Senate Hopeful’s Suit Puts Pennsylvania in Turmoil : Novice says the people, not the parties, must choose candidates.

It was, in the parlance of politics, a done deal.

In the special election this fall to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of John Heinz (R-Pa.) in a plane crash last April, Democrats were going to run former state Industry and Labor Secretary Harris Wofford, who is serving as Heinz’s interim successor. Republicans planned to put up U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, a popular former two-term Pennsylvania governor.

But now, Pennsylvania politics is in chaos as state officials, legislative leaders and political bosses scramble in the wake of a legal masterstroke by John S. Trinsey Jr., 64, a colorful suburban Philadelphia developer and political unknown with plans to run for the seat.

Backed by his reading of the U.S. Constitution in his home encyclopedia, Trinsey filed suit in federal district court, contending that the way state law permitted major party candidates to be picked violated the 17th Amendment. A federal judge agreed with him and nullified the state’s special election procedures for picking candidates.

“You’ve never seen such turmoil,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. “In theory, if the judge’s decision is upheld on appeal and the Legislature doesn’t do anything to change the law, Wofford could remain in office through 1994, when Heinz’s term is up.”

That is an unsettling prospect to state Republicans, who thought that they had a sure winner in Thornburgh. They have joined state Atty. Gen. Ernie Preate Jr. in appealing the decision last week by U.S. District Judge Edward N. Cahn.

Cahn’s ruling last week invalidated the procedure allowing nominees for the Senate seat to be picked by political party leaders and not by voters in a primary. The judge accepted Trinsey’s argument that the process violated the 17th Amendment, which empowers governors to make temporary appointments to vacant Senate seats “until the people fill the vacancies by election as the Legislature may direct.”

“It’s that little phrase--’the people’--that is the key,” said Trinsey, who describes himself as a longtime Republican loyalist. “The Democratic and Republican Party bosses in this state wanted to make the choices themselves and leave the rest of us, the people of Pennsylvania, stuck with their choices.”

Trinsey, who is embroiled in a $7.3-million bankruptcy proceeding against his development firm and whose only experience in political office has been as a township supervisor in the 1960s, says he was prompted to file the suit after deciding to run and then learning a brutal truth.

With no chance of getting his party’s nomination, the only way he could get on the special election ballot was to collect the signatures of 41,305 registered voters and run as an independent.

“I said: ‘Something’s wrong here,’ ” he said. “Pushing the federal courthouse in Philadelphia five feet upriver would be easier than raising that many signatures. Then, one day, when I was at home listening to opera while my kids were doing homework, I looked at the bookshelf and saw the World Book Encyclopedia.”

In the volume with the entry on the U.S. Constitution, he found enlightenment. “It was pretty discouraging reading at first, but when I hit on the 17th Amendment, I jumped and shouted: ‘Wow!’ And the rest, as they say, is history.”

In moving for an appeal, Preate said of Cahn’s decision that “it is an opinion in which a single District Court judge plunges into untested waters and purports to discover therein an entire new constitutional principle.”

Preate has asked for an expedited hearing. But there is a possibility that, even if the appeals court rules in the state’s favor, the decision might not come soon enough to give either major party time for a full-scale campaign.

Such an eventuality would hurt the prospects of Democrats more than those of Republicans because Wofford, who already has been endorsed by the Democratic State Committee, has never run for political office before and is far less known among voters than Thornburgh.

On the other hand, Democrats stand to gain if Wofford remains as interim senator pending an election, giving him more time to build up his public image.

Meanwhile, Republican plans to formally nominate Thornburgh for Heinz’s post have been put on hold, and GOP leaders at the state Capitol in Harrisburg are in a stew.

Robert C. Jubelirer Jr., president pro tempore of the GOP-controlled Senate, would like to see the Legislature enact a measure creating a September primary even before the state’s appeal of Cahn’s decision is decided. But Speaker H. William DeWeese of the Democrat-dominated House says he will not “rush pell-mell into any legislative initiatives that will alter the status quo.”

The longer the delay, the more Thornburgh’s chances of staying in are diminished.

As for Trinsey, a onetime Olympic rower, cellist, ditch-digger and construction worker, he hopes the state eventually creates a primary. If so, he says with characteristic braggadocio: “I not only plan to run, I plan to win.”