Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Tom Wolf is just shy of a month into the new job, but one his cabinet nominations has raised eyebrows in Harrisburg and across the state. Wolf has nominated Pedro Cortes to be secretary of state, a job Cortes held in the last Democratic administration, two-term governor Ed Rendell, from 2003 to 2010. At first glance, the nomination makes sense. Wolf was Rendell’s secretary of revenue, and he knows Cortes well. As well as being the first Latino cabinet member in state history, Cortes is also the longest serving secretary of state.
So why the controversy? It’s not just partisanship that has the Republican majority leaders in both houses of the general assembly up in arms. House speaker Mike Turzai and senate president pro tempore Joe Scarnati have written a letter to Governor Wolf requesting he withdraw Cortes’s nomination. During his previous tenure at the state department, the letter charges, Cortes oversaw a regime of nonfeasance that allowed the now infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell to flourish.
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The charge isn’t without merit. In the 2011 grand jury report on the Gosnell investgiation, more than 25 pages are devoted to the state department’s negligence during the abortionist’s reign of terror in his South Philadelphia clinic, much of which occurred during Cortes’s first tenure as secretary. The state department oversees the health department as well as Pennsylvania’s licensure process, and the grand jury report states Cortes’s state department had “ample notice” that Gosnell had been grossly ignoring health regulations. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
Between 2002 and 2009, Board of Medicine attorneys reviewed five cases involving malpractice and other complaints against Gosnell. (The Grand Jury also received records of three older complaints – from 1983, 1990, and 1992 – one of which resulted in a reprimand.) None of the assigned attorneys, or their supervisors, suggested that the Board take action against the deviant doctor. In fact, despite serious allegations, three of the cases were closed without any investigation. The other two were investigated and then closed – without any action being taken.
The report cites one particular case, that of Semika Shaw, a mother of two who died during an abortion at Gosnell’s clininc in 2000. The state department logged receipt of a complaint about Shaw’s death from an insurance underwriter in October 2002. Nothing appears to have happened with the complaint or with Gosnell until January 2004, when the state department acknowledged receipt of the abortionist’s license information. A few months later, a state department prosecutor authored an evaluation of the case, getting a number of facts incorrect, before concluding, “prosecution not warranted.” The state department approved the prosecutor’s evaluation, despite the fact that it had omitted some details of Shaw’s procedure that suggested malfeasance on Gosnell’s part.
The Shaw case was not the only Gosnell incident Cortes’s state department decided not to prosecute—the grand jury report cites several more. One investigation was into the case of an anonymous woman undergoing methadone treatment who attempted to receive an abortion from Gosnell in 2005. Gosnell administered anethesia to the woman, despite her warning that she had taken methadone earlier in the day. The anesthesia triggered a seizure, prompting the womant to tell Gosnell to stop anesthetizing her. The abortionist ignored her, the woman convulsed and fell to the floor. Her companion to the clinic asked Gosnell to call 911, which he refused to do. After an hour, the companion was allowed to administer her methadone to stop the seizure.
The woman’s attorney sued Gosnell for malpractice and issued a complaint that the abortionist did not have liability insurance in contravention to Pennsylvania laws. But in 2008, the state department closed its investigation. Two years later, a state department investigator looking into Gosnell’s clinic discovered the doctor had not been insured “at all” during a period between 2004 and 2005.
“[T]he problem does not lie just with the individual attorneys,” the grand jury report adds. “There are clearly problems with procedures, training, management, and motivation within the Department of State’s Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs.” The report says prosecutors appeared to be ignorant of the number or seriousness of the complaints against Gosnell, and that their training to deal with these cases was inadequated. Furthermore,
