Question of the Week: When will Rhode Island next begin a new legislative session without a budget deficit? Thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. As usual, your tips and comments are welcome, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. (A quick program note: I’m taking some time off to wind down 2019, so TGIF will be on hiatus next week and then return on Friday, January 3.) Here we go.
1) It’s déjà vu all over again. Yogi Berra’s words make for an apt description of Rhode Island’s budget outlook as we slouch toward 2020. A deficit of about $200 million looms on the horizon as one of the top challenges facing lawmakers for the General Assembly session starting January 7. We have to reach back more than 13 years, to the administration of former GOP Gov. Lincoln Almond, for the last time when the legislature returned without facing a fresh deficit. The consequence of persistent red ink during good economic times is clear – things will be worse during the next downturn. For now, though, there’s no solution on the horizon for Rhode Island’s structural deficit. During a year-end interview, Senate President Dominick Ruggerio noted how the red ink leaves less money to spend on other priorities. In his interview, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello pointed to a need to get a better return for taxpayers – a frame that could come in handy during ongoing skirmishes with the administration of Gov. Gina Raimondo. For her part, Raimondo rejected the idea that the state is spending beyond its means (although she was surprised to learn the state has been running deficits back to the Almond era), even though the $10 billion budget has grown by billions of dollars over the last 10 years. About a third of the budget goes for Medicaid, and that’s a worthwhile investment in the state’s safety net, she said. Ultimately, Raimondo told me (in an interview set to air Monday on The Public’s Radio), “It’s not about how much you spend, as much as it is on, are you investing and how are you spending? If you invest in education, if you invest in infrastructure, if you invest in job creation, those are good investments that should create jobs and build your economy, which is the way to get out of a deficit. What we have to be careful of is spending in ways that don’t generate jobs and improve our economy.”
2) Priorities from the troika: Gov. Raimondo said key focal points for the remainder of her time in office will be education and job training. Senate President Ruggerio points to education as the Senate’s biggest priority for 2020. Speaker Mattiello’s list includes school safety, the ongoing phaseout of the car tax, and education.
3A) Liz Gledhill, chairwoman of the RI Democratic Women’s Caucus, has a evocative story explaining how she got interested in politics. “When I was in high school, we had a problem with our lunch schedule. We had a very brief time to get lunch and our school at the time was really overcrowded, so students weren’t getting lunch in time and I kept trying to bring attention to the issue and it really wasn’t working. So I staged a protest where I made 670 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to prove that I could provide lunch faster than our service provider at the time. And I think from that point on I realized how powerful a voice can be and how powerful organizing can be.”
3B) Gledhill said the Caucus plans to focus on electing more women legislators in 2020, and that the group’s legislative priorities include the doula bill and fighting lunch shaming. While she doesn’t blame the RI Democratic Party for wanting caucuses to be cohesive within the party, Gledhill said the party didn’t allow caucus members to be part of the process of writing bylaws. “If they had come to the table and said, ‘listen, we don’t have to agree on everything, but let’s make sure everybody has a voice,’ that really could have brought progressives and moderates together to say, ‘all right, we’re under this big tent that everybody talks about,’ ” she said on Bonus Q&A. “Why can’t we have these conversations and disagree, but still move forward in these Democratic ideals?” Click here for our conversation on Political Roundtable. (RI Democratic Party Executive Director Cyd McKenna disputes Gledhill’s description. McKenna said Liz Perrick is a dues-paying member of the caucus and was on the bylaws committee, as was, she said, state Rep. Justine Caldwell of East Greenwich. Further, McKenna said, members of the Women’s Caucus in the Democratic Party were not asked if they wanted to transfer into the new stand-alone caucus created in November.)
4) For people concerned about climate change, a big part of the challenge is breaking efforts to improve the situation into tangible steps with broad support. A case in point is the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), described by the Conservation Law Foundation “as a collaboration of 12 states from New England to the Mid-Atlantic and the District of Columbia working together to improve transportation, reduce carbon emissions, and develop a clean energy economy.” Gov. Raimondo said the initiative makes sense since transportation represents a significant percentage of emissions (she said it’s too early to judge the cost impact). The issue is nonetheless shaping up as a battle in Rhode Island, where Senate Republicans, the Gaspee Project and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity are opposed to the concept, citing concerns about higher costs for gas and other goods and services. More significantly, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello is also an opponent, and the pocketbook issue could resonate with everyday people. “I do not support raising the gas tax, which is already higher than most New England states,” Mattiello said in a statement. “We’re not going to put a more onerous burden on hard-working Rhode Islanders who need their vehicles to get to work. Our gas tax is indexed to inflation and it is used to help fund our critical transportation and transit needs.”
5) Shelby Maldonado, an up and comer from Central Falls, signed off this week amid her third term as a Democratic state rep. She’s taking a job in New York as Hispanic outreach director for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Joshua Giraldo, chief of staff for Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, has announced his candidacy for the seat vacated by Maldonado. The primary is slated for February 4 and the election for March 3.
6) The fatal shooting in Westerly on Thursday puts a renewed focus on gun violence ahead of the legislative session. Yet if recent experience is an indicator, legislative leaders will remain mostly unwilling to make gun laws more stringent. In a statement, the RI Coalition Against Gun Violence said this: “While legislators will often cite our lack of mass shootings as a defense when refusing to support common sense gun violence prevention policy, the reality is, Rhode Islanders face gun violence everyday.”
7) RI Poli/Biz/Media/PR People on the Move: Congrats to Brenna McCabe, ace spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration, and Chris Raia of Duffy & Shanley on their engagement …. Gabe Amo, formerly a staffer with Gov. Raimondo, has joined Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign as east regional deputy director; also joining the Bloomberg team is Sarah Hummell, who helped run Clay Pell’s RI gubernatorial campaign in 2014 …. Brown alum and former ProJo reporter A.G. Sulzberger has won NEFAC’s Stephen Hamblett Award for fighting for the First Amendment …. Stuart Malec, formerly comms director for U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin, has taken on a similar role with U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY).
8) One of the top RI stories of 2019 was how a bill to ensure abortion rights cleared the General Assembly to become law. Considering that, I asked Liz Gledhill, chair of the RI Democratic Women’s Caucus, how some women activists reconcile their ambivalence toward legislative leaders with how Speaker Mattiello and President Ruggerio allowed the abortion issue to move forward (even though they did not vote for it). While Gledhill said she’s grateful that leadership allowed the abortion bill to move to the floor of the two chambers, she calls that “a systems flaw” – “I don’t think that anybody in our General Assembly should have the power to decide which bills come to the floor. I think everything should get a fair vote, and it really shouldn’t have to come to the point where we would have that kind of top-down leadership.” But what about the top-down leadership of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Is she not small-D democratic enough, asked Scott MacKay. “I don’t know, it’s tough to say,” Gledhill said, “ ‘cause Nancy Pelosi is in quite a position right now, and I think what’s demanded of her is that top-down leadership, because Democrats are sort of looking for someone to, say, ‘lead us, tell us where to go, and tell us what to do’. I do think she consults with a lot of the people she works with.”
9) Speaker Mattiello and Senate President Ruggerio are calling the legalization of recreational marijuana a non-starter in 2020 – a not particularly surprising stance in an election year. But Governor Raimondo tells me she will still try to push forward on the issue.
10) Congrats to ProJo Editorial Page Editor Edward Achorn on the pending publication (in March) of his latest book, about Abraham Lincoln. Ed offered this preview: “ ‘Every Drop of Blood’ looks at about 24 hours in the life of Abraham Lincoln — from March 3, 1865, the eve of his second inauguration, until the night of March 4, after he gave what I consider to be the greatest speech in American history (‘with malice toward none, with charity for all’). In it, Lincoln refuses to crow about his great leadership as he stands on the verge of winning the Civil War. Instead, he argues this terrible American tragedy was God’s judgment on BOTH North and South for the sin of slavery. Some very famous people intersect with Lincoln that day. The famous and beloved actor John Wilkes Booth, who will kill him in six weeks, stalks him at the inauguration. Walt Whitman covers the events for The New York Times. Frederick Douglass, long a bitter critic of Lincoln, watches the speech and tries to attend a reception at the White House that night. At first he is thrown out as an African-American; but he manages to get in and tell Lincoln it was a ‘sacred effort.’ Salmon Chase, who yearned to be president and tried to steal the Republican nomination from Lincoln, swears him in as chief justice. Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson is a slobbering drunk at the inauguration. I explore all of these fascinating people, and their passionate feelings about the war. I think we need Lincoln now more than ever. The book is about a bitterly divided nation — even more bitterly divided than in our own time — and how Lincoln strives to tamp down hatred and heal the nation’s wounds. The tremendous hatred that many people, North and South, had for Lincoln – as an ‘unpresidential buffoon and tyrant — has been largely airbrushed out of history but is part of the story. In the face of all of that, no one but Lincoln would have dreamed of giving that address.”
11) There was a lot of excitement on my twitter this week about how Lauryn Hill is set to play the Vets on February 18.
12) U.S. Sen. Jack Reed’s comment on the impeachment this week of President Trump: “[T]he U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress’ constitutional power to investigate. These are gravely serious charges. President Trump’s unprecedented actions have forced Congress to undertake the extraordinary step of considering articles of impeachment. The United States Senate now has a constitutional duty to hold a trial and render a decision. In weighing these articles of impeachment, the Senate must be fair, transparent, and deliberate. That should include hearing from witnesses who President Trump barred from testifying and seeing the actual documents at issue, not just the Trump Administration’s summary of his call to the President of Ukraine. No Senator relishes this responsibility, but every Senator must take it seriously and with an understanding that our system of checks and balances is on trial as well.”
13) Gov. Raimondo said she didn’t like seeing the Brookings’ finding showing a significant loss of innovation jobs in Providence from 2005 to 2017, but she thinks the situation has changed for the better more recently. “If I look at what has been happening in the past three or four years, we’ve seen an acceleration in job growth, an acceleration in wages and an acceleration in innovation jobs. So I think now we are on the right path …. I feel very strongly if we continue to invest in job training, higher ed and education, we will stay on the trajectory we’re on and have more innovation jobs. And I predict that if you look back, say, 2016, in 2026, you’ll see that’s when we turned the corner from a blue-collar economy to a more innovation-focused economy.”
14) What’s better for the environment – a real or artificial Christmas tree?
15) Via Marketplace: “If I’m known for anything, I guess I would be known for being the inventor of Big Mouth Billy Bass.”
16) With 2019 fading, let’s take a moment to remember Jim Taricani, who died earlier this year at age 69 after a long and distinguished career reporting in Rhode Island. As Dan Barry wrote in July, “Jim Taricani was the template. For nearly four decades, mostly for WJAR-TV in Providence, he produced investigative reports that changed laws and lives in Rhode Island, his mission interrupted only briefly by a heart transplant in 1996. No public official wanted to hear that Taricani from Channel 10 was on the line. His reputation for fairness explained the invitation he received to the wake of Raymond L.S. Patriarca, the glowering boss of New England organized crime who, as far as I know, was never once described as ‘media friendly.’ ”
