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30 search results for: master lever

1

Misunderstanding the Problem of the Master Lever

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Sam Howard wants to conclude that the master lever (allowing voters to simply vote for a political party for all open offices) was never Republicans’ problem in Rhode Island, because he wants to believe that the issue is “their party’s toxicity to a state that overwhelmingly supports Democratic policies.”  One’s first thought upon reading that might be that RI progressives have to get their story straight.  Here’s Bob Plain reporting Progressive Democrat leader Sam Bell’s belief that “the people who dominate the Democratic caucuses in the General Assembly … really seem to stand with the national Republican Party on the core issues that divide the two parties at the national level.”

But Howard wants to believe progressive policies are popular — perhaps because without popularity, they’d just be society-and-soul-destroying nonsense in the service of totalitarians — so he wants to conclude that eliminating the master lever won’t really help Republicans.  Mind you, he’s putting forward his evidence before there’s been a single election without the lever:

Eliminating the master lever was supposed to assist the RI Republican Party (and strengthen RI’s democracy) by assisting in one of the most important things a party needs: candidate recruitment. The problem, as it was posed, was that the prevalence of the master lever basically acted as a deterrent for potential Republican candidates for the General Assembly; why put in the effort of running if loyal Democrats, voting for president or US senator or governor at the top of the ticket, would simply pull the master lever and obliterate down-ballot Republicans? Eliminating the option would allow Republican candidates to run without fear of such occurrences, thereby assisting efforts to recruit quality candidates.

This paragraph shows a deep misunderstanding of the interaction of human nature in politics, at least on the Right.  Nobody should have believed that eliminating the master lever would be anything but a long-term reform.  Generally, conservatives don’t want to enter a lifelong swirl of politics and government’s rotating doors, certainly not to the degree of people who believe in big government, so there’s no giant wave of people so aware of the career path that they’ve carefully calculated their odds of winning, with the master lever considered.

Rather, potential Republican candidates see the current makeup of the legislature, they have a general sense of their odds of winning, and they know they’ll be a targeted minority even if they beat those odds.  That last is not a matter of the popularity of their beliefs; it’s a matter of the political machine, from the master lever to legislative grants to union thuggery to biased media.  It’s also a matter of accelerating from a near standstill.

Assuming digital-technology-enabled fraud doesn’t swamp its effects, eliminating the master lever will bear fruit at the margins, enabling a few more candidates already crazy enough to run to get in.  With each who does, the level of required craziness will drop and the field of candidates will broaden, with most not realizing the effect the master lever had.

2

How Senate Judiciary Distorted the Rules on the Master Lever

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John Marion, of Common Cause, pointed out in the Capitol TV video of the Master Lever hearing (go here and click on the 4-8-14 thumbnail) that you can see Sen. Leonidas Raptakis (D, Coventry, East/West Greenwich) second the motion by Sen. Dawson Hodgson (R, East Greewich, Narragansett, North/South Kingstown) to pass the bill to eliminate […]

3

How Senate Judiciary Distorted the Rules on the Master Lever

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John Marion (and others) are correct that yesterday’s Senate Judiciary hearing on the master lever was an example of how rules don’t matter in the General Assembly, but I think they’re missing the larger problem (which includes elected officials’ not understanding the rules of order).

4

Metts, Master Lever, and the RI Merry-Go-Round

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Yesterday, Patrick mentioned the statement of Sen. Harold Metts (D, Providence) that he supports the master lever (i.e., straight-party voting on Rhode Island’s ballots) because his constituents know what party is best for them.  As that hearing happened, I saw a number of tweets of astonishment that he would say such a thing.

But this is just the annual tradition.  Here’s a paragraph from my liveblog of the corresponding hearing back in 2012:

Senator Metts commented that his father always knew what party was for poor people and what party were for rich. (His grandparents were Republicans.) People may not know the specifics and all the complicated political things that candidates fight about, but people know which party “is going to put food on the table.”

Add it to the long list of evidence that nothing will change until Rhode Islanders start changing the people making the speeches.

5

Senator Harold Metts on Master Lever

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Two things struck me today about the master lever bill and Senator Harold Metts’ words and actions. I wish I had an exact transcript but he made two comments about it that I will do my best to paraphrase and others are more than welcome to correct me if they have the exact words. He […]

7

With Reports of Ballot Machines Breaking Down Around the State…

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… why should we be surprised that a state that can’t direct traffic, can’t implement a new DMV computer system for a decade, and can’t make a new $365,000,000 welfare program work out of the gate would be able to change voting technology without some glitches.  So, as with the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) debacle, leaving people waiting in line for days and not receiving payments, we have people waiting in line to vote and having to leave their ballots in an open box.  (That’s after a surprise week of heavy “early voting” during which no IDs were necessary.)

I’ve wondered whether the the state’s ruling elite finally allowed the elimination of the vote-for-one-party “master lever” option on the ballot because they were confident they had the whole electoral process more or less locked up anyway.  If we’re going to have a system that’s rigged to the core — down to the fundamental assumption that government policy should be built around vote buying — we might as well have elections that feel like something out of a third-world country.

At least the nature of our government system will be unmistakable.

8

For Electoral Trust, Keep the Paper

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I’ll admit that in darker moments I wonder whether the General Assembly agreed to get rid of the Master Lever (which allows a voter to pick everybody in a party with one mark the ballot) — delaying implementation for one election — because leadership knew that digital electoral equipment would be coming online with its own advantages for insiders.

To be sure, the changes actually planned for the election in November aren’t as bad as they might be.  We’ll still be voting on paper, but the machine will transmit the data wirelessly rather than through dial-up.  (Dial what?)  On the other hand, people will now be able to register to vote online, and the state will be testing out an “e-poll book” system that will handle check-in through tablets and (presumably) the Internet, rather than using an actual book that voters have to sign.

The process is important here.  A cynic might wonder whether somebody in state government will be able to keep an eye on votes in real time (with the new ballot scanners) and also watch the list of who has voted across the state, enabling them to drop hints to political friends who needs to be prodded to the polls where.

In the long run, though, I’m still with Glenn Reynolds on the value of paper:

Voting systems rely on trust. Voters have to trust that their own vote is recorded and counted accurately; they also have to trust that the overall count is accurate, and that only eligible voters are allowed to vote. …

The problem is that electronic systems — much less the Internet-based systems that some people are talking about moving to — can’t possibly provide that degree of reliability. They’re too easy to hack, and alterations are too easy to conceal. If the powers-that-be can’t protect confidential emails, or government employees’ security information, then they can’t guarantee the sanctity of voting systems.

Yeah, folks in the news media and those really invested in the out come of elections (like me) are addicted to watching results in as near-real-time as possible, but we shouldn’t be the top priority on election day.  If it takes a whole day, week, or more to produce an election outcome around which everybody is absolutely confident that the process of voting (at least) was fair, accurate, and traceable, then we’ve got the time.

9

GOP Gubernatorial Primary: A Final Word on Ken Block’s Vote for Obama

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When choosing a President based on the very legitimate criteria of his influence over the Supreme Court, had Ken Block considered what it might mean for basic issues of religious freedom, the right to bear arms, and economic rights?

Republicans want a leader who is going to do more than work around the strange ideas that liberals have, after they’ve been implemented in government. His good work on the master lever notwithstanding, the votes for Obama are a strong suggestion that Ken Block isn’t that type of leader.

10

Did Scott MacKay Misinterpret His Own Data?

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RIPR’s Scott MacKay tries to make the case that just because all parts of Providence used the master lever in the last two elections, it’s not any specific district. Also interesting is that no one has made the case that it’s just one part of the state that uses it. It’s used in all parts of the state, but let’s take another look at the data. What happens in presidential election years compared to mid-term elections? How is the master lever used then?

11

Coming up in Committee: Thirty-Two Sets of Bills Being Heard by the RI General Assembly, April 29 – May 1

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1. H7512: Eliminates the straight-party option, aka “the master lever”, from Rhode Island general election ballots. Also, H8072 eliminates the the master lever from Rhode Island general election ballots, and provides for “community outreach” in order “to educate the public, including the elderly” about how to vote without using the master lever. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29)

2. H7767: Repeal of Rhode Island’s voter-ID law. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29)

3. Proposed amendments to the State Constitution, that would require ratification by the voters:

• H7024: Trades an extension of Senator/Representative terms to 4 years, for a term-limit of 3 terms. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29) I’m not in favor of across the board 4 year terms for the Rhode Island General Assembly, but if they were to be implemented, shouldn’t they be staggered so roughly half the seats are up every two years?

• H7458: Reduces the number of House districts to 50, with two representatives being elected from each district, one male and one female. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29)

• H7593: Unambiguously extends the jurisdiction of the State Ethics Commission to the legislature (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29)

• H7594/S2420: Removes free-speech protections from any activity that involves the spending of money. (H Judiciary; Tuesday, April 29 & S Special Legislation and Veterans’ Affairs; Wed, Apr 30) The publication of newspaper editorials that offer candidate endorsements could be regulated by the government under this amendment — that is, if there’s weren’t a First Amendment to the Federal Constitution, that supersedes any attempt by Rhode Island’s governing class to limit political speech.

• S2113: Requires “Senators, representatives and general office holders [to] contribute twenty percent (20%) towards the premium for health care coverage paid for by the state of Rhode Island”. (S Special Legislation and Veterans’ Affairs; Wed, Apr 30)

• S2397: Changes the state’s current duty under Article XII to promote schools and libraries into a (judicially enforceable) “right to an adequate education”. (S Special Legislation and Veterans’ Affairs; Wed, Apr 30)

• H8014: Line item veto (including the option of line-item reductions), with the GA able to override any item through the usual process. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29) One thought here: Does a provision like this need some kind of protection, so that the GA can’t just override everything that was line-item vetoed, with a single en masse override vote?

4. S2309: Repeals the the provisions in the law allowing “deferred deposit” loans, i.e. “pay-day” loans, and that allow check-cashing businesses to automatically operate as pay-day lenders. (S Commerce; Thu, May 1) According to the official description, this is a complete repeal of pay-day lending.

5. H7263: Clarifies that existing law states that the home address of someone confined to a correctional facility, for voting purposes, is the address they had before they began serving their sentence, and creates processes to make sure this law is properly enforced. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 29)

14

Speaker Mattiello at the Rhode Island Taxpayers Summer Meeting, Part 1

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A retro-liveblog of remarks made by Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives Nicholas Mattiello, at this Saturday’s summer meeting of the Rhode Island Taxpayers organization. The areas the Speaker touches on include education, the gas-tax, reducing regulations in RI, and some general ideas about what governing means and how it should be done.

15

Coming up in Committee: Seventeen Sets of Bills Being Heard by the RI General Assembly, May 20 – May 22

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3. S2657: “The information contained in a portable electronic device shall not be subject to search by a law enforcement officer incident to a lawful custodial arrest except pursuant to a warrant”. (S Judiciary; Tue, May 20) The same bill was vetoed by Governor Chafee two years ago and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Governor Jerry Brown recently vetoed a similar bill in California, telling “the legislature not to require warrants for cellphone searches, saying the issue belongs in the courts”. We’ll see what happens in RI this session.

4. S2985: Allows “a health care facility licensed as an organized ambulatory care facility” to operate at multiple locations without having to seek an individual license for each site. (S Health and Human Services; Tue, May 20)

5. S2208: Extends full state school-housing facilities support (which I believe means state aid to assist with capital construction costs) from district-sponsored charter schools to any Rhode Island charter school, e.g. Mayoral academies. (S Finance; Thu, May 22)

6. S3014: Adds “the real property of any person having debts secured by casino-issued lines of credit” to the list of property “exempt from attachment on any warrant of distress or on any other writ”. (S Finance; Thu, May 22)

7. S2072: If the annual gross receipts of a Rhode Island C-Corp or LLC are less than $500, the corporation gets an automatic tax-refund in the amount of the difference between its gross receipts and the $500 corporate minimum tax it would have to pay… (S Finance; Tue, May 20) …i.e. changes the corporate minimum tax from a tax that certain corporations owe to the government just for existing, to requirement that certain corporations pay the government the first $500 they make each year in the form of corporate income tax.

16

Coming up in Committee: Twenty-Six Sets of Bills Being Heard by the RI General Assembly, May 6 – May 8

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1. H2059: Prohibits standardized testing from being used as a graduation requirement from Rhode Island high schools until after July 1, 2017. (S Education; Wed, May 7) What’s going on inside the Rhode Island’s Senate backrooms, with regards to education testing? (More detail after the jump).

2. S2030: Requires employers with 200 or more employees to apply to participate in E-verify by January 1, 2015, and all employers to apply to participate in E-verify by January 1, 2016. Employers are required to keep applying every 60 days, until they are accepted. (S Judiciary; Tue, May 6)

3. Gary Sasse and John Simmons will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, May 8, to give testimony under the heading of “Analysis and discussion of determining the payment or non-repayment of moral obligation bonds relating to 38 Studios and the consequences of such choices”.

4. H7437: Writes into law in-state tuition at RI public colleges and universities for students, including illegal aliens (but not non-immigrant aliens) who graduated from a Rhode Island high school that they spent three years at, including illegal aliens who have applied for citizenship, provided that the Federal government has provides a pathway to citizenship as part of an amnesty law. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 6)

5. S2335: Eliminates tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge, replacing the anticipated revenue with a multi-part formula requiring that fixed percentages of the total state budget be annually appropriated to a “transportation infrastructure fund” and adding a temporary 5% surcharge to motor vehicle fees to help initially seed the infrastructure fund. Also, if a Federal internet sales tax is adopted, instead of the RI sales tax dropping from 7% to 6.5%, as is specified in current law, the sales tax would only drop to 6.625%, with the 0.125% difference going to the infrastructure fund. Also, creates a study commission to look at eliminating the gas tax. (S Finance; Tue, May 6)

6. H7776: State bailout of the Central Falls pension system. According to this bill…

The state is liable to the retirement system for the cost of funding a retirement system for the existing retirees of the city of Central Falls who are members of the system under this section and chapter. (H Finance; Wed, May 7)

17

Let’s Slow Down There, Mr. Speaker

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I like Speaker Mattiello’s talk about being pro-business and wanting to improve the economy but I think he may already be contradicting himself when he says he wants to give power back to the members of the House while also saying he may not have time to consider certain issues.

18

The Mattiello Speakership; Past, Present and Future

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Past: It was difficult to look at the (unsuccessful) Marcello coalition and believe they were offering reform, as much as they were offering a refashioned oligarchy to replace the old one.

Present: Here are three specific proposals for rules reform, consistent with Speaker Mattiello’s call for a House of Representatives that is truly run by its members:

  • A prohibition on members being removed from a committee, without their consent, after they’ve received their initial committee assignment from the Speaker (this is so non-radical a proposal, the Rhode Island Senate already does it).
  • Creation of a clear procedure — that everybody understands exists — for rank-and-file members to use to recall bills “held for further study” and place them on committee agendas for up-or-down votes.
  • Tidying-up the discharge petition procedure for freeing bills from committee, removing the current rule preventing their use until 50 days into the session, and removing any ambiguity about the “only one petition to be presented for a public bill or resolution during the course of a session” clause in the rules meaning one petition per bill, as opposed to one petition per year.

Future: Trying to downplay the serious differences and avoid explaining the errors of progressivism and the excesses of unionism in order to ease the process of political coalition building isn’t likely to stop the progressives from immediately coming after Speaker Mattiello, or the unions from shifting their support elsewhere, if they don’t get their top agenda items. With the help of some standard-issue Rhode Island political inertia, the new Speaker may be able to maintain the coalition he has assembled for a time, but to prevent it from being whittled away, he will need to resolutely work at convincing a broad swath of Rhode Islanders about why his version of “jobs and the economy” is superior to competing versions which have strong constituencies amongst activists in the Democratic party.

20

RI Jobless Rate Increases

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The Rhode Island unemployment rate went in the wrong direction again in July as did the number of jobs in the state. What did our General Assembly do this past session to fix this years-old problem?

24

DAILY SIGNAL: Iran, Ukraine, and Trump Behind Closed Doors. Former EU Ambassador Tells All in New Book.

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President Donald Trump’s greatest foreign policy achievement was the Abraham Accords advancing peace in the Middle East, says Gordon Sondland, who served as ambassador to the European Union under Trump. “I think the strategy behind the Abraham Accords was you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result,” Sondland says. The Abraham […]

25

What Organized Labor Thinks of Workers

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To understand Rhode Island politics, one must understand the activities of organized labor (that is, unions), and to understand their activities, one must understand their attitude.  (By the way, one should also know that reporters for the state’s major daily newspaper, the Providence Journal, are unionized under the AFL-CIO.)

This is from a Providence Journal article by Katherine Gregg about a press conference promoting legislation from Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo that would impose a new tax on large companies whose employees are on Medicaid:

“There is a loophole in the Rhode Island health-care system allowing certain large corporations to avoid their responsibility to provide adequate coverage to their workers. Instead they shift employee health-care costs to the state budget from their own balance sheet,” said George Nee, president of the RI AFL-CIO.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Hold on there, a second.  When did it become my employer’s responsibility to take care of my health?  Put from a perspective that sees workers as adults capable of making their own decisions, when did it become the case that when we choose for whom we want to work, we’re picking the people who will take care of us?

We’re not wards of our employers.  They aren’t our parents; they aren’t our masters.  That’s a huge stolen base in our rights and our autonomy.

Why would labor organizations — who claim to be all about the rights and humanity of workers — see us as something like children who need to be cared for?  Because they have a worldview that breaks us all into classes of people, in this case workers and management, and they want workers to feel like they are something more like servants under the protective thumb of a master so that they, the unions, can edge into the relationship promising that only they have the strength to go up against the master.

Once they do that, it ceases to be your job, for which your employer pays you an agreed upon rate, with agreed upon benefits.  It becomes the union’s job, which you get to fill for the moment, as a nameless servant of the boss and a client of the union.  One uses you for labor, and the other uses you for leverage.

27

The General Assembly’s Distorted View of Its Own Role

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Even before I’ve managed to work through every bill that made its way through the General Assembly, this session, I’d have to say that legislators did grievous harm to the value of diplomas from Rhode Island public schools.  At a minimum, the General Assembly undermined even a pitiful baseline for what the piece of paper proves and catered to the teachers’ unions to limit administrators’ (already meager) leverage in trying to get them to work harder and perform better.  There’s really no question, at this point, that the brief ray of work-through-the-system education reform has effectively been blocked out.

That’s a shame, and a tragedy for students who have no choice but to go through government-branded schools in the state.

Salt in the wound is the expressed reasoning of Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston):

“I became frustrated with the waiver process,” he said. “It produced inequitable results. Depending on where you lived, some communities were more liberal than others.” …

“That’s what government is supposed to do,” he said. “In a unique way, it’s supposed to serve the most humble members of our community.”

Notice that it’s Rhode Islanders, specifically students, whom the speaker sees as “humble”; it’s certainly not the legislature, whose members apparently have the massive competence to micromanage an education system serving over 100,000 children during its six-month, part-time adventure in telling other people how they must live.

Giving communities the ability to set different expectations is exactly the way to ensure that our government is representative.  If one town wants to ensure that its diplomas are known far and wide to be proof of a mastery of knowledge and ability to learn, then families that prioritize such things will move there.  If a city wants schools that amount to thirteen-year courses in building self-esteem, then it will produce the predictable results.

The General Assembly is not an appeals board for people dissatisfied with their communities to seek a solution that applies to the entire state.  Local opposition is one of the few areas of accountability that government-branded schools actually face.

If members of the General Assembly really want to empower families to find the best opportunities for their own children, they should allow parents and guardians to choose where to direct the funds that the system sets aside for their children.  It shouldn’t only be wealthier Rhode Islanders who are able to save their children from an unaccountable system that is set up mainly to preserve the high-paying jobs of teachers and the political power of unions.

28

Coming up in Committee: Twenty-Four Sets of Bills Plus One Ceremonial Resolution Being Heard by the RI General Assembly, April 8 – April 10

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1. S2091: Repeal of the master-lever, i.e. the option of using a single mark to vote for all of the candidates from one party (while ignoring non-partisan races, and creating general confusion in elect more-than-one races), from RI General election ballots (S Judiciary; Tue, Apr 8)

2A. H7944/S2778: Adds fire districts to the “fiscal stabilization law”, the law that allows the state to displace the elected local governments of financially distressed communities and supersede them with budget commissions and receivers. (H Finance; Tue, Apr 8 & S Finance; Tue, Apr 8) This is pretty obviously directed at the Central Coventry Fire district. It’s a single-sponsor bill — but the single sponsor is Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, though it had submitted by then-Rep Mattiello before all heck broke loose at the statehouse. Also worth noting is the simultaneous-hearing fast-track the bill appears to be on.

2B. H7943: Replaces the town/city council president on a budget commission of a town/city that’s under one, with a member chosen by a vote of the town/city council. (H Municipal Government; Thu, Apr 10) This bill could also be described as “replaces Albert Brien on the Woonsocket Budget Commission with someone yet to be determined (at least as far as the public knows)”. People have a better case for taking to the streets shouting “It’s a coup! It’s a coup!” in response to this bill (though it would still be a stretch) than they do in response to Gordon Fox’s resignation.

3A. H7939: Provides for information related to mental-health related involuntarily commitments to be added to the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) database used for conducting firearms purchase background checks. The records sent to database will be from cases where there has been a demonstration of “clear and convincing evidence that the subject of the hearing is in need of care and treatment in a facility, and…continued unsupervised presence in the community would, by reason of mental disability, create a likelihood of serious harm”. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 8)

3B. H7587: Changes firearms permitting by local law enforcement agencies from a “shall issue” process, to a “may issue” process requiring an applicant to show a “good reason to fear an injury to his or her person or property” or another “proper showing of need”. (H Judiciary; Tue, Apr 8) As noted previously on this blog, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that issuing permits allowing the carrying of firearms off of private private on an exclusively “may issue” basis is violates the Constitutional right to bear arms.

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