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Rod Driver: Rhode Island House: Back to the bad '80s

01:00 AM EST on Monday, March 7, 2005

FEB. 17, 2005, was a dark day for Rhode Island. In the 1980s, special pension bills had been slipped through the General Assembly unseen. Credit-union regulatory bills were quietly killed, without even a committee vote. A bill to eliminate credit-union liquidity reserves was passed under false representations. These and other outrages cost Rhode Islanders hundreds of millions of dollars.

So in the early '90s, the House of Representatives adopted some new rules. Committee chairmen were required to honor sponsors' requests for consideration of their bills. The public was to be notified of hearings on bills. Members were to be allowed to see bills before voting on them, and the House would pass no more than 40 bills in one day. Of course, the speaker of the House was the dominant player.

But in 2005, Rep. William Murphy (D.-West Warwick) was re-elected speaker, by a vote of "only" 45 to 30. So on Feb. 17, a majority in the House acted to give the speaker virtually every bit of power that the position might previously have lacked -- shutting out the minority entirely. During a four-hour debate on the rules for 2005, the majority rejected 20 attempts (by Representatives Savage, Watson, Gorham, Long, Amaral, Voccola, Menard, Caprio, Smith, Ehrhardt and others) to preserve some of the safeguards.

The results are as bad as the rules of the 1980s -- in some respects, worse.

Last year's rules provided that if a committee chairman fails to consider a bill at the sponsor's request, the speaker "shall" send the bill directly to the House for consideration. The new rules say that the speaker "may" do so -- at his or her discretion.

A petition to discharge a bill from committee will now require the signatures of 38 representatives, instead of 30. (The no longer sufficient 30 is the number of votes Rep. John DeSimone got in his unsuccessful race for speaker.)

Among other new rules, the speaker, the majority leader, and the minority leader may drop in on any committee to vote on any bill.

A committee may consider a bill without notice to the public and without copies' being distributed. It only requires the acquiescence of a simple majority of the committee members who happen to be in the room.

Representatives may now have little opportunity to see bills before voting on them. Bills may be distributed as late as half a day before the House votes -- and sometimes not at all.

A bill may skip the committee process entirely and be passed immediately on the floor unread, unless one-third of the members object. Even in the 1980s, any one member could insist that a bill go through the committee process.

And if any power for the speaker and majority leader has somehow been overlooked, the new rules may now be suspended without the consent of the minority leader.

Even in the 1980s and '90s, rules that got in the way could be suspended. On June 6, 1991, I tried to enforce a rule limiting the House to 40 bills per day and requiring advance distribution of bills. The leaders simply moved to suspend the rules.

The motion was enthusiastically seconded by Representatives Robert Weygand and James Langevin -- future statewide officeholders -- and it passed, 72 to 13. In the next few days, hundreds of unread bills were passed faster than you could turn the pages. Several of these bills did just the opposite of what they were alleged to do.

Why would any representative think these activities or the new rules are acceptable? For that matter, why does the majority routinely do whatever the speaker wants?

The answer lies in a simple, unwritten, self-fulfilling rule: To get one's bills passed, a representative needs the blessing of the speaker. And to earn this blessing, the representative must do whatever the speaker wants.

This irresponsible process will not change until legislators add more calcium to their backbones -- or Rhode Island voters and media pundits start paying attention. We Rhode Islanders criticize the General Assembly, but we traditionally re-elect our representatives and senators, or promote them to higher office, oblivious of their records.

Here's the roll call on final approval of the House rules for 2005:

Yes (40)

Ajello (D.-Providence)

Almeida (D.-Providence)

Carter (D.- N. Kingstown)

Church (D.-N. Smithfield)

Coderre (D.-Pawtucket)

Corvese (D.-N. Providence)

Costantino (D.-Providence)

Crowley (D.-Newport)

Dennigan (D.-East Providence)

Diaz (D.-Providence)