Right-wing social warriors in the state Legislature have backed off their effort to hold thousands of Pennsylvania college students hostage to their ideology. But, characteristically, their Plan B is only marginally better.

Each year, the Legislature appropriates money that the four state-affiliated universities — Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln — use primarily to fund in-state tuition discounts. The universities, unlike the state-owned schools of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education — operate independently.

For the 2022-2023 academic year, lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf plan to allocate $580 million to the four universities.

But a group of conservative lawmakers added a measure to the budget bill, threatening to withhold the funding unless the universities agreed not to conduct research using fetal tissue. That applied primarily to the University of Pittsburgh, a leader in biomedical research. Its proposed allocation is $155 million, a $15,000 discount for each in-state Pitt student.

Under heavy pressure from leaders of their own caucus, the dissenters agreed to separate the provision from the budget process.

But then, rather than creating a bill to address the research on its merits, they attached it to another unrelated bill that must pass. The legislation that now includes the fetal research ban is designed to accelerate the establishment of broadband high-speed internet and communications services statewide. Perversely, in heavily rural Pennsylvania, improved broadband access is crucial to making better health care more widely available through telemedicine.

Attaching narrow-interest legislation to must-pass public-interest bills is an old trick. But in Pennsylvania, the state constitution proscribes it, requiring that legislation address only a single subject.

Of course, the Legislature once passed an entire state budget by attaching it to a different bill. So, who knows? Maybe they’ll get away with it.

But to protect the crucial broadband bill from being found to be unconstitutional, lawmakers of both parties in both houses should ensure that it passes as clean legislation for its intended purpose, and that the fetal research ban be debated on its own merits.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS