The Pennsylvania Supreme Court should not bypass a lower appellate court and invoke its King’s Bench power to hear an appeal in the monthslong legal fight over filling former Lackawanna County Commissioner Matt McGloin’s vacant seat, the Lackawanna County Democratic Committee contends in a recent filing.
It came more than a month after a split panel of three senior Lackawanna County judges delivered the Democratic Committee a key victory in that battle, with a majority of the panel ruling in late May that the county’s Home Rule Charter controls the process of replacing McGloin, a Democrat who left office in late February. The committee plays a major role in filling such vacancies under the charter, which tasks it with submitting the names of three potential appointees for consideration by the commissioned judges of the county Court of Common Pleas.
Democratic Commissioner Bill Gaughan and the county, co-petitioners to litigation challenging the charter process, contend instead that state Rule of Judicial Administration 1908, not the charter, should control the process of choosing McGloin’s successor. Rule 1908, adopted by the state Supreme Court in 2019, says the county court, not a political party, “shall receive applications from any interested candidates for the position” pursuant to a deadline established by the court.
County Commissioner Bill Gaughan rebuts comments made by Commissioner Chris Chermak following the public comment portion of the Lackawanna County commissioners meeting at the Lackawanna County Government Center in Scranton on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
Its application would therefore effectively remove the Democratic Committee from the replacement process, place it solely in the hands of the county court judges and widen the pool of potential candidates.
With Senior Judges Carmen D. Minora and Vito P. Geroulo in the majority and Senior Judge Robert A. Mazzoni dissenting, the split judicial panel ruled May 22 that the charter process supersedes Rule 1908. It was a victory for the committee and a loss for Gaughan and the county, who appealed that and other elements of the ruling in state Commonwealth Court, where the appeal remains pending.
Then, in a filing last month, Gaughan and the county asked the state Supreme Court to invoke what’s known as a King’s Bench power, rarely exercised authority that allows the Supreme Court to immediately consider any pending case. The state’s high court can choose to exercise that power “when it sees the need to address an issue of ‘immediate public importance,’ ” according to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
In a response filed with the Supreme Court last week, the Democratic Committee argued the King’s Bench application for the exercise of extraordinary jurisdiction should be denied. That filing notes Gaughan and the county’s appeal is already pending before the Commonwealth Court.
The Lackawanna County Government Center in Scranton on Friday, March 28, 2025. (REBECCA PARTICKA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
“The Applicants have identified no particular urgency for this (Supreme) Court’s intervention while this matter awaits their decision, nor did they indicate any urgency for when appealing to the Commonwealth Court,” the committee’s filing notes. “Nor, obviously, is there any reason why this matter lies beyond the competence of the Commonwealth Court.”
The committee’s filing by attorney Adam Bonin reiterates arguments for the supremacy of the charter, including on separation-of-powers grounds. County voters empowered the committee to play a major role in filling vacancies when they adopted the charter in the 1970s, it contends.
“To be sure, the judicial power authorizes this Court to direct the procedures a court of common pleas must employ when acting to fill a vacancy, but the substantive choice of who can fill the vacancy is a legislative power upon which this Court could not and did not encroach,” the filing notes.
The committee also rejects that the matter is of “immediate public importance” such that it would warrant the state Supreme Court’s intervention.
“While LCDC readily agrees that its matter is important to the residents of Lackawanna County, there nonetheless remains nothing immediate,” the filing notes. “Certainly nothing about this matter is more immediate now than it was over a month ago when Applicants timely appealed this matter to Commonwealth Court instead of seeking relief from this Court, nor when they filed their initial petition for relief before the Court of Common Pleas on March 17.”
How we got here
Gaughan and the county’s March 17 petition initiating the litigation followed the committee’s Feb. 27 closed-door meeting where members voted to advance former county Economic Development Director Brenda Sacco, Olyphant Borough Council President James Baldan and Scranton School Director Robert J. Casey as the three candidates to potentially replace McGloin. Gaughan had introduced Dunmore Mayor Mark “Max” Conway Jr. as his preferred choice to succeed McGloin at a press conference, but the committee did not advance Conway as a finalist.
Dunmore Mayor Max Conway speaks during a press conference in the Commissioners Conference Room at the Government Center in Scranton Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
Gaughan subsequently blasted the committee’s process as nontransparent and politically “tainted,” arguing it “threatens to turn the county over to a small group of politicos.” County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Patrick, defending his process, has repeatedly argued Gaughan only ever supported one candidate, Conway, who lacked the necessary qualifications to be commissioner.
In their application asking the Supreme Court to exercise its King’s Bench power, attorneys for Gaughan and the county argued Minora and Geroulo’s May 22 majority ruling for the supremacy of the charter “weds the trial court to the political whims of unelected political party officials” and diminishes the neutrality of the courts.
Mazzoni, who disagreed with his senior county judge colleagues that the charter controls the McGloin-replacement process, noted in his dissent that the “clear and unambiguous language in Rule 1908 … makes its application in this case compelling.”
“As noted in the language of Rule 1908, the application of this Rule makes the selection of a candidate more transparent and, of course, more diverse by creating a larger pool of worthy applicants,” Mazzoni wrote. “A result which truly serves the ends of justice.”
Minora and Geroulo’s majority ruling, on the other hand, noted the entire home rule charter concept is to provide municipalities that adopt charters “power at the local level to govern at the local level.”
Gaughan and the county’s reading of Rule 1908 “simply defies logic and means every time the court issues a new rule, be it administrative or procedural, HRC communities better hold their breath lest their constitutionally guaranteed right to self-rule be consumed … by a pac-man like anonymous rule making committee unanswerable to any public input,” Minora and Geroulo wrote.
Whether the state Supreme Court will invoke its King’s Bench power to hear Gaughan and the county’s appeal remains unclear. If it doesn’t, the appeal will continue in Commonwealth Court.