For many years, the R.I. House and Senate have suffered from a serious disconnect. While the two bodies may convene mere steps away from one another, there seems to be a gaping intellectual and ideological chasm between them. All too often, bills that have broad-based support in the House fail to even make their way out of committee on the Senate side, and those that do often face unwarranted scrutiny and kibbitzing on the Senate side. Let’s look at some examples.
So, why is there this gap between the House and Senate? The House is arguably a more accurately representational body than the Senate, so why is the Senate not taking their cues from their colleagues in the House? Frankly, I am at a loss as to why this happens, but I think that a unicameral legislature would go a long way to fixing this problem while, at the same time, streamlining the committee process.
In a unicameral legislature, the number of committees could be cut in half. No longer would concerned citizens and public interest groups have to attend two committee hearings on the same issue, delivering the same testimony to both bodies. No longer would electeds have to serve on more than two committees, which often forces them to duck out of one committee meeting to attend another, often missing critical testimony on a particular issue. I daresay we could expand the membership of existing committees, which could – and would – provide for a more vigorous vetting process for proposed legislation.
Keep in mind, I am not proposing to eliminate the Senators, just the Senate. The unicameral legislature would become a single body of 113 members, with half the number of committees to staff, and cut staffers at the state house in half. Just having a single press bureau for the legislature would cut spending significantly.
Over the years, there has been a lot of speculation of the effects of consolidating municipal services in Rhode Island. Most agree that we could save a ton of money by allowing cities and towns to share services and financial burdens, but let’s start by looking to the body that affects all of Rhode Island: our fractured General Assembly.
(Note: The only state in the U.S. that has a unicameral legislature is Nebraska. Their legislative elections are also non-partisan, which is a whole other post!)
]]>It’s Tuesday, December 3rd, the day Detroit will, or won’t, officially file for bankruptcy protection … and, in local news, Brett Smiley is formally announcing he’s running for mayor of the Capital City today. Check out the About page on his website and you’ll see there is little doubt he sees himself as the progressive in the crowded field for mayor…
Brett will be joining Mark Gray and I for our first roundtable podcast on Thursday afternoon … if you’d like to join us, or have a question for Brett, reach out on twitter and/or Facebook….
And speaking of being mayor and running for office, current Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is scheduled to join the URI Honors Colloquium tonight on great public schools tonight … more on this developing story later this morning. The URI Honors Colloquium has already hosted such education experts as Diane Ravitch and Henry Giroux, and us progressives are sure looking forward to hearing what Mayor Taveras adds to this ongoing debate….
UPDATE: According to the Honors Colloquium, Taveras’ appearance has been canceled for tonight. “the Mayor expresses his sincere apologies for not being able to attend,” said his communications director, David Ortiz. “He had a scheduling conflict.”
Pension detective Ted Siedle is petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate pension fund investments overseen by General Treasurer Gina Raimondo. Siedle says that some investment agreements essentially allow hedge fund managers to “steal from the state” by hiding information from the public that they are expressively allowed to share with other investors.
Raimondo’s office responded by calling the accusation a political attack. Yes, it is true, the retirees whose savings Raimondo slashed definitely have a political interest in her not becoming governor … the more pointed question she should respond to: do some state investment agreements allow managers to share information with other investors while shielding it from the citizens of Rhode Island. Because all of Rhode Island may not want the person who negotiated that deal to be our next governor…
Seidle told the Providence Journal: “What I have done for Rhode Island is to draw attention to the other side of the balance sheet, the other side of the income statement, which is how much has been paid to Wall Street.”
Steve Ahlquist offers a good government reason why Rhode Island should NOT have a Constitutional Convention in 2015. In an RI Future post published this morning, he says “Con-Con” delegates are elected for the singular purpose of amending the state Constitution, and thus aren’t accountable to any future voters.
“This is the wrong way to effect change,” writes Ahlquist. “Right now, the General Assembly can be held accountable by voters: If you don’t like the way they are behaving, you can remove them from office by voting for their opponents in the next election. The Con-Con delegates, on the other hand, have no such accountability. Delegates, unconcerned with being re-elected, can suffer no penalty for failing voters. Delegate candidates could conceivably run as moderates and then work to effect radical changes once elected.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse held a summit on health care yesterday and said Rhode Island is proving to be a stellar example to the rest of the nation in how to deliver better and more efficient benefits to people in the 21st Century. Similarly, a new report says the Ocean State is poised to be a national leader in solar power … in other words, Little Rhody shines when it comes to health care and renewable energy sectors of the economy … that’s called being well-situated for the future. Go Rhody!
A 38-year-old truck driver was ordered to pay the Koch bros company $180,000 because he participated in an organized hack on the right-wingers site … Koch Industries is located in Wichita, Kansas and so was his trial. The website was down for 15 minutes and the company said it lost $5,000 as a result…
On this day in 1886, textile workers in Fall River fought for and won … a 10-hour work day.
And in 1910 … the International Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, organized their first loggers union … speaking of organized labor in the timber industry, if you’ve never read Ken Kesey’s classic “Sometimes A Great Notion,” it’s a fantastic parable on team work and the dangers of thinking you’re above it. This is one of my favorite and most disturbing movie scenes of all-time:
Publisher Andres Shifflin has died … he founded The New Press after being fired from a Random House-owned company for not making enough money. He published the leftists works of Noam Chomsky and Studs Terkeland said his firing was essentially corporate censorship.
And one-hit wonder reggae singer Junior Mervin died yesterday … he wrote “Police and Thieves,” about senseless street violence … it became a hit for punk band The Clash, and turns out it’s just as relevant the 21st century United States as it was to 20th century Jaimaca and London.
The push seems to be born out of frustration with the way the General Assembly works (or doesn’t). One recent example of the General Assembly being out of touch with the wishes of Rhode Island voters is the legislative body’s recent inaction on eliminating the master lever. At State House hearings no one testified in favor of keeping the master lever and public support for removal was robust, yet the General Assembly failed to act. A case can be made that some members of the General Assembly should be held accountable for this failure.
Some are suggesting that the Con-Con will be a place to address this failure. Elected convention delegates could decide to put the decision on eliminating the master lever directly to the voters. The goal of eliminating the master lever might be accomplished but what about the goal of holding the General Assembly accountable? The General Assembly might start to feel even more able to punt on certain issues, because the Con-Con is not the process by which legislators are held accountable
If a Con-Con is approved in the 2014 election, then Rhode Island voters will have a chance to go back to the polls in 2015 and elect delegates to represent their views. Being a delegate is a one-time position that will begin and end with the convention. The delegates will consider and advance several changes to the Rhode Island State Constitution which will then be voted on by the public in 2016.
This is the wrong way to effect change. Right now, the General Assembly can be held accountable by voters: If you don’t like the way they are behaving, you can remove them from office by voting for their opponents in the next election. The Con-Con delegates, on the other hand, have no such accountability. Delegates, unconcerned with being re-elected, can suffer no penalty for failing voters. Delegate candidates could conceivably run as moderates and then work to effect radical changes once elected.
The most powerful penalty we can assign our elected officials, being tossed out of office by voters in a fair election, does not apply to Con-Con delegates. The job of a Con-Con delegate is to alter, perhaps fundamentally, the Constitution. Under Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that effectively ruled that dollars are the equivalent of speech, an unlimited amount of money could flood Rhode Island from out-of-state special interest groups. Think ALEC on steroids. Con-Con delegates will be barraged by special interests supplied with bottomless wealth, perhaps seriously damaging the process.
If it is worth millions to rewrite our laws, how much is rewriting the Constitution going to be worth?
Civil rights could be severely impacted by a Con-Con. There is nothing to stop the delegates from putting measures on the ballot that might reverse the recent, hard-won marriage equality law, for instance. Polarizing issues are especially vulnerable: guns, reproductive justice, immigration, environmental and economic issues are all primed to be hijacked by special interests. Even if voters ultimately vote against the worst ideas the Con-Con advances, it will come at the staggering costs advertising for such elections has reached in recent years. Rhode Island will become a political battleground on a plethora of issues, and citizens will be barraged by advertising and advocates run ragged fighting for and against the proposed changes to the Constitution.
Our state legislature is based on the ideals of representational democracy. Our General Assembly, despite its many problems is the way in which we as citizens engage with important policy issues. The Con-Con is an attempt to perform an end run around the process, and like any high risk play, the end result may be amazing, but it will most likely end in a disaster of wasted money and effort.
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