It looks like Rhode Island Senate President Dominick Ruggerio (D, North Providence) and his leadership team observed the advance of the progressives within the Democrat Party and are moving to conform.  He and Senate Majority Leader Michael McCaffrey (D, Warwick) have published an op-ed that put any lingering proclamations about the senate’s “conservative leadership” to rest.

Like many progressive politicians, they try to capture some of the language of the political Right with sentences such as, “The COVID-19 pandemic is as much an economic crisis as it is a public-health crisis.”  But the policies are all Left and therefore at odds with the insinuation about helping the economy:

• Socialized healthcare
• Wealth redistribution in housing
• Identity politics and regulation of business payrolls
• Legalized drugs
• More-progressive taxation
• Higher energy costs in the name of climate change
• Higher employment costs, harming employers and workers
• Subsidies to decrease “small business” independence

Political leaders who can look at an economy in which nearly 20,000 people stopped looking for work during a pre-COVID-surge month when the nation was recovering and in which there are 36,000 fewer jobs than a year ago and conclude that this is what’s needed are not just pandering.  They’re dangerous.