I’ve mentioned before that national experts who’ve testified before Rhode Island legislative committees have been astonished at the lack of decorum.  Attend committee hearings on a regular basis, track legislation for a couple of sessions, and it’s difficult not to conclude that the entire process is designed mainly to make people feel as if there is a process — as if public input really could affect the laws under which we live.

But if nothing ever comes of the testimony, then the task of legislators is mainly to look attentive while lobbyists go through the motions and Rhode Islanders offer sincere, nervous, and useless testimony about things that matter to them. Sometimes the lack of weight shows through.

On Tuesday, having waited an hour and a half to give the House Committee on Labor the perspective of some research from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, which he runs and for which I work, Mike Stenhouse was offering a quick summary of his written testimony.  (Listening to the March 11 audio available here, it’s clear the committee didn’t have much patience for him to put his full testimony on the recording.)

The image of the typical minimum wage worker as a struggling single parent is false, he explained.  Most are “young kids” looking for supplemental income, living with their parents in households that have family incomes over $61,000.

This was too much for chairwoman Anastasia Williams (D, Providence), who interrupted: “Are you joking?  Are you standing in front of my committee joking me, right?”

Stenhouse was courteous enough not to point out that it’s not “her” committee, but the people’s. Instead he informed her that the Providence Journal’s PolitiFact team had recently investigated his statement and found it True.

When Stenhouse finished, Williams proceeded to mock his organization and then appeared to have forgotten what legislation they were discussing:

Well, first and foremost, seeing that you are here representing this Freedom and whomever these folks are… Freedom and Prosperity for a certain class of people, my question to you would be, what does a retiree now… would have if unilaterally… umm… the… the… the… I’m trying to cool down here, this is like… pass.

You’ll know the state is ready to pull itself out of the gutter when voters start demanding that their “leaders” are at least better at pretending that they really do represent all of us.