Mar 17, 2016 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers and websites around Pennsylvania as compiled by the Associated Press:

It’s not often we congratulate someone who’s done something wrong.

But state Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin did the right thing by resigning his seat Tuesday.

And for that much, thanks.

Eakin, a Republican, follows into retirement former Justice Seamus McCaffery, a Democrat who was implicated in the widespread sharing of pornographic, racist and sexist emails by members of the statewide judiciary and the legal profession.

Chief Justice Thomas Saylor and the newly elected members of the high court have already begun to do the hard work of repairing the court’s public reputation. But there is a part for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly to play as well.

With Eakin’s resignation, the seven-member court has been reduced to six members. It will be up to Wolf to appoint a replacement and for the Senate to confirm that person. As Pennsylvania’s hyper-extended budget debate made clear, Wolf and the Legislature have proven woefully incapable of agreeing on much of anything. And with an election ahead, the temptation of further gridlock is great.

But when it comes to appointing Eakin’s replacement, they should resist that temptation and keep in mind voters have little confidence in their ability to do the right thing.

Moving quickly to fill Eakin’s vacancy would be a good first step toward fixing that.

President Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was regarded back then as a stern warning to all holding positions of responsibility that there was no guarantee any cover-up would remain under wraps forever.

Back then, that warning seemed to apply only to government, but it’s a warning two former bishops of the Altoona-Johnstown Catholic Diocese should have heeded.

But now there is the troubling new disclosure three Cambria County judges did nothing to publicly expose evidence of horrific abuse that occurred – or that still might have been occurring – against children by priests serving at churches in the county.

The new allegations suggest those judges – two of whom continue to serve while one is retired – actually were complicit in the cover-up by acceding to the two disgraced bishops’ wishes to keep the abuse under wraps.

Like Nixon, those judges fell victim to the errant belief the cover-up never would come back to haunt them.

Although current statutes of limitations are preventing prosecution of those priests still living who are identified in the report, there is no statute of limitations covering warnings from mistakes made in the past…

On the same day two gunmen killed six people and critically injured three others in Wilkinsburg, the state Supreme Court conducted a hearing on one of many idiotic Pennsylvania gun laws that serve the interests of the gun lobby rather than public safety.

In 2014, state lawmakers representing gun activists introduced a bill that was so bad it could not survive on its own merits. It granted legal standing to gun activists from anywhere to sue municipal governments that enact gun-control measures in the interest of public safety.

The bill’s sponsors waited until the waning moments of the 2014 legislative session and attached it to an unrelated bill regarding penalties for scrap metal theft. Doing so spared the narrow-interest legislation the trouble of hearings and debates – you know, democracy. It plainly violates the state constitution to combine unrelated bills, so the Commonwealth Court overturned the law last year. That prompted the appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Wilkinsburg killers used the military-style weapon for its designed purpose – killing people. Unless Pennsylvania lawmakers stop pandering to the gun lobby and get serious about helping Pennsylvania communities improve public safety, the law itself will continue to be an accessory to murder.