Senator Bravely Stops Bill That Arrived With Her Help

Pennsylvania state Senator Tracy Pennycuick is campaigning on her resistance to data centers. Spotlight PA reports that one pro-Pennycuick advertisement praises her for removing fast-track language from a bill and stopping it in committee.

She co-sponsored the bill.

Please leave a respectful distance between those two facts. They need room to collide.

The Republican senator’s original measure would have accelerated permitting for AI-related projects and prevented municipalities from applying tougher zoning rules to data centers than to other industrial development. In February, Pennycuick removed those provisions. The bill has not advanced since.

Changing your mind can be good. Listening to constituents can be good. Discovering that the neighbors have questions about the enormous electricity-eating rectangle is a perfectly reasonable stage of political development.

What takes talent is selling the rescue without mentioning that your name was on the delivery paperwork for the thing everyone needed rescuing from.

It is the legislative equivalent of pushing a shopping cart toward somebody’s car, grabbing it at the last second and asking whether they have considered nominating you for a public-safety award.

Pennycuick says her position changed as she learned more. She now favors decisions tailored to local communities. Fine. Tell that story. It has a beginning, a middle and the possibility that an elected official acquired useful information.

But the campaign-ad version apparently benefits from removing the beginning, the part where the senator and the threatening legislation were standing quite close together wearing matching name badges.

Her Democratic challenger, Chris Thomas, is attacking that record. Meanwhile, Pennycuick’s side accuses him of serving data-center developers. That claim rests on his work for an engineering firm that consulted on an Amazon proposal; his campaign says his temporary work came afterward.

So voters get to sort out sponsorship history, employment timing and competing accusations of corporate loyalty while presumably also having jobs and needing to buy fucking groceries.

Could we provide a diagram? Not another attack ad. A diagram. Put the bill over here, the people who supported it over there, and draw the arrows before anyone is allowed to add ominous music.

The campaigns together spent about $9 million on television and digital advertising and mailers between June 9 and October 19, including spending contributed on their behalf. That is a substantial investment in making two candidates’ positions harder to distinguish.

Because here is the exhausting part: both favor guardrails, not a moratorium. Both support requiring data centers to supply their own energy. They have differences and records worth examining, but this is not a contest between someone demanding a server farm in every bathtub and someone planning to outlaw the extension cord.

There could be an argument about which safeguards work. Instead, the advertisements are having a custody battle over who hates the developers more.

And then the senator’s own co-sponsored bill walks into the room, and everybody has to pretend it is an unfamiliar gentleman who took a wrong turn.

By all means, take credit for changing course.

Just don’t sell us the emergency brake without mentioning whose foot was on the gas.