I, and, I believe, many supporters of good and open government would call it a good start.
Rank and file House members, many of them Democrats and a significant number of freshmen stood up and said “No” to the supplemental budget as proposed, and made the leadership change it to allocate more money for cities and towns. For that they should be congratulated and rewarded.
The dissidents not only did something that isn’t done very often — challenging a budget once it has left House Finance — they did something even rarer: they won. For that they deserve an A minus.
Why minus? They stood up. They stood their ground. And they won a stunning victory against an all-powerful, nearly unbeatable opponent. Why cheapen their triumph with a minus?
Because they did it in secret.
Instead of giving the public the vigorous and open debate on budget policies we so desperately need right now to hash out what is happening with the economy and what we can do about it, the House Democrats allowed Majority Leader Gordon Fox to corral theme into the House Lounge behind closed doors and conduct their insurrection outside of the eyes and ears of the public and the press. Apparently, while they were prepared to oppose the leadership,  they didn’t quite have the gumption to openly defy it.
The Democrats huddled in secret conclave not once but twice. Once, on Wednesday when they made it clear they wouldn’t vote for the budget as it is, and again on Thursday when they were told what crumbs the leaders were going to allow to fall to them from the table.
Oh sure, the formal vote to add the money for cities and towns to the budget was taken later, on the House floor, but by that time the membership was only ratifying the agreement that General Assembly leaders had acceded to after the uprising. Make no mistake about it: When the Democrats emerged from that second caucus on Thursday, the deal had gone down. There was no way to stop Minority Leader Robert Watson and the handful of other Republicans from screaming on the floor for a few hours, but nothing was going to change.
What they did may have been legal, but it wasn’t good government.
Differences, political, ideological and otherwise, had been papered over and a course of action was determined that would allow them to take action without their genuine public policy disagreements being aired in the open. (And this is the crew that got a grade of 100 percent on adhering to the spirit of the Open Meetings Law from Secretary of State Ralph Mollis.) 
You deserve to know how zealously, or not, your representative was defending the aid to your community or how vigorously he or she fought the gas tax (which was carried out of the caucus in a casket; killed under the cloak of secrecy).
I asked Speaker William Murphy on Thursday whether the public was being robbed of a debate it deserved to hear.
“Caucuses can be very healthy,” he answered. “If people come into the caucus with the right idea, that they want to have a chance to vent and give their opinions and sometimes people might not want to say what is on their minds when it is being recorded and so forth.”  Yes, political scientists have a technical term for that: political cowardice.
“So there is nothing nefarious about having a closed Democratic caucus,” Murphy continued. “In fact, my understanding is that in this House the Republican Party caucuses all the time and I’m under the impression that all of those caucuses are closed.” Are they closed, or is it just that nobody thinks they are worth showing up to watch? After all, it’s six guys kvetching about how they are never able to get off Square One. 
An amusing aside: I got up to ask Murphy that question on the spur of the moment. I was fuming about not being able to report on the caucus that was just then breaking up and Murphy was just standing there on the rostrum, waiting for everyone to assemble and take their seat. So I got up and figured I’d ask the speaker about all this. Even I didn’t know I was going to ask the question until a minute or so before I did. But Larry Berman, Murphy’s press secretary knew. Berman was standing by eavesdropping, as he likes to do anytime a reporter talks to the Speaker or Majority Leader, and as soon as I asked about the caucus, he had a handout ready that quoted a piece of the Open Meetings Law with the part about party caucuses already marked in yellow Hi-Liter. They were decidedly ready for the question.
Democrats in the House have a special responsibility to be accountable because they have been entrusted with 69 of the 75 seats in that chamber (same goes for Democrats in the Senate, who hold 34 of the 38 seats, but they didn’t hide in a secret caucus; they wimped out in plain sight).
That’s why I call this tiny moment in Rhode Island history a good start. It would have been more meaningful and more effective if they did it on the House floor in front of their colleagues, in front of the public, the press, Capitol TV and God. But it is something that can be built from.
Politicians don’t act because they see the light; they act when they feel the heat. House leaders felt an unaccustomed heat last week, and they acted. Good start for those bringing the heat. (I would recognize each of you by name, but you did your good deed in secret.)
Hiding in the House Lounge had the added benefit for both leadership and rank-and-file of disguising the fact that most (OK, I’ll say many because I don’t have an actual head count, but I think it is most) members just don’t know the details of what they are expected to vote on. If they got on the floor and started asking the most basic questions about what exactly is and isn’t in the budget, it would look bad for both groups. And the whole idea of the secret caucus was to avoid having the House, and especially the leadership, look bad.
A key part of what happened is the issue: state aid to cities and towns, and the likely effect its last-minute elimination would do to property taxes in communities across the state. Because the lawmakers are elected from those communities, and want to get re-elected from them, they for one brief, shining moment were more afraid of you than they were afraid of their party leaders.
Most of them are always afraid of you a little bit once every two years. Honest. Despite the stereotype of the arrogant General Assembly Democrat who is guaranteed re-election every two years no matter what he or she does, I can tell you that even the longest-tenured, safest seated, most powerful legislators at the Statehouse go pale and their hands shake if it is even suggested they will have an opponent in the next election. Sure, some of that is “Oh, crap, now I’m going to have to actually campaign instead of coasting to re-election unopposed,” but even so, the prospect of an opponent makes even the biggest of them get twitchy.
But even though they are a little bit afraid of you every two years, the rest of the time they spend in sweating, quaking fear of the Speaker.
While you have them worrying about you, you should leverage that fear. When there is an issue you care about, call your representative (this will work for senators, too) at home, send him or her an e-mail or write a real letter (contact information is available on the General Assembly Web site www.rilin.state.ri.us). Write a letter to the editor about the behavior of your representative or senator; we’ll run them.
If they get 10 calls or letters on a particular issue, politicians start to think there is a groundswell; if they get 20, they become convinced that the peasants are at the gate with torches and pitchforks. 
Break out the pitchforks!