Politics as Usual 

By JIM BARON 

Anytime a bill that makes it all the way to the floor of the House of Representatives and then loses, it’s news. This time it is good news.

An ill-conceived piece of legislation intended to circumvent the Electoral College crashed and burned on the floor of the House despite having a powerful committee chairman – House Judiciary’s Donald Lally – as a prime sponsor.
The bill was talked nearly to death for well over an hour on Thursday before being finished off by a 28-45 vote.
What was truly amazing was that a few members actually stood up and said their minds were changed by the floor debate and although they intended to support the bill, they would instead oppose it. Who knew the lawmakers were even listening to one another, let alone thinking about what was being said and allowing the discussion to change their thinking. (I would add, ‘who knew they were thinking?’ But that would be a cheap shot.)
The argument that seemed to carry the day is the one that strikes at the heart of the silliness of the bill, which should have been titled “The Ignore the Will of the Voters Act of 2009.”
According to the RI Board of Elections, Democrat Barack Obama got 63.1 percent of the votes cast for president last year and Republican John McCain received 35.2 percent. But had McCain won the most popular votes nationwide (O.K., he didn’t come close, but I’m saying what if) then all four of Rhode Island’s electoral votes would go to McCain if Lally’s bill had been law at the time. In 2000, all of Rhode Island’s votes would have gone to — gasp! – George W. Bush.
If I were an elected legislator, I would think twice about voting in favor of a bill that so blithely and so flagrantly flouts the clear intent of the voters.
Proponents of the bill will tell you that Rhode Island’s votes went into the calculation of the nationwide popular vote, so the mechanism that would have given Rhode Island’s four electoral votes to the guy who lost nearly 2-1 in this state is carrying out THAT will of the voters. If that sounds like hogwash, that’s because it is. And by a landslide vote, the House of Representatives recognized it as such. Good for them.
What the bill would have done is make Rhode Island a party to an agreement with other states that have already decided to adopt this cockamamie scheme, and once there are enough states in the so-called compact to constitute an Electoral College majority, they would spring into action and pledge all of their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most popular votes.
The thing is, a national popular vote might be a good idea. There are arguments on either side. Some folks say the Electoral College gives smaller states like Rhode Island more influence than it might otherwise have in a national election, and there may be a bit of truth in that. But there is also truth in recognizing the reality that by being such a lopsidedly Democratic state, we squander any influence we might have had under the current system and no candidates pay attention to us after the Democratic primary is over.
The way I look at it, election laws should be there to facilitate the citizenry coming out to cast its ballots, and have those ballots counted fully and fairly to determine who the elected officials should be in the nation, state, senate and representative district, city and town and any smaller subdivisions that elect leaders. Potential campaign strategies should not be a factor in election laws.
The Fair Vote people who are putting so much energy into circumventing the Electoral College should instead challenge it directly if they want to get rid of it. Lobby Congress for a constitutional amendment to abolish it. If it succeeds, they get their way. If it doesn’t that means they don’t have the necessary political and popular support so their effort should fail until they can marshal such support.
You saw what happened in the presidential race in Florida in 2000, and you see what is still (STILL!) happening in the Minnesota Senate race. What could happen if every popular vote in every state in the union – hell, even if it is only a handful of states – gets subject to the challenges and legal scrutiny that has kept the Al Franken-Norm Coleman senate race from being decided in Minnesota? What happens if we get to Jan. 20 in a year after a presidential race and the election returns are still tied up in court with no end in sight?
Until something definitive can be done, like changing the constitution to institute a popular vote for president, we shouldn’t be monkeying with well-intentioned but nonetheless harebrained schemes to circumvent the Electoral College.

Assembly made the right move overriding compassion center veto
The General Assembly also did the right thing (Wow! Twice in one week! Who woulda thunk it?) last Tuesday when both the House and Senate voted to override Gov. Donald Carcieri’s veto of the bill to create compassion centers to legally distribute medical marijuana to sick people whose doctors say it will help them.
Perhaps it is time for the U.S. Congress to consider legalizing marijuana altogether. Yes, I mean even go past Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s bill to decriminalize up to 3.5 ounces of the drug and make it a legal commodity, regulated and taxed like alcohol.
When the first laws making the drug illegal were passed, people smoking marijuana was a rare and foreign phenomenon, limited to immigrants from Mexico, people who live in poor urban neighborhoods and jazz musicians.
But for the past 40 years now, millions of people have smoked marijuana in this and just about every other country on the planet and the adverse medical effects have been nil. If people’s lives are damaged by marijuana – adults or children – that damage has come not from the substance itself, but from the laws against it: jail, losing or not getting jobs, losing college loans or scholarships, criminal records that last a lifetime.
If marijuana is not doing serious physical or mental damage to people, why are we as a society so intent on doing legal damage to them?
A really good argument can be made that if everyone who drinks alcohol put it down today and started smoking marijuana instead, society would be better off by tonight. Fewer people would die or be maimed on the highways, fewer spouses and children would be verbally or physically or sexually abused, fewer people would show up at hospitals with corroded livers, police would have less vandalism, fighting and other rowdiness to deal with. The billions of dollars that are spent every year (if not every month) on tracking down, prosecuting, imprisoning and supervising on probation and parole people who use marijuana could be put to better use. Our prisons would free up space for violent felons who belong there, not some luckless mope caught with a bag of pot.
Cottage industries that would spring up to grow, process, package and sell marijuana would provide jobs and generate taxes at each step in the process — laws would be best designed to promote such small businesses, rather than have the tobacco conglomerates bigfoot the industry.
Also, organized crime and drug cartels would be deprived of the money they now reap from the tens of millions of people who want a product their government makes illegal.
There is virtually no downside.
Spare me any talk about it being more available to kids. What prompted me to write this was the inanity of Governor Carcieri’s veto message on the compassion centers, especially the part where he says: “Allowing the manufacture and sale of federally illegal drugs would send the wrong message to our children and place them at risk.” Give me a break.
If your high school kid is not using marijuana now, it is because he or she does not want to, and you reared them to avoid it. It’s not because it is not available to them. If they want it, they can get it, without leaving the corridors of their schools. Just because there is a non-profit center to make it easier for sick, crippled people to get marijuana to treat their cancer, multiple sclerosis, AIDS or other disease is not going to affect the access teenagers have to the drug one whit, more or less. If you think it would you are kidding yourself.
Perhaps one of the few things that could limit a kid’s access to pot is to have it sold by a businessman with a license and a livelihood to protect, who maybe knows the kid’s parents because they live in the same city or town or neighborhood. If a kid breaks open his piggybank and collects enough nickels, dimes and pennies to buy a bag of weed, the street dealer will be there to sell it to him or her. The licensed shopkeeper is less likely to do that.
Don’t worry, legal pot isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But we would be better off if it did.

Jim Baron covers politics and the State House in Rhode Island for The Times of Pawtucket and The Call. He can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .