Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

Heaven forbid the notion that political deals are made in awarding judgeships, but geez, do they have to be so blatant about it?

Supreme Court Presiding Justice Joseph Rodgers announces his retirement on the very same day that Governor Carcieri appoints his daughter, Kristin, to the same court.
Really? On the same day? And they expect us to believe this wasn’t some kind of an “understanding”?
You would think that they would have put a week or two between the two announcements, just for appearances’ sake.
Not only does it smell like a pre-arrangement, but it sounds like one between people who don’t trust each other.
It reminded me of being a little kid and trading baseball cards with some other kid you didn’t trust to not just run off with your card without giving you his. So you kept one hand on your card as you took his and he put one hand on yours as he handed you his and you both let go at the same time. I wonder if retiring Judge Rodgers and Governor Carcieri stood in Carcieri’s office and did that with Rodgers’ resignation papers and his daughter Kristin’s appointment letter. Did they count one, two, three before letting go?
This robe-swapping nepotism was made possible by the BAD, BAD, BAD law that cheapens the judicial selection process by allowing the governor to select from old lists of judicial candidates provided by the Judicial Nominating Commission for previous vacancies. Kristen Rodgers was not on the list of candidates the JNC handed up to Carcieri to replace Judge Joseph Ragosta, the vacancy she is filling. Carcieri went back to a previous list to choose her. The General Assembly should close that loophole as quickly as possible. (I saw a bill extending that bad law one more year whiz through the House in the middle of the night Friday, but I haven’t been able to find out what happened to it in the Senate.)

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And that isn’t even mentioning the mad rush to get Kristin Rodgers confirmed in time for her to be in her robes before the pension rules for judges change on July 1. That is a very big KA-CHING for her honor. The Senate scrambled to whoosh her confirmation through on Friday, on what everyone thought and many were hoping would be the legislature’s last day of the year, after a quickie hearing in Senate Judiciary the day before. Senators are always intoning how they take the advice and consent process seriously. Well, it didn’t seem that way this time. (In fact it seldom does; I have sat through many committee hearings and Senate debates on judicial appointments over the years and just about every one seemed to be an occasion intended to kiss the candidate’s butt rather than to seriously delve into questions about his or her character, abilities and experience.)
This whole set-up in the Rodgers case slimes everyone involved in it. And it is a body blow to the public’s confidence in the judiciary and court system.

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The phrase “hiking the Appalachian Trail” suddenly has a whole new and much more colorful meaning in the political lexicon. Thank you, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. It’s always nice to have a new euphemism: “Gee, the senator and his pretty legislative aide seem to spend a lot of time together. Do you think they are hiking the Appalachian Trail?”

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Sen. Rhoda Perry is taking a lot of flak from the Republican/conservative/union-bashing contingent for her common-sense bill that extends the terms of school teacher contracts until a new contract is finalized.
As I see it, there is one large flaw in Senator Perry’s bill: it does not apply to every single public and private labor contract in the state of Rhode Island.
Labor contracts are not one-shot deals. They grow with a business, or any other enterprise, like a school district or municipality, reflecting compromises and gains on the part of both parties over the years — and decades. They define the relationship between the employee and the entity that employs him or her.
To assert that one side can stall negotiating a new pact until after the expiration date of the existing one and everything that has been bargained for through the years and decades just goes poof is just nonsense. What boss wouldn’t just run out the clock to get a clean slate: everything the workers and their predecessors had negotiated and bargained to obtain for generations gets wiped away instantly if he just sits at a bargaining table and twiddles his thumbs for a couple of months.
Workers aren’t just given wages, benefits and decent and safe working conditions by employers, they have had to be fought for, bargained for, and sacrifices had to be made to get them. Now everyone just wants to shrug their shoulders and say, “yeah, you had a deal, but we can’t afford it now, so tough cookies.”
That idea of “that was then, this is now” is A LOT of what is wrong with America today, particularly in employer-employee relations. There is a social contract. There are moral obligations. Both should be upheld. The East Providence School District is no exception.
It wasn’t all that long ago that it was considered immoral to back out of a deal, breaking a promise that had been put down on paper and signed by all parties.
That’s what a vested pension is. After you dedicate so much of your life and career to a business or another employer, you have an ownership stake in the benefit that was promised you. To unilaterally take it away is just plain wrong. A private employer would never get away with doing what the state just did to its employees’ pensions
Opponents of Perry’s bill are acting as though it was some completely unheard-of, and just possibly communist, notion that an existing contract stays in effect while the successor agreement is negotiated.  It’s not. It happens all the time. Even in the vaunted private sector.
Both chambers of the General Assembly should get their backsides back to the Statehouse and make passing Perry’s bill into law their first order of business.

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Speaking of unions in Rhode Island:
“The unions” wanted to restore revenue sharing to cities and towns. “The unions” wanted to see the flat tax repealed or frozen. “The unions” didn’t want money to go to the mayoral academy. “The unions” didn’t want that nearly $60 million across the board cut in all state departments that will almost surely cost positions, if not jobs, and will likely prompt another raid on benefits or demands for more co-pays. “The unions” have had to swallow pay freezes, pay reductions, benefit reductions and higher co-pays for those reduced benefits at the state level, in cities and towns and in school districts across the state.  “The unions” REALLY didn’t want to see the $55 million in changes to their pension plans in the budget — and might go as far as to sue over it.
Will one of the blowhards who insist that “the unions” pull the strings of the General Assembly and exert almost total control over the entire state please step forward and explain to me how they lost ALL of those battles, not to mention how Senator Perry’s legislation failed to pass before lawmakers went home?
Anyone who insists on repeating that tired old canard is working off information that is at least three years old and should shut up until they know what they are talking about.

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Michael Jackson’s music was never my cup of meat, and he was without question a weird little critter. But he had a talent that made the lives of literally tens of millions of people all over the planet a little bit happier. That’s never a good thing to lose.

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If that referendum to change the name of the state by removing “and Providence Plantations” gets approved by voters, it will be a big boon to the black community, if for no other reason than it will let them get past this nonsense and focus on something worthwhile. Of all the things to expend energy, effort and political capital on, why that? How is taking “and Providence Plantations” out of the state’s official name going to improve the life of any person, black, white or green, who lives in this state by one iota?

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Don’t you hate it when you are way up on your high horse, pontificating haughtily on some issue or another, then you go and make a big stinko of an error? That happened in this space last week.
I was writing about the effort to sneak around the Electoral College with an interstate compact to conspire to have a national popular vote by having states pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote no matter who won the popular vote in that state. As an example, I said that if that scheme were in place in 2000 all of Rhode Island’s vote would have gone to George W. Bush. Well, no. In 2000 Al Gore won the popular vote, so our votes would have gone to him. That election and its aftermath is the whole impetus behind this latest effort to junk the Electoral College. Obviously, I should have said that in 2004, Rhode Island’s votes would have gone to Bush. My bad.