The Republican-dominated Pennsylvania House recently voted in favor of a resolution condemning the death penalty moratorium enacted by Democratic Governor Tom Wolf in February, shortly after his historic win over Republican incumbent Tom Corbett. In a perfect example of how things sometimes go in Pennsylvania, the House Judiciary Committee, of which the resolution’s prime sponsor is a member, held a hearing ostensibly to explore the issue—on the day after passing the resolution.

When he announced the moratorium, Wolf’s office called the state’s death penalty “a flawed system” that is “ineffective, unjust, and expensive.” The moratorium’s critics aren’t arguing that death penalty is effective, just and cost-efficient in the state; regardless of moral perspective on the idea of government executions, it is a near universally acknowledged fact that the system for choosing who will be executed is broken. In 2013, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Saylor began a paper on the topic by stating what he called the obvious: “The current state of Pennsylvania’s capital jurisprudence is impaired,” he wrote. “Indeed, a colleague sometimes commented that, in Pennsylvania, we do not have the death penalty, rather, we have ‘death by arteriolosclerosis.’”

What the resolution calls unconstitutional, though, is the relatively esoteric business of the protocol Wolf used to declare a temporary halt to the death penalty. Specifically, it is an argument over whether or not Article IV, Section 9 of the state constitution grants Wolf sufficient reprieve powers to justify his action.

House Resolution 143 urges Wolf to reverse the moratorium so Pennsylvania can to get back to executing inmates. Except, as Chief Justice Saylor noted, Pennsylvania generally doesn’t execute inmates.

Pennsylvania has the fifth most populous death row in the nation, with 186 people theoretically awaiting lethal injection with drugs the state currently doesn’t possess and can’t obtain. Since Pennsylvania reinstated the death penalty in 1978, only three men have been put to death, and they all went willingly, by voluntarily waiving appeals. Six people have been exonerated. Since 1985, 29 have died of natural causes. There have been more than 250 reversals. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, Pennsylvania is less likely to execute a death row inmate than any other state that has carried out any executions.