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A settlement based on suggested guidelines put forth by Judge Jeffrey Lanphear of the Rhode Island Superior Court was rejected this morning by the State of Rhode Island after a behind-closed-doors meeting in chambers at the state courthouse. The plaintiffs were willing to accept the settlement, which would have effectively ended the Southwell v. McKee […]
The clock is ticking on America’s debt. “You cannot spend yourself into oblivion like this country’s been doing,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., says, adding that Republicans are “going to tackle it head-on.” America has reached its current debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion, and Treasury’s extraordinary measures will likely be able to extend current federal spending […]
The RI Center for Center for Freedom & Prosperity, earlier this month signed a national coalition letter urging Congress to oppose a federal attack on citizens’ 401(k) pension savings. The letter opposed Biden’s Department of Labor rules that would allow environmental extremists to divert hundreds of billions of dollars of Americans’ pension savings into green […]
The Food and Drug Administration has permanently changed its restrictions on abortion drugs. Following an official rule change in early January, women no longer need to see a doctor in person to be prescribed chemical abortion pills. The move, according to OB-GYN Dr. Ingrid Skop, is opening women up to the “Wild West” of abortion. […]
Classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found Nov. 2, six days before the midterm elections, in Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. The Biden administration didn’t announce the discovery, which was reported first Monday by CBS News. Biden commented briefly Tuesday, saying he was “surprised to learn […]
The national coalition letter below, which was emailed yesterday to Rep. Jim Jordan, was co-signed by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity along with 69 other national and state organizations. The letter requests that Report Language be added to the Department of Education Appropriations Bill that would bar the DOE from making proposed changes to […]
Congressional Democrats and Republicans agree that Big Tech companies are too powerful, says a Texas congressman who is a leader on the issue. “These Big Tech companies have gotten to the point that they own the government, in a sense,” Rep. Lance Gooden, co-chair and co-founder of the Freedom From Big Tech Caucus, says, adding […]
A coalition of 20 state attorneys general, all Democrats, are backing a federal gun rule in court. The Final Rule, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives named it, would enable law enforcement officials to trace any homemade guns used in crimes. In addition, the rule limits trafficking the weaponry.
Yesterday, Dr. James McDonald, former RIDOH Interim Director and Medical Director, was deposed by attorney Gregory Piccirilli. According to sources who witnessed the deposition, McDonald, under oath, revealed what most close observers suspected all along; that most of the highly-restrictive pandemic measures recommended by RIDOH and adopted by the Raimondo and McKee administrations … were arbitrarily made, likely for political reasons to follow what we now know was a false government narrative, with little or no actual scientific or credible data basis.
In the wake of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade and returning the issue of abortion to the American people and their local elected representatives, a gaggle of leftist district attorneys said they won’t enforce laws enacted to protect the unborn. Some of those rogue district attorneys are from pro-life states and might […]
Team Southwell is on a roll and parents across the state are celebrating. The over three dozen parent plaintiffs and their attorney have been racking up recent victories in Rhode Island’s Superior Court in the Southwell v McKee lawsuit against K-12 school mask mandates. Yesterday (June 6), Judge Lanphear ruled against the State’s motion to […]
An upcoming Biden administration rule change will tie billions of dollars in federal education funding to an array of LGBT policies, forcing school districts and universities to implement controversial rules on issues like transgender athletes in order to receive federal funding.
Are Rhode Island Teacher Unions Unlawfully Collecting Dues? Unconstitutional Provisions Discovered in Many CBAs School District Employees Not Being Informed of Their Rights Providence, RI – A report released today by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity detailed how over 1-in-4 reviewed school district Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA), put into place since the landmark2018 […]
Do you want to stay up-to-date on the latest news and events happening in Rhode Island? If so, then this podcast is for you! We discuss current events that are affecting our state. We also interview people who have a lot of knowledge about certain topics. Our goal is to make sure everyone has access […]
The rule changes proposed last week by the RI Department of Health (RIDOH) are nothing but a blatant power grab, even as state health officials hail it as a major step towards returning our state to normal. Technically, the recommended provisions would amend R.I. Gen. Laws Chapter 23-17 and § 23-17.7.1 to make permanent new […]
by Gerard V. Bradley, Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. Last month Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Lanphear ruled against a group of school parents who sought to enjoin enforcement of Governor McKee’s school-mask mandate. Judge Lanphear’s legal analysis was seriously flawed and his conclusion to uphold the mandate was mistaken. I expect that […]
In ruling against the plaintiffs, the judge essentially ruled that it is not within the purview of the court to over-rule a “political” policy that does not clearly violate a constitutional right. We’re joined by Richard Southwell and other parents to discuss the case: “As does every parent in this state, we are concerned with the […]
BREAKING: As The Current reported Thursday, RIDOH issues its own EMERGENCY RULE mandate, to protect against a likely defeat in the #ParentsUnited lawsuit case.
Some politicians (perhaps an entire political party) think they are the exception when it comes to adhering to laws, standards, and basic good governance.
The extraordinary powers by which Raimondo is governing Rhode Island are floating in this gray area between law and regulation on the one hand and suggestion on the other, and it’s about time lawsuits started.
As public attention understandably turns to legal developments in the toll case and the very visible construction of toll gantries around the state, it is important to note how the governor explicitly broke her word on the critical matter of when toll gantries would go up and highlight the heavy financial consequences to which she has needlessly exposed Rhode Island residents with this completely unprincipled volte-face.
Having posted this morning on the problem with overly aggressive campaign finance laws, I should point out the latest evidence pointing in the other direction. This news about casino-game-company IGT’s big contribution to the Democratic Governor’s Association (DGA) shows that some level of transparency is a good thing, indeed, especially considering that the DGA has been bragging about its record fundraising under Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s leadership:
Records show that IGT donated $150,000 to the Democratic Governors Association in the last six months, while Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was leading the group as chairwoman and former IGT Chairman Donald Sweitzer was serving as treasurer.
The contributions came while the Raimondo administration was negotiating a 20-year, no-bid Lottery contract extension with IGT. Twin River, which has led opposition to the proposed contract extension, donated $100,000 to the Democratic Governors Association on Feb. 28.
The association said Tuesday that it had broken its previous fundraising record during the first six months of the year.
Campaign finance regulations can become a way for political insiders to trip up newcomers. They also allow activists to create the impression of improper relationships based on the likelihood of people knowing each other in a small state like Rhode Island.
That said, the governor’s bringing in a giant donation for a political organization that she leads while also preparing a long-term, no-bid deal with the donor company looks a lot like a quid pro quo.
While we must be wary of giving credit-rating agencies the power to dictate the legislation of our elected representatives, Rhode Islanders should contemplate the significance of this development, which Katherine Gregg reports in the Providence Journal:
A warning from one of the nation’s largest credit-rating agencies, Moody’s Investors Service, has revived the debate over the union-backed continuing-contract legislation that Gov. Gina Raimondo signed last month over the objections of city and town leaders.
The new continuing-contract law indefinitely locks in wages and benefits in expired public-employee contracts. The teacher union lobbyists who took the lead in pushing the bill said it was aimed at preventing cities and towns from unilaterally slashing pay or making employees pay more for their health insurance during deadlocked negotiations.
“The law has the potential to provide collective bargaining units with advantages in negotiations,’’ Moody’s public-finance division wrote in a special report out Thursday that echoed one of the biggest concerns raised by Rhode Island mayors and town administrators.
Moody’s worries that the law may be “a significant impediment to local governments’ ability to negotiate labor contracts,” and as a local elected official participating in negotiations, I can confirm that to be the case. It isn’t just a matter of unions’ refusing to make concessions that help government agencies balance their budgets.
The legislation — and even just the fact of its passage, along with the firefighter overtime bill — is already shutting off areas of discussion. A municipality and union trying to balance current expenses with employees’ long-term interests can’t trust that the state won’t change the rules out from under them. Even in a situation when the current members of a particular union have long demonstrated a desire to work cooperatively with management, decision-makers can’t consider only that relationship, but must worry about the unknowns of what future union members might do and how union-friendly legislators might change the rules on their behalf.
As with so much in Rhode Island government, the legislature and governor have demonstrated that they don’t take the broad, long-term effects of their actions into consideration. One imagines that if they were ever to acknowledge the law of unintended consequences, they’d move swiftly to pass legislation repealing it.
If Rhode Islanders, through their elected officials, wish to establish different norms for teachers in their schools, they should be able to do so, but due process should be the same in and out of government.
Busy with other things, I was excited to look into details about the new rules that appear likely to apply to the House this legislative session. And this is definitely a good thing:
The rule changes, endorsed 14-3, would require House leaders to post new legislative language — with some exceptions — for public consumption at least 24 hours before it is voted on by lawmakers.
The exceptions: The annual House budget bill customarily printed and immediately approved by the House Finance Committee late at night will not be subject to the 24-hour posting rule.
And neither will bills the chairman of a committee deems “either technical, grammatical, or not substantive or substantial in nature” need a day’s exposure to public scrutiny.
But I can’t help but wonder… is that it? I thought we were going to shift power away from the speaker and toward our elected representatives. More time to review legislative language will help, but not much, and only if legislators are sincerely reviewing it. If (as one needn’t be too cynical to suspect) their votes depend more on politics than policy, more time won’t matter a bit.
I’ll also acknowledge mixed feelings about this reaction from the speaker:
Speaker Mattiello has pooh-poohed the debate over the House rules as being of little interest to voters. “I might have gotten no more than two emails on it,” Mattiello told Dan Yorke on Thursday. “Nobody is asking me about it. Nobody cares about it.” Referring to the Reform Caucus of dissident Democrats, the speaker added, “This is an internal game with this ‘high-tax caucus’ wanting to gain ground so they can pass their bad bills.”
He’s undoubtedly right. Progressive activists may have impressed the local media by getting a few people to testify, but anybody on the inside knows what that amounts to. These are folks who’ll turn out anyway and won’t be persuaded to vote for people who don’t align with them. (Raising my hand with some Tea Party been-there-done-that experience.)
Moreover, Mattiello goes right to the key point. At this time, the rules (which remain terrible, from a perspective of political theory) are what will enable him to be a firewall against a destructive ideology that would actually be worse than the insider system under which we’ve been suffering. That he is maintaining his promise of being a firewall is at least a bit of a silver lining.
When Tiverton’s new library director canceled a town Republican event on short notice, last week, she proved the importance of citizens’ vigilance for their basic civil rights.
A deeper question that arises from John Vecchione and James Valvo’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is whether the creation of an income tax makes this sort of corruption inevitable:
Congress has passed several laws, including the Regulatory Flexibility Act and the Congressional Review Act, that require agencies to report on their rules’ economic impact to lawmakers and the public. The president also conducts oversight of agency rules through the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. These good-government measures are meant to ensure unelected bureaucrats can be checked by the public.
Crucially, they are all triggered by an initial determination by the agency of whether its new rule will have a “significant economic impact.” But as our report shows, the IRS has made up a series of exemptions that allow it to avoid basic scrutiny. The agency takes the position that its rules have no economic effect because any impact is attributable to the underlying law that authorized the rule, not the agency’s decision to issue or alter the rule.
A healthy understanding of government process proves this reasoning to be circular: Agencies aren’t supposed to make rules that aren’t authorized by statute, so every effect of every rule could be said to originate with legislators. A rule with effects that are not attributable to the enabling legislation is a rule that should not be implemented in the first place.
In authorizing an income tax, however, the government created an agency capable of entering into our lives and manipulating, even dictating, our use of our own resources. Every rule of such an agency will affect the economy, and therefore every rule ought to trigger a review.
When we’ve discussed tax changes purely from the perspective of revenue and economic effect, I’ve argued that Rhode Island’s circumstances suggest that the state would be better off keeping the income tax and eliminating the sales tax. From a philosophical point of view, however, it’s hard to argue that a free people can really tolerate an income tax — at least one that isn’t more like a sales tax on labor, meaning simple, flat, and easy to calculate.
The story of the school teacher who was bumped from her United Airlines flight to make way for a congresswoman seems like a small thing, in the grand scheme:
A passenger on a flight from Houston to Washington D.C. has accused United Airlines of giving her first-class seat to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. D-Houston, and then threatening to remove her from the plane for complaining and snapping a photo of the Houston congresswoman. ‘It was just so completely humiliating,’ said Jean-Marie Simon, a 63-year-old attorney and private school teacher who used 140,000 miles on Dec. 3 to purchase the first-class tickets to take her from Washington D.C. to Guatemala and back home.
But in that grand scheme, it seems representative, and I can’t help but connect it with the latest strange tidbit to come out about the FBI’s (quote/unquote) investigation of Hillary Clinton’s recklessness as Secretary of State:
“We have email evidence from Andrew McCabe indicating that Hillary Clinton was going to get an ‘HQ Special,’ a headquarters special,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) alleged on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” Friday. …
He explained that the “headquarter special” was an indication that “the normal processes at the Washington field office weren’t followed and he had a very small group of people that had a pro-Hillary Clinton bias who had a direct role in changing the outcome of that investigation from one that likely should have been criminal to one where she was able to walk.”
It’s plain to see what’s going on in the United States. A political elite lives above the law, more like royalty, while the rest of us are supposed to make accommodations for them and follow the surreally complex rules ourselves. The notion that politicians and deep-state bureaucrats see We, the People, as their bosses is increasingly difficult to sustain.
On Tiverton Fact Check, I’ve detailed an example of how the town government appropriates money in a way that (let’s say) conflicts with the clear language of the town’s Home Rule Charter:
The complicating factor is that the vote [to create a restricted revenue source for pay-as-you-throw trash bag revenue] was taken as a resolution in the FTM docket, which should have made it valid for the duration of that year’s budget only. Resolutions have to be renewed each year, and the PAYT restricted account has not been renewed. In other words, the town has been putting that money into a restricted account illegally for six years. To avoid an annual vote, the council would have to present voters with an opportunity to write the account into the charter or provide some other vote akin to a bond approval, making clear to voters that the restricted account will go on forever, or end at some future date.
To some extent, these sorts of things should be expected. Local government generally consists of people who aren’t government experts and who often see themselves as engaged in a sort of volunteer service; process rules can therefore seem frustrating and unreasonable. Additionally, in a council-based system, they’re often overseeing a rolling series of town managers and solicitors who lack a long-term institutional knowledge (which is just objective fact) and have financial incentive to tell the council that it can do what its members want to do (which can be corrupt).
In my view, that’s a reason to keep government limited. If a transaction is too technically or politically complex for a council and well-paid staff to make it under the clear rules of the law, then it shouldn’t be done. In this case, the council created a new rubbish fee without taking additional steps that would have required additional votes of the public, which sounds quite a bit like the proposed PawSox stadium deal, specifically, and moral obligation bonds, in general.
I often wonder how many similar examples could be found throughout Rhode Island if residents were to make a dedicated practice of combing through their municipal governments’ audits.
Is it me or are the policies the Rhode Island General Assembly is implementing sparking more lawsuits, lately, indicating a desperation to find new ways to squeeze money out of a strangling economy? Here’s the latest:
The new rules order online retailers with no physical presence in the state to collect the state’s 7-percent sales tax on purchases by Rhode Island buyers or mail those buyers a letter notifying them that they owe the equivalent use tax on the items. Buyers already owe use tax on purchases made from out-of-state sellers, including websites, but very few actually pay it at the end of the year.
NetChoice, an e-commerce trade group that’s challenged online sales tax policies in states across the country — including a current lawsuit against Massachusetts — is urging senators to reject the sales tax provisions in the Rhode Island budget, which they call “privacy invading,” costly and unfair.
“Don’t pass this law,” said Carl Szabo, senior policy counsel at Washington, D.C.-based NetChoice. “It is hard to understand what the purpose of it is except for the perception that the Internet is hurting Main Street. Now Amazon, Walmart and most of the top 20 online retailers collect and remit sales tax for Rhode Island.”
NetChoice is coming off a victory on Wednesday when Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, responding to the lawsuit, abruptly canceled plans to begin collecting sales tax on Internet purchases from out-of-state retailers.
The next question is who is going to sue over the fact that Rhode Island will effectively be double-taxing the thousands and thousands of Rhode Islanders who pay the minimum use tax on their income tax returns even though they’ve already paid sales tax on all of their online purchases?