In his run to defeat incumbent Gov. Tom Corbett, Tom Wolf campaigned on his experience as a business owner and suggested he was a pragmatist, not a typical politician. Wolf went on to defeat Corbett, and in his second day in office, Gov. Wolf fired Erik Arneson, the head of the state’s Office of Open Records.

Arneson was appointed by Corbett late in his administration, and Wolf said the firing as well as the reversal of more than 25 eleventh-hour appointments by Corbett was about process. Wolf said Arneson’s appointment, and the others, lacked the transparency he wanted to see in state government.

On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling, saying that Wolf overstepped his authority in firing Arneson.

The Supreme Court agreed with the lower-court’s emphasis on the need to protect or insulate the Open Records office from potential political influence.

Despite Wolf’s claim that his actions were about lack of transparency, Wolf looked political. It was not the sort of action expected from a man who campaigned on not being a typical politician. And certainly not on the second day in office.

Even if Wolf’s motivation was not political, it looked suspicious. And coming on his second day in office, it quickly set a partisan tone and raised questions about the new governor’s commitment to open records.

At the time of the firing, a Wolf spokesman said Arneson was as an “at will” employee, someone who serves at the pleasure of the governor. But that’s exactly not what the head of the Office of Open Records should be.

Created in 2008, the office was designed to serve the public seeking public records and it also was intended to enforce the open records law, which had been rewritten in a way that shifted the burden of proof to those who wanted to keep records private, assuming public records were public unless the government could prove otherwise.

To make the office non-political, the Legislature created a six-year term for the head of the Office of Open Records. Six-year terms would not correspond with the four-year terms for governors. By overlapping administrations, the Office of Open Records was intended to be independent, and not subject to politics.

In a February speech to the Pennsylvania Press Club in Harrisburg, Arneson said that if the executive director of the Office of Open Records could be fired at any time by the governor, the office would become “a rubber stamp for the governor” and would lose the public’s confidence that it was operating on behalf of the public’s right to know.

Arneson was right. The Commonwealth Court and the Supreme Court were also right. And Gov. Wolf was wrong.