Taking A Look – Literally – At Last Month's Impact Fee Debate

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

There’s no question the natural gas impact fee legislators passed into law last month – now known as Act 13 – was a very partisan piece of legislation. Just ten Republicans voted against the bill in the House, while only two Democrats supported it.
Democrats like Mike Hanna calling the legislation a “sham,” “sweetheart deal,” and “ridiculous.” House Republican leaders made it clear they didn’t love the bill – they were wary about its per-well fee, but Majority Leader Mike Turzai called it “a commonsense solution” that would protect the environment while boosting the drilling industry.
At times it was hard to believe they were talking about the same piece of legislation.
But when you grouped the two days of House speeches all together, would Democrats’ concerns about “giveaways” look any different than Republicans’ talks of job creation?
StateImpact Pennsylvania decided to find out, by acquiring the debate’s unofficial transcript from the House Clerk’s office, and using Wordle.net to create word clouds visualizing Democrats’ and Republicans’ speeches.
The Democrats delivered more than 22,000 words-worth of commentary on the bill. Here’s what it looks like:


 
Republicans didn’t speak nearly as long as Democrats. Altogether, GOP lawmakers’ remarks totaled 11,600 words.

 
Some notes: these word clouds do not include parliamentary inquiries – just lawmakers’ remarks on the bill. We also removed “Mr. Speaker” and “Pennsylvania” from the clouds, since those three words would have dominated both visualizations, given the way legislators speak on the House floor.

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