It’s time for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to get to work.

On Tuesday, the voters in three Allegheny County districts did their jobs. They showed up for the special election to fill the seats of the late longtime legislator Tony DeLuca, newly installed U.S. Rep. Summer Lee and Lt. Gov. Austin Davis.

The fact that those three all won reelection to their seats in November but would not be in place for the start of the 2023 term threw House leadership into a turmoil.

The Democrats won control for the first time in more than a decade — except they didn’t, because the seats immediately were vacant, and the Democratic majority was tissue-paper thin. Without those three seats being filled, the Republicans retained a majority, except it was tenuous and likely to be temporary.

The special election verified that short-lived nature. Unofficial results put all three seats in Democratic hands by massive margins. Joe McAndrew won the 32nd with about 75% of the vote. Abigail Salisbury took the 34th with what appears to be a devastating 87% of the total and Matthew Gergely had the closest of the three races with 73% at the end of the night.

This isn’t a shock. It reflects the predictions everyone had made since Election Night in November before even one candidate had been named by the parties. Any of the three very blue districts going Republican would have been a surprise.

So now what?

Now it’s time for legislators to start legislating.

The Speaker of the House, Mark Rozzi, is a compromise candidate elected with bipartisan votes after pledging to abandon his Democratic caucusing in favor of independence. It was a nod toward sanity and good government and, well, that didn’t last long.

Rozzi quickly was criticized by his Republican friend and nominator for not making his independence official by changing his registration. When there were problems getting his priority project — the constitutional amendment creating a window for child sex abuse victims to sue — to pass without amendments, he called a recess.

The House won’t reconvene until Feb. 27. Lawmakers still are cashing paychecks, though. And those paychecks have a 7.8% increase over 2022.

The first two months of the calendar have been wasted. Blame whoever you want. Democrats, Republicans, Rozzi, whoever. There’s more than enough blame to go around.

The simple truth is people were sent to Harrisburg to do a job and — predictably — the job hasn’t gotten done.

So now three more people will be installed, and the majority is decided. This should be the push to accomplish something.

But will it? Will Rozzi make good on his promise to let nothing else be done until the amendment issue is settled? Will the parties be able to agree on absolutely anything long enough to order lunch let alone make laws?

What we do know is, now, they don’t have the excuse of three empty Allegheny seats keeping people from doing their jobs.

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