1. The big news from last night’s budget session was that an amended budget Article 5 was defeated by a vote of 36 to 39, with the Speaker and the Majority leader voting in the affirmative (and losing). This would have suspended for one year a law stating that a budget surplus ($12.9M in this case) must be deposited into the state pension fund.

2. After the vote, Speaker of the House Gordon Fox left the rostrum (Justin last night at 12:04: “An unhappy-looking Gordon Fox is wandering the floor shaking his head”) to determine a next move. It is widely expected that the Speaker/Majority Leader/Chief of Staff of the Speaker etc. will try (metaphorically) to twist a few arms, to have the vote reconsidered.

3. After the “nullification” of the ethics bill vote earlier this year, I looked up some of the finer points of reconsideration in Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure, the guide to parliamentary procedure specified in rule 37(a) of the RI House. The bottom line, rules-wise, is that reconsideration is perfectly in order here. Here are a few of the relevant snippets from Mason’s…

Sec. 65.1: “Thus, if a legislative body passes or refuses to pass a bill, that bill is disposed of for the session, unless the vote is reconsidered”.

Sec. 450.1: “With certain exceptions every legislative body has the inherent right to reconsider a vote on an action previously taken by it”.

Sec 450.4: “The reconsideration of a negative vote on final action is as proper as reconsideration of a favorable vote”.

4. Rules like the above, of course, are not supposed to apply only to votes that leadership loses. They are supposed to be applicable to any substantive vote taken by a democratic decision making body. However, in Rhode Island, the legislative leadership, backed by their minions, supporters and enablers seem to have decided that they are the only ones who get to use the full parliamentary rulebook, whereas legitimate, basic options for rank-and-file members unaligned with leadership who find themselves on the losing side of votes are closed off, on murky grounds no more compelling than “that’s not the way it’s done around here”.

5. A similar dynamic played out earlier this week. A week ago Tuesday, according to Katherine Gregg of the Projo, the House Judiciary Committee voted 6 – 5 against giving a commemorative license plate to a retired magistrate. (I’d post a link to the vote, but House policy is to not post committee votes of bills that are defeated). However, at a meeting of the House Judiciary the following Monday, the vote was reconsidered, and the bill was passed to the floor.

6. Nullification of the ethics bill vote was normatively justified on the grounds that bills held for further study must be reposted, before being considered for a second time by a committee, even at the same meeting (see the Speaker of the House’s legal counsel Susan Pegden’s comments to WPRI-TV’s Ted Nesi on this subject, immediately following the vote.)

Reconsideration of the license plate bill, on the other hand, was not posted on the House Judiciary agenda for Monday.

7. Believe it or not, this is self-consistent with the letter of the leadership’s interpretation of the House Rules. Rule 12(f) says that says “any vote” can be reconsidered; leadership’s position is that “any vote” refers to “any vote, except a vote to hold for further study”, and since an outright vote against sending a bill to the floor is not a vote to hold it for further study, the reconsideration provision can be applied (under either the leadership’s interpretation of the rules or the English language interpretation of the rules).

Time now for a “got that”. Got that? A bill that is straight-up defeated can be reconsidered without prior posting, but a bill held for further study cannot — meaning that “holding for further study” is actually a harsher means of defeating a bill than is actually “defeating” it.

8. The reconsideration of the license plate bill proves, beyond any doubt, that the justification for “nullification” was the dishonest fraud you thought it was.

9. Before the ethics vote nullification, I would have said that chicanery like this occurred mainly because members fail to assert their rights. The treatment of Representative Patrick O’Neill, stripped of his Judiciary committee position for moving to reconsider the ethics bill (you know, like the license plate bill was reconsidered), has ended the viability of this line of reasoning.

If House leadership is allowed to move to reconsider bills when they don’t like the results, but rank-and-file members who differ with leadership aren’t — and are even punished for trying to do so — then the Rhode Island legislature cannot be said to be functioning as a democratic decision making body. This can only be fixed with a combination of substantial rules reform, including a rule that committee members cannot be removed from their positions without their consent (as is the case in the Rhode Island Senate) and a liberalizing of discharge petition rules as well as the removal from their positions of representatives who have a history of disrespect for the democratic process.

10. Final note: Late in the night (actually early in the morning), after the Article 5 had been defeated, Rep. Karen MacBeth made a motion to reconsider, in an attempt to preempt any leadership arm-twisting. Speaker Gordon Fox responded by calling for a recess. Under usual parliamentary procedure, a motion to recess or adjourn does take precedence over just about everything else, but with a contentious issue on the floor when the motion was made, the Speaker should have actually counted votes for and against recess.

If they follow a respectable parliamentary procedure, the RI House should go right back to the business that was pending when the recess was called, i.e. Rep. MacBeth’s motion to reconsider. So who knows what the Rhode Island House will actually do.

 

Featured image: Deputy Majority Whip Christopher Blazejewski, Majority Whip Stephen Ucci, and Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello consult with leadership legal staff after the article’s defeat.