Today is the 51st day of the Rhode Island House of Representatives 2013 session. Day 51 is of significance, because it is the day on which it becomes possible for a majority of House members to remove a bill from committee, by means of a discharge petition. The relevant House rule is rule 20…

(20)(a) No petition to discharge a bill or resolution from Committee shall be appropriate for presentation until after the fiftieth (50th) legislative day and until the bill or resolution shall have been in the possession of the Committee for no less than sixteen (16) legislative days. On any day after those requirements have been met, the prime sponsor of a bill or resolution may present a petition in writing to discharge the committee from further consideration of a public bill or resolution which has been referred to a committee, and by no other procedure, but only one petition may be presented for a public bill or resolution during the course of a session. The petition shall be placed in the custody of the recording clerk of the House who shall arrange some convenient place for the signatures of the members to be placed thereon in the presence of said clerk. A signature may be withdrawn by a member at any time before the petition receives sufficient signatures to become effective, and such petitions shall become effective, and shall serve to discharge a committee from further consideration of the public bill or resolution and shall cause said public bill or resolution to be placed upon the calendar for action, when any thirty-eight (38) representatives shall have affixed their signatures thereto, provided, however, that if, after the bill or resolution is calendared but before it is taken up, enough signatures are withdrawn so that the number of effective signatures falls below thirty-eight (38), the bill or resolution shall pass off the calendar.

(b) At the time the petition is properly submitted to the clerk of the House, a notation shall be added tothe travel of the bill section for that particular legislation as it appears online.

(c) During House consideration of any discharged public bill or resolution, no motion to recommit or lay on the table shall be entertained by the Speaker until every member desiring to be heard has been recognized.

I haven’t written about discharge petitions in this space previously, because I wasn’t sure they could be applied to bills held for further study. According to the text of House rules, the vote to hold a bill for further study is a vote on “a motion to report the bill or resolution to the House with a recommendation that it be held for further study”. However, during the Judiciary Committee’s nullification of the Ethics bill vote earlier this year, we learned that bills held for further study aren’t considered to have been reported to the floor, and remain in the possession of the committee.

If a bill held for further study remains in committee, it means a discharge petition can be applied.

A discharge petition is not exotic parliamentary trickery. Rather, it is an explicit operationalization of the idea that the final authority on all matters of importance within a legislative body is supposed to be a decision made by the group, not by a single member. A discharge petition process provides an orderly means for a majority to assert itself on a specific issue, when their position differs from that of the leader’s — a circumstance that should be anticipated, since it is unlikely that a legislative leader will agree with the majority view on every issue. (Can you think of any issues this might apply to, in the current RI legislature?)

The nature of a decision-making body is determined by who wins out when the majority of a body wants one thing while the leader, who is just a single member, wants something different. In a democratic process, you get one answer. In a dictatorial process, you get another.

Of course here in Rhode Island, that everyone agrees that a legislative chamber should be run democratically cannot be taken for granted. Putting as positive a spin on the viewpoint as is possible, there are proponents of giving a single leader absolute control of the legislative agenda, under the belief that day-to-day activities become unmanageable if carried out according to actual democratic principles, and that it is close enough to democracy to have a legislative agenda set by one member, so long as final decisions on substantive matters are made by majority vote. But it is difficult to believe that unmanageable chaos will result, if rank and file members from time to time develop a little spine, trust that they understand some of the issues before them as well as whomever the Speaker (or Senate President) consults with to decide which bills to release from committee, and on their own send a bill or two to the floor.

The rub in the RI House rules is that only the primary sponsor of a bill can initiate a discharge petition. This means that an identifiable member of the RI House has to be brave and risk punishment from the Speaker, by taking substantive action on a bill that the Speaker does not want passed. We saw what happened earlier this year when a Representative called for a committee vote without the unofficial — i.e. the formally unnecessary — permission of the Speaker; the Representative (Patrick O’Neill) was stripped of his committee position by the Speaker.  Would a representative who attempted to move a bill out of committee via a discharge petition be treated the same way? Were that to occur, the Speaker who recently spoke in public about the importance of “standing up” for democracy would be guilty of an act of the utmost hypocrisy.