May 31, 2015 4 min read

HARRISBURG – At least one of Gov. Tom Wolf’s Cabinet nominations may be in jeopardy as the Pennsylvania Senate winds up its review of his top advisers over the next two weeks, including expected votes on two other nominations that have encountered resistance.

Marcus Brown, Wolf’s choice to lead the Pennsylvania State Police, will be the focus of a hearing before the Law and Justice Committee on Wednesday. Some Republican senators already are saying Brown lacks the votes for confirmation because of criticism over his past actions as a police official in Maryland and decisions he has made since his nomination was posted in January.

“There are problems there, but the governor is going to stand by him,” said Mary Isenhour, the Democratic governor’s legislative affairs secretary. “We’ll see what happens.”

Also awaiting action are the nominations of Pedro Cortes as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state and John Quigley, whose hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, as secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.

So far, the Senate has confirmed nine of Wolf’s nominees. Eleven nominations are pending.

Brown, a Penn State graduate who holds a law degree from the University of Baltimore, has rubbed some people the wrong way – including the state troopers’ union and the Senate Republican leadership, which separately sent letters urging Wolf to withdraw the nomination.

Majority Whip John Gordner said flatly that Brown, a former Maryland state police superintendent who spent most of his 25-year career in the Baltimore Police Department, does not have enough support to win confirmation.

Gordner ticked off several complaints about Brown that included his decision to wear the Pennsylvania state police uniform even though he did not attend the Pennsylvania State Police Academy, which rankled many retired troopers, and lingering questions about the pension he received from the city of Baltimore before he had accrued the usual 20 years’ service.

“This is the position in charge of the Pennsylvania State Police. The person in this position should have the most integrity that you could possibly want and set himself up on a higher standard,” the Columbia County lawmaker said.

Cortes served in former Gov. Ed Rendell’s administration as secretary of state, an office that oversees the state’s elections, campaign finance reports, lobbying registrations, corporation filings and more than two dozen professional licensing boards.

Cortes has come under fire from lawmakers and activists opposed to abortion rights who have sought to blame him for lapses by the state Board of Medicine that allowed abuses to continue for years at a now-shuttered Philadelphia abortion provider that prosecutors dubbed a “house of horrors.”

At his hearing, Cortes told the State Government Committee he did not know about problems at the clinic at the time because of a state Supreme Court decision that bars investigators from reporting such information to the department until a formal action is filed, which did not occur.

The committee was divided over Cortes’ nomination and took the unusual step of forwarding it to the full Senate without making a recommendation to approve or reject it.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman acknowledged that there is “some angst” over Cortes’ nomination within the Senate GOP caucus, but he declined to predict the outcome.

“It’s hard to handicap at this point,” the Centre County Republican said Thursday.

Isenhour said she is confident that Cortes will be confirmed and lashed out at his critics.

“Most of them aren’t voting for him in the first place,” she said. “It is absolutely offensive to insinuate … that he looked the other way on this horrible, tragic incident.”

Quigley headed the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for three years during the Rendell administration and previously worked for the Harrisburg-based environmentalist group PennFuture.

Some Republican lawmakers expressed concern that as chief of the DEP he would push environmental restrictions that could hurt the gas, coal and other natural-resource industries, but Corman said Quigley seems to have quelled those concerns and is expected to be confirmed.

“Other than some (past) policy differences … I don’t know that there’s anything that could interfere with Quigley,” he said.