The money that decides an election almost never arrives with a name on it. It moves from one group to the next, and lands in your mailbox with a name that tells you nothing. That is not an accident. Nobody has time to trace it, and the people writing the checks like it that way.

Pennsylvania House Bill 2728 takes a new route. Instead of rewriting election law, it rewrites the corporations code. Corporations have only the powers the state gives them. Article X, Section 3 of our state constitution says those powers can be revoked, amended or repealed. The bill recognizes that influencing our elections was never intended.

PA State Rep Joe Webster introduced it on August 5, 2026. This approach didn't start here, though. Hawaii passed its version in May, 24 to 0 in their Senate and 50 to 1 in their House. It polls well across the country on both sides of the aisle. Rebecca supports HB 2728, and wants it expanded to reach corporations chartered in other states too.

Western PA is undergoing real economic change, including new industries and businesses like robotics and advanced batteries are making local investments that our kids will be thankful to have. That proximity is an opportunity. It’s our responsibility to make sure we capitalize on it, through education, worker protections and long-term sustainability.

Our workers need union support, training centers and other pathways to great jobs in promising fields. Only then can our entrepreneurs and business owners proceed into these sectors or supply the goods and services those new industries and workers will need.

The minimum wage was created to guarantee workers a basic and livable standard of living.

Ours has been stuck at $7.25 for nearly 2 decades. A raise is overdue. There’s a catch though. Home care agencies and small practices don’t get to set their prices. The state does. When an aide spends an hour helping someone bathe and get dressed, the state pays a set amount for that hour, called a reimbursement rate, and the agency pays the aide out of it. Raise the minimum wage without raising that rate and the money coming in stays flat while payroll goes up. Agencies cut hours, stop taking new clients, or close. The person who needed help getting dressed is the one who loses their care.

Both numbers have to move together.

Don’t let them tell you the minimum wage was never meant to support people though - that’s exactly what it is intended to do.

We are an energy-producing region. The world’s demand for fossil fuels feeds a lot of families around here.

The unknown future of the global energy market is a considerable risk to our economy, and climate change is a related risk we can't ignore. The war in Iran proved we should still be very concerned about this risk, affecting the health of the global economy in less than a week. Prices spiked, family budgets got rewritten. It’s no fluke. As a region, we must not treat renewables, electrification and battery technologies as threats. We must instead entice these industries and opportunities to come here and build in harmony with our existing employers.

Battery manufacturers have made major investments in nearby regions, but we haven't pursued them as aggressively as others. Geothermal uses many of the same skills our energy crews already have. Rather than betting everything on a small segment of the energy industry, we must act with the confidence that we can be leaders across the board.

In Washington County, that should not depend on what their parents do or which school district they live in. Right now, that is not what we have. Some districts can offer career and technical programs, mental health services, and special education support. Others are stretched so thin they are borrowing money just to keep classrooms open.

Pennsylvania is working to fix this. The state has started putting real money into an adequacy formula that sends the most help to the schools that need it the most. But progress has been slow, and small and rural communities are still waiting. Our schools need to be ready to give every student the tools to compete, whether that means college, a trade, or a career in a field that did not exist ten years ago.

The Head Start program has been helping helping kids in Washington County for decades.

The last year and a half has been rough though. An early version of the federal budget would have eliminated Head Start entirely, despite its positive impacts. It will be threatened again.

Count on Rebecca MacTaggart to keep defending Head Start every time anyone tries to cut it.

Health care in Washington County should not depend on where you live, where you work, or whether Harrisburg and Washington can agree on a budget.

Next year’s "Big Beautiful Bill" cuts to Medicaid are estimated to affect more than 300,000 Pennsylvanians and their providers, from home health aides to small practices, who are already operating on reimbursement rates that have not kept up with the cost of doing business.

As a result, Pennsylvania hospitals and service providers now find themselves in higher danger of having to cut departments or close altogether. It's important to have representatives with experience in these issues.

Data center development seems to be today’s version of this debate, but it keeps coming up until everyone understands the core concepts: Our laws and ordinances are there to protect and preserve our communities. Health, resource, and financial risks should not be dismissed too quickly. Transparency is critical for trust.

If there is a reasonable chance that a new development might hurt the health or well-being of the families that live in the community, then the community deserves to reject or delay that development until the community is satisfied.

There is another problem. Under the Municipalities Planning Code, the maximum fine for a zoning violation is $500 a day. For a family or a small business, that is real money. For a billion-dollar corporation, it is a rounding error. When the penalty for breaking local rules costs less than a company spends on coffee, communities do not have real enforcement power. That has to change.