HARRISBURG — Gov. Josh Shapiro shares stories and vignettes from his high-profile political career, family life, and Jewish faith in his new memoir, Where We Keep The Light.
The book’s last chapter also divulges delicious insider details about the rushed vetting process Shapiro underwent in the summer of 2024, as then-Vice President Kamala Harris was deciding on a running mate for her eleventh-hour — and ultimately unsuccessful — presidential campaign.
Not surprisingly, that rare peek behind the curtain of presidential politics has commanded most of the discourse about the book, as has speculation about whether the memoir is Shapiro’s unofficial announcement of what many seem to consider a given: that he will run for president in 2028.
Less discussed are the stories he chose to tell about his time in state government — and the fine print he chose to leave out. There are also several high-profile controversies he avoids mentioning altogether, including the clumsy handling of a private school voucher proposal in his first year in office, as well as sexual harassment allegations involving a top aide.
It is Shapiro’s story to tell. But below are some areas Spotlight PA pinpointed as missing the full context.
Part 2 of this story publishes this Wednesday.
Legislative reform
Shapiro devotes a chapter to his three terms in the state House, including a meticulous chronicling of his shoe-leather approach to his first campaign in 2004 (he says he knocked on 18,000 doors in his Montgomery County district).
He also relives the heady moment when, as a rookie lawmaker in early 2007 (he had just won his first reelection campaign), he orchestrated a political coup in the state Capitol by elevating a moderate Republican to the speakership — one who would side with Democrats and help usher their agenda through.
The new speaker, former state Rep. Denny O’Brien, quickly returned the favor, giving Shapiro the newly created (but unpaid) title of deputy speaker, and tapping him to co-chair a special (and also newly created) legislative committee on reform.
In those days, reform was a buzzword in the Capitol. The legislature was still reeling from public backlash against a dead-of-the-night vote it had taken in 2005 to grant itself hefty payraises.
In his book, Shapiro writes that the commission “passed a bunch of meaningful reform measures through that commission. Real politics, real progress.”
News clips from that time paint a far more nuanced picture.
The commission did shepherd through positive changes. It approved a package of internal rules that made lawmaker expenses publicly available in electronic form and prevented the kind of all-night sessions that allow legislators to ram through controversial legislation (like the pay raise).
It also advocated hard for strengthening the state’s then-weak public records access — changes that eventually formed the backbone of Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law as it stands today.
But the commission couldn’t muster momentum on some of its loftier goals, including limiting campaign finance contributions, implementing term limits for lawmakers, and shrinking the size of the legislature.
Still, some supporters argued the commission had the odds stacked against it from the start. When O’Brien created it, he insisted on a supermajority within each political party for approving reforms — a difficult lift that ended up dooming changes that had simple majority support.
Catholic Church abuse
Few things catapulted Shapiro’s profile — both nationally and internationally — more than the staggering and devastating grand jury report on decades of child sexual abuse by Catholic Church clergy in Pennsylvania, and its cover-up by the church’s leaders. The nearly 900-page report was released in the summer of 2018, when Shapiro headed the state Office of Attorney General.
Drawing on testimony from dozens of witnesses and hundreds of records seized from the church’s secret archives, it contained harrowing accounts of grooming, manipulation, predatory behavior, and sexual assault. It also detailed how Roman Catholic leaders in six Pennsylvania dioceses covered up the abuse for decades.
The report almost didn’t come to light. Lawyers for a group of unnamed individuals and organizations mounted a furious, monthslong, and largely secret legal battle to block its release. Shapiro and his top prosecutors were widely credited for not bowing to the pressure and fighting to make the report public.
In his memoir, Shapiro dedicates an entire chapter to that time in his career. He writes in detail about how he met and stayed in contact with survivors to assure them he would fight for the report’s release and their truth to be heard.
But Shapiro is silent on the aftermath: the struggle to get the state legislature to create or advance a two-year window to allow survivors of long-ago abuse to sue the perpetrators and those who covered up the abuse. Those survivors are barred from bringing civil lawsuits under the state’s statute of limitations.
Shapiro and some of his most senior officials in the attorney general's office at the time furiously worked to convince the state Senate’s then-president, Joe Scarnati — the most prominent opponent to a two-year window — to allow a bill to be brought to the chamber’s floor for a vote.
The intensity of that lobbying effort in the months following the report’s release — including news conferences inside the Capitol featuring survivors and their families pleading with lawmakers to take action — was unmatched by almost any other time in the state’s modern history.
But it ultimately failed. The legislative session came to a close in 2018 without a vote by the state Senate. Since then, efforts to approve a two-year window have unfolded with dramatic starts and stops, and still face an uncertain future.
Some survivors, once firmly in Shapiro’s corner, have also lost confidence in him, insisting he’s abandoned the effort and not used the bully pulpit of the governor’s office to push the measure through.
Shapiro’s office, meanwhile, places the blame on the state Senate’s unwillingness to bring a two-year window measure to a vote without tying it to an expanded voter ID proposal.
Trump lawsuits
Shapiro’s book also weighs in on what he calls President Donald Trump’s “politics of grievance.” He believes the president rose to power by taking advantage of people’s economic insecurity, and parlaying their frustration into a resentful movement with Trump at its center as the only savior.
“There is so much to legitimately fear and loathe and resist about what we have witnessed in this era of politics,” he goes on to write. “That’s why I sued the first Trump administration dozens of times in my time as Attorney General.”
He adds: “But while I had profound differences with the guy … I only sued the administration when I believed that he was actually violating the law. I didn’t join every lawsuit that every Attorney General in every state brought against him just because I knew it would make for a good headline or get attention on social media.”
News releases and articles show Shapiro’s attorney general’s office participated in at least 16 legal actions in 2017 and 2018, his first two years in office. In a 2019 speech, Shapiro told an audience his office had sued the Trump administration 29 times, according to a Butler Eagle article.
That was before the litigation-heavy year of 2020 and its geyser of lawsuits by states over everything from COVID-19 policies to Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election.
While those lawsuits raised Shapiro’s national profile, not all of them were spearheaded by his office. In fact, Pennsylvania frequently joined or piggybacked onto other states’ efforts.
The lawsuits ran the gamut, from blocking rollbacks of student loan protections, tailpipe emissions, birth control coverage, and greenhouse gas emissions; to ending efforts to add a citizenship question to the census and restricting the number of legal immigrants who live or enter the United States.
But true to Shapiro’s account, there was at least one time he held off on joining high-profile, multistate lawsuits: in February 2019, when 16 states sued over Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Shapiro declined to join, saying he first wanted to wait and see whether the effort would divert federal funds away from congressionally approved projects in Pennsylvania.