PROVIDENCE — State lawmakers wait anxiously each year — and especially in election years — to find out how much taxpayer money the General Assembly’s Democratic hierarchy will give them to personally deliver to their hometown Little Leagues, soccer clubs, American Legion posts, St. Patrick’s Day parade committees and assorted “right to life” and religious groups.

While much else across state government is being cut to close a massive deficit, legislative leaders have preserved this special $2.3-million pot of “legislative grant” money for year-round distribution to rank-and-file members of the House and Senate in widely varying amounts, ranging from $500 to $15,000, for their pet organizations and causes.

After protesting for years the way, they say, legislative leaders have used these taxpayer dollars as a reward-and-punishment system aimed at keeping lawmakers in line, House Republicans are headed to court tomorrow in an attempt to force out-front votes on the annual grants package.

In an interview late last week, House Minority Leader Robert Watson and House Minority Whip Nicholas Gorham provided a preview of the complaint they said they intend to file in Superior Court, Providence, on the day before House budget deliberations begin on Wednesday.

Gorham, of Coventry, said GOP leaders gave House Speaker William J. Murphy advance notice of their intentions about two weeks ago, in hopes he would commit to a more public approval process for the legislative grants before voting begins on the new state budget , but as of Friday they had gotten no response.

The complaint and the memorandum of law that will follow challenge the “constitutional validity of approximately $2.3 million in local and private appropriations that are controlled by the Speaker and the [Senate] president and their respective staffs.”

As it stands, “it is impossible to divine” from the one-line legislative appropriation in the annual budget bill how much has been set aside for this purpose out of the lawmakers’ $35.6 million budget.

Their request for a summary judgment from the court centers, in part, on Section 11 of Article 6 of the state Constitution which says “the assent of two-thirds of the members elected to each house of the General Assembly shall be required [for] every bill appropriating the public money or property for local or private purposes.”

“Properly viewed,” they argue, this provision “is not only a limitation of legislative power to appropriate money to local and private causes, it is a mandate that any such appropriation be clearly stated so that the nature and extent of the appropriation can be understood and deliberated upon by member of the General Assembly and the public.”

At the very least, they argue, the Constitution requires the disclosure before a budget vote of how much is being appropriate and to whom, “otherwise Article 6, Section 11 is meaningless.”

They also question the legal authority of individual lawmakers — albeit the House speaker and Senate president — to dole out state public money for private purposes “unless they do so pursuant to a specific appropriation passed by the General Assembly” or a clearly stated process by which competing requests are aired and judged.

They also contend: the manner in which the money is currently dispensed violates what is known as the non-delegation doctrine because, simply put, it is all personal — with no clearly stated rules “as to how much, for what purpose, to whom or when the money for legislative grants is to be spent.”

“Reduced to essentials,” they argue in their court filing, “the only substance to the program exists in the minds of the Speaker and President — precisely the type of governance proscribed by the non-delegation doctrine.”

To bolster their case, they cite the outcome of a similar fight in Alabama over the award of community service grants, that was ultimately won by the governor and treasurer of that state in what the court filing here describes as a win for “separation of powers.”

What is happening here is an “even more egregious constitutional violation,” they argued, because the Rhode Island “grant scheme does not appear to vest the discretion for spending grant money in a committee … spending discretion appears to be vested in the defendants only.”

The small House Republican caucus is asking the court to essentially ban the House speaker and Senate president from doling out any more legislative grants until the appropriation is approved by two-thirds of the legislators “with sufficient particularity” that they know what they are voting on, or the monies are awarded under a clearly spelled-out process that lays out “an intelligent principle” for making the decisions.

Assuming their opponents will argue that the Assembly’s Joint Committee on Legislative Services inherently has the authority to dispense the money, they ask the court to declare that approach unconstitutional. In the interim, Gorham produced undelivered and uncashed checks to three of the hometown organizations on his traditional grants request — the Foster Ambulance Corps, the Tyler Free Library and the West Glocester Fire Department — as evidence that he and his fellow Republicans have decided to forgo the money.

Until the issue is settled, Watson said he “will never ask for anything … because to ask anything of that office almost inherently complicates the job that I’ve got to do as the leader of the opposition, and you know, the legislative grants and the thousands of dollars that they represent to have to ask the speaker for them, I’m not sure why any of the legislators feel comfortable.”’

Said Gorham: “If you take grants from the speaker, that makes it all the more difficult to stand up and start criticizing and voting against, as we did, bad programs like the film-tax credits which cost of millions upon millions of dollars. It makes no sense to compromise your ability to be a good representative for a couple thousand dollars.”

The court complaint pits 10 of the 12 current House Republicans against Murphy in his dual capacities as House Speaker and chairman of the Joint Committee on Legislative Services, and Senate President Joseph Montalbano, in his capacities as Senate president and vice chairman of the JCLS, which handles routine hiring and spending for the General Assembly.

The other two Republicans — Gorham and freshman Rep. Steven J. Coaty, R-Newport, have volunteered to pursue the case without charge, according to Gorham.

Asked for comment Friday on the imminent court filing, Murphy issued this statement through a spokesman: “I have not seen the lawsuit. However, I believe that legislative grants are constitutional.”

kgregg@projo.com