01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 6, 2006

THE RHODE ISLAND SENATE president just happened to forget to inform the public that his law firm has been paid more than $86,000 by West Warwick, the town that wants to host a Harrah's casino.

Maybe we should trust him.

Joseph Montalbano said it was "probably inadvertent" that he failed to include the information in his ethics report. Meanwhile, he initially refused to spell out what he did to earn the money, citing lawyer-client privilege. Later, he said he did no work involving potential casino land.

Maybe we should trust him.

At the same time last week, Mr. Monalbano was rushing through the Senate a bill to write a Harrah's casino in West Warwick into the Rhode Island Constitution. The details, including exactly how much tax revenue the state would get out of the deal, will be worked out later.

Maybe we should trust the legislature to put the public interest first when it gets around to the details.

This came just days after the Senate, in another rush job while the public's attention was diverted by the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, stripped the governor of his power to put nonbinding questions on the ballot. It was that process that helped the citizens force through the landmark separation-of-powers reform, after the legislature had blocked it for years.

Maybe we should trust the legislature -- and no one else -- to put questions on the ballot from now on.

This came a few weeks after Senate leaders shelved a petition signed by more than 20,000 citizens asking for a voter-initiative process.

Maybe we should trust the legislature to wield power without further involvement by citizens, other than their voting every two years to re-elect incumbents -- many of them unopposed. As Rep. John Patrick Shanley told voter-initiative backers: "Throw me out on my rear end if you don't like it!"

This comes as federal agents are reportedly investigating whether senators used their public office for personal gain. One of them -- John Celona -- pleaded guilty to federal mail-fraud charges, admitting he sold his office to Roger Williams Hospital, CVS and Blue Cross.

Maybe we should trust everyone else.

This comes after two former executives of Lincoln Park were found guilty of conspiring to bribe former Speaker John Harwood, through his law firm that represented the slots emporium, with up to $4 million in legal fees.

Maybe we should trust legislators who put themselves in potential positions of conflict through their legal practices.

After Mr. Montalbano started working for West Warwick, while inadvertently forgetting to inform the public, he offered a public defense of Sen. Stephen Alves (D.-West Warwick) for suing a constituent who wrote a letter to the editor Mr. Alves did not like. The Rhode Island courts ruled that Mr. Alves had improperly tried to deny his constituent his First Amendment rights to criticize people in public office and ordered him to pay back $33,000 -- a portion of what the citizen had to spend in legal fees defending himself against the unjust suit.

Yet the Senate never reprimanded Senator Alves, or even stripped him of his leadership post. When I asked Mr. Montalbano about that, he said, "You're talking to a friend of Stephen Alves." Indeed, Mr. Montalbano said, he "could see somebody" suing someone like that. "That's not a constituent. It's a former opponent who lost an election."

Maybe we should trust the legislature to honor the First Amendment, which young Americans are defending with their blood right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate doesn't need to send any message by denying powerful positions of public trust to someone who does what Senator Alves did.

This comes as the General Assembly has failed to fully enact the separation-of-powers reform passed by 78 percent of voters in 2004. The reform, designed by former Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse and others to make Rhode Island function like the federal government and the 49 other states, bars the legislative branch from engaging in executive functions. Yet the legislature continues to do so, in defiance of more than three-quarters of the voters who supported a binding constitutional amendment, retaining its role in some very powerful executive boards: the Coastal Resources Management Commission, the Narragansett Bay Commission and the I-195 Redevelopment Board.

Maybe we should trust our Assembly leaders to get around to it someday.

Of course, there may be something to the dictum: "Trust, but verify."

For their part, legislators trust that the voters will return the vast majority of them to power in the primary election this September and the general in November. I think they're right.

Rhode Islanders are a very trusting bunch. Almost to a fault, some might say.

Edward Achorn is The Journal's deputy editorial-pages editor. His e-mail address is eachorn@projo.com.