constitution confers a fundamental right to reproductive autonomy, including abortion, and forbids excluding abortion from Medicaid coverage. Those are two propositions the amendment was written to foreclose. The broader question of the ruling's scope is still pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Article XI of the state constitution requires an amendment to pass both chambers in identical wording in two consecutive two-year legislative sessions before it goes to a statewide vote. SB 106's second round had to come before the 2023–24 session ended.

The November 2022 election set up the narrowest majority possible. Democrats won 102 of the House's 203 seats, their first majority since 2010. Between December 2022 and January 2023, three of those seats fell vacant. Rep. Anthony DeLuca died, Summer Lee resigned to go to Congress, and Austin Davis resigned to become Lieutenant Governor. All three had just won re-election, and on paper Republicans briefly held a 101–99 edge.

All three seats were in Allegheny County. A February 7, 2023 special election filled them. Democrats won all three, the 102–101 majority returned, and Joanna McClinton became Speaker. She never scheduled a vote on SB 106, and when the session ended on November 30, 2024, and the amendment expired with it.

It is tempting to pin the outcome on those three Allegheny County races. But in a chamber split by one seat, every seat in the majority is decisive. Had any one of the majority's 102 seats gone the other way in 2022, the Republican party would have controlled the calendar. A seat in Erie, Bucks, Luzerne, or Cambria County carried the same weight as the three special elections.

Cambria County's 72nd District is a good example of how thin that line was. Rep. Frank Burns, a pro-life Democrat, has represented the Johnstown district since 2008. He is endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and has voted for abortion restrictions, including a ban on abortions sought after a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis. In 2024 his district voted for Donald Trump by roughly 40 points.

Burns held the seat by 9 points in 2022. In 2024 his margin fell below 3 points, fewer than a thousand votes. Had that one seat gone the other way, the other party would have controlled the House, and with it what reached the floor.

Burns is not the only one. Rep. Anita Astorino Kulik of the 45th District is the other House Democrat who breaks with her caucus on abortion, and she ranks among Allegheny County's more conservative Democrats on the issue.

Both cases run against a common intuition, that outcomes follow from how members vote on an issue. Burns and Kulik, pro-life legislators, helped sustain a majority that would not schedule a pro-life amendment. That is not hypocrisy but how legislative control works. The leaders of the majority party control the calendar and what comes up for a vote, not the convictions of its individual members.

So, when you cast a vote, you are voting for a candidate and candidate’s party’s control of the legislature. Your vote helps decide which party controls the chamber. SB 106 was never defeated. It was just set aside. Because Pennsylvania has no procedure that lets a minority party force a vote, the leadership of the majority party could just kill it by not bringing it up for a vote.

That outcome is common. Ballotpedia found that from 2010 to 2022, when party control of a chamber changed between sessions, 11 of 14 amendments failed. The two-session rule is built so that an amendment must survive a change of electorate. It is a brake, and here it worked as designed, whatever one thinks of the result.

The 2022 vote is now history. Any future amendment on the subject starts over at first passage and needs only a simple majority of the members elected to each chamber. The earliest realistic statewide vote is 2030, after first and second passage of the amendment in the next two legislative sessions.