The news keeps coming fast and furious, so here’s my latest attempt to recap the week. Thanks for stopping by. As always, I welcome your tips and comments, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. Here we go.
*** want to get my column in your inbox every Friday? Just sign up right here ***
1) When U.S. Rep. David Cicilline’s political obituary was (prematurely) being written in 2012, did anyone think he would be at the center of an effort to impeach an embattled president almost a decade later? That sharp contrast reflects a political journey with some remarkable twists and turns. Cicilline, 59, has overcome various questions and setbacks while ushering in the post-Buddy Cianci era in Providence, winning a seat in Congress in 2010, going on to scrutinize big tech and now helping to lead Democrats’ second impeachment of President Trump. The Rhode Island congressman’s name appeared prominently on A1 of The New York Times earlier this week – where he also published an op-ed with his rationale for impeachment – and Cicilline remains a familiar face on cable news. There have been low points, too; in 2012, he apologized for essentially sugar-coating fiscal problems in Providence. He later won re-election to the U.S. House that year by a larger-than-expected margin.
In the current moment, Cicilline’s office has received multiple threats due to his support for impeachment and his Providence home remains under the watch of police, although the congressman is unbowed. Referring to the insurrection at the Capitol, Cicilline wrote in his NYT op-ed, “We cannot let this go unanswered. With each day, Mr. Trump grows more and more desperate. We should not allow him to menace the security of our country for a second longer.” Looking ahead, the next chapter in Cicilline’s journey remains unclear. Does he remain in the House, with Rhode Island expected to lose one of its two congressional seats? (He lost a recent bid for assistant U.S. speaker, to Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Republicans are a threat to regain the chamber in 2022.) Regardless of his next move, Cicilline is arguably a singular figure in Rhode Island politics over the the last three decades.
2) One suspects the late Robert “Cool Moose” Healey would be bemused by how the filling of an impending vacancy in the lieutenant governor’s office has become a Full Rhode Island: 1) A growing field of candidates is vying for the pick; 2) Soon to be Gov. Dan McKee said he expects to make the choice, but wouldn’t make a legal challenge if the General Assembly takes it away; 3) Common Cause of RI’s John Marion offered a reminder via Twitter of how the state Constitution restricts this choice to the gov; 4) cross-chamber rivalries are at play, since the House will be peeved if a senator gets the pick, and vice versa; 5) Politics 101 suggests McKee should pick an LG who would be most simpatico while giving him the best shot of retaining the governor’s office in 2022; 6) given this thicket of stuff, McKee is assembling an advisory panel to vet candidates and make recommendations. The panel will include Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena and Rosa De Castillo, a policy analyst in McKee’s office. Other picks for the panel are expected to be named next week.
3) Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, widely expected to run for governor as part of a large Democratic field in 2022, could arguably be a smart pick for Dan McKee’s lieutenant governor. The conventional wisdom suggests he needs to pick a woman with statewide appeal. Gorbea checks those boxes, plus she’s a Latina, she boasts an amiable public persona, and she has a good story to tell about RI’s 2020 election. During an appearance this week on Political Roundtable, Gorbea said she’s continuing to explore a run for governor. Her spokesman, Nick Domings, said Gorbea has not been contacted about the LG role, and, “She fully intends to serve her complete term as secretary of state.”
4) While a Utah liberal is among the many people arrested and charged in connection with the insurrection at the Capitol last week, there’s no evidence to reinforce some conservatives’ claims that Antifa was responsible. “Antifa went in there, did some, you know, bad stuff, raised the flag for Trump and blamed it on Trump,” Rep. Justin Price (R-Richmond) told me last week, in perhaps his only extended interview on the topic. “It’s confirmed.” A similar view was shared on conservative news sources like Fox News and Newsmax, even though the FBI said there was no basis for Antifa responsibility. Ultimately, the belief in this ill-founded theory seems like a variation of Trump’s false narrative about a stolen election. “The Antifa narrative, designed to exculpate the Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol — and also exonerate Trump for encouraging them — has been debunked, yet it persists,” Brian Stelter wrote at CNN. “Another denialist narrative aims to downplay the severity of the attack, even as new evidence to the contrary emerges every day.”
5) With polls showing that a large percentage of Republicans believe President Trump’s lies about a stolen election, how can public officials restore confidence in voting? “I think we just need to continue to have a conversation about all the ways in which we protect our elections,” Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea said this week on Political Roundtable. “Clearly, this country needs to have an ongoing conversation about what measures we have in protecting and securing our democracy. It’s about education, making sure that our children and our adults understand how elections happen, how the government comes into power and what are the security measures that we have for that.” Gorbea points to the absence of widespread fraud in the November 2020 election as proof that relaxed standard for mail ballots do not negatively effect elections.
6) With his pending move into the governor’s office, Dan McKee will gain a potentially significant advantage in the 2022 race for governor, boosting his profile and his fundraising capacity. While he represents a sharp stylistic contrast from Gina Raimondo, he could play well with the big slice of the electorate encompassing conservative Democrats, independents and liberal Republicans who almost made Republican John Robitaille governor in 2010. During a Thursday news conference, McKee vowed to focus on the pandemic and the recovery. Transition spokesman Mike Trainor said McKee is expected to next week reveal names for a series of advisory panels on such topics as budgets, social justice, health and hospitals. Meanwhile, Smith Hill is curious about who will fill such roles as chief of staff, administration director, and counsel in the McKee administration.
7) Back in 1813, Oliver Hazard Perry is said to have uttered, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Over time, given the human capacity for self-injurious behavior, that morphed (through Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo) into, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now, in the aftermath of the Capitol attack, one question being asked is, “We have met the enemy – is he us?” The Times reported that the mob included notorious white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. Writing at Politico, Jack Shafer said it would be foolish to mock all of the rioters as ignorant buffoons: “Based on the early arrests and news reports from the riot, the Capitol insurrectionists represent a bigger slice of white America than just the low-class knuckle-draggers who rolled in from the sticks on Donald Trump’s command. Many of the protesters and rioters we have met through rap sheets and press accounts are solidly middle class.” R.P. Eddy, a former counterterrorism official who runs a private intel firm, told NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston that “in hindsight he believes the problem was something he calls ‘the invisible obvious’ — things that sit right in front of us that we don’t notice. ‘The reason that they are invisible to us … gets to our biases,’ he said. ‘The situation here, I’m unfortunately quite sure we’re going to find, that it was very hard for these decision-makers and these analysts to realize that people who look just like them could want to commit this kind of unconstitutional violence and could literally try to and want to kill them.’ ”
8) Bonus: The notion of “We have met the enemy and he is us,” was crafted in the Pogo comic strip, which ran from 1948-1975, created by Walt Kelly. And there’s a story with a Rhode Island connection, involving the character of Simple J. Malarkey.
“At the time, Malarkey’s inspiration, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was at the height of his political power, routinely destroying reputations in the name of rooting out Communism,” Ben Marks wrote in a 2015 article at BoingBoing. “Kelly should have been intimidated, but he mocked the bilious senator from Wisconsin for a year and a half, until one of the newspapers that published Pogo, the Providence Bulletin, threatened to drop the strip if Kelly didn’t drop the character. Seizing upon this fresh opportunity for parody, Kelly promptly drew a new Malarkey panel, hiding Malarkey’s face under a sack. “I’m afeared us will haf’ta keep these bags over our heads, otherwise that chicken from Providence might recognize us,” Malarkey confided to a cartoon cohort on October 8, 1954. In the context of the strip, the statement was a reference to a Rhode Island Red named Sis Boombah from the previous day’s comic, but it was also a clever slap at that Rhode Island newspaper that had tried to censor him.”
9) Here’s an excerpt from the swearing-in of Melissa Long, who this week became Rhode Island’s first Black state Supreme Court Justice: “As the Rhode Island Code of Judicial Conduct reminds us, ‘[a]n independent, fair and impartial judiciary is indispensable to our system of justice.’ We judges play a critical role in our constitutional democracy. We believe in justice and preserving the rule of law, and that belief has tangible benefits. We know that our decisions have enormous impacts on individual lives and can be transformative. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does, indeed, bend towards justice. Judges paved the way for my being here today: The schools my father attended as a little boy were desegregated after Brown v. Board of Education. The Loving v. Virginia decision decriminalized my parents’ interracial marriage and allowed them to live and raise a family without fear of arrest.”
10) Back in 1924, the Republicans who ruled the General Assembly sharply opposed an attempt by Democrats were pressing to use their minority power “to end the property qualification for urban elections and reapportion the seats in the legislature so as to finally end rural domination.”
William G. McLoughlin recounts the episode in his history of Rhode Island, starting with how filibusters by Democrats stopped majority Republicans from passing legislation. Then: “At the 1924 session of the legislature, the Democrats demanded that the Republicans call a constitutional convention. They refused, and the filibustering began again. This time it lasted six months, until, on June 19, 1924, the exasperated Republicans hired a Boston thug to set off a stink bomb of bromine gas behind the senate rostrum. The fumes forced the evacuation of the chamber. All the Republican members of the senate then left the state and went to live in a hotel in Rutland, Massachusetts. Their absence prevented a quorum, and the senate ended with no legislation bill, not even an appropriation to pay the salaries of government employees and sustain state institutions. Twenty-three banks in the state joined to lend money to the state to cover these expenses till the next session.”
11) The elevation of state Rep. Katherine Kazarian (D-East Providence) as majority whip, and Rep. Mia Ackerman (D-Cumberland) as deputy whip, is one indicator of the changes being made by House Speaker Joe Shekarchi. In other legislative news, the House is expected to vote on its new rules later this month. And the progressive Renew Rhode Island coalition unveiled a package of proposals related to housing, jobs, climate change and other issues.
12) Via news release from AAA Northeast: “Over a 10-year period, the number of pedestrians killed in motor vehicle crashes on America’s roadways increased by a staggering 55 percent, according to a new report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. The deaths, from 2009-2018, came after three decades of declines. In Rhode Island, there were 122 pedestrians killed during that ten-year period, as well as 725 in Massachusetts and 439 in Connecticut. California, with just under 7,500, accounted for the most of the 51,000 deaths …. Recently, AAA Northeast recognized the safety record in the town of Barrington, where through the end of 2019, no pedestrian fatalities have taken place in 60 years. ‘This safety record could not have been realized without the department’s vigilance in enforcement, engineering, and a holistic approach to education. For example, the Barrington public schools make traffic safety education a priority from grades K-12,’ said Lloyd Albert,” a spokesman for AAA Northeast.
13) Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea isn’t concerned by how $400 million in proposed state borrowing will be decided with the typically low turnout of a special election on March 2. “The results of an election are good, as long as they’re open and transparent election, which is what we’re going to have,” she said on Political Roundtable.
15) The attack on a Capitol police officer with a pole bearing the American flag was grimly reminiscent of a prize-winning photo capturing an assault on Ted Landsmark, in a different ugly era in U.S. history.
16) My colleague Sofia Rudin reports on how the final step in getting the vaccine into people’s arm is being handled by Rhode Island’s cities and towns.
17) The Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society are digitizing a series of historic RI newspapers. With more to be added, the two groups say the initial output at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site includes Herald of the Times (1830-1856); Literary Cadet and Rhode-Island Statesman; Literary Cadet and Saturday Evening Bulletin (1826-1829); The Literary Echo; The Literary Echo & Pawcatuck Advertiser; Westerly Echo & Pawcatuck Advertiser (1851-1858); Newport Gazette (1777-1779); The Northern Star; The Northern Star and Warren and Bristol Gazette; The Northern Star and Constitutionalist; Northern Star, Farmer & Mechanics Advocate; Rhode Island Constitutionalist (1826-1855); and The Pioneer Woman’s Advocate (1852-1853).
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org
