Pawtucket Times - The return of the General Assembly

* Before last week’s (latest) announcement, the one question I heard over and over again as I run into people around the state was: “When is the General Assembly coming back?” That question is usually followed by “What’s taking them so long? What are they waiting for?”

I have taken to answering those questions with a question of my own: What do you expect them to do when they do return? Fix the financial crisis and solve the unemployment problem?
That answer is ludicrous enough to get a laugh out of people and usually gets them to acknowledge that the General Assembly returning to the Statehouse may not be the solution to our current situation.
A better question/answer might be: with all they have done to bring us to this point, aren’t you afraid that if and when the legislature reconvenes, they are only going to screw things up even more?
We can poke good-natured fun at our elected lawmakers, but you really shouldn’t expect any great shakes when the legislative engine fires back up on Oct. 28 and 29.
They will probably mop up the prostitution mess they left on the floor when they beat it out of town at the end of June, and they might do something with people who text message or tweet while driving. The whole deal with teacher contracts will probably be kicked over to next session, perhaps with a study commission. And they will no doubt take up a slew of inconsequential bills you haven’t heard about and don’t care about.
But that’s about it.
From almost everything I’ve heard, the bill to require 200 days of racing at Twin River is probably dead, although the lawmakers could put their imprimatur on allowing the track (um, we might not be able to call it that much longer; let’s say the gambling hall) to stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if for no other reason than to keep Governor Carcieri from taking credit for it.
I also got the distinct impression last week that the E-Verify legislation (requiring all private employers to use the system that pulls illegal aliens from the labor pool) once again has been stamped NGN — Not Going Nowhere.
My general feeling is that the resumption of the General Assembly is going to be more exciting in the anticipation than it is in the execution.

* Sometimes small-town politics can be the most entertaining variety there is.
Take Central Falls, the smallest town Rhode Island has.
The ACLU is suing the city, Mayor Charles Moreau, and other city officials into federal court, challenging the stunts the mayor’s supporters allegedly pulled to give the mayor a free ride to re-election.
First of all, the suit charges, the city’s Board of Canvassers did not give the candidate challenging the mayor, Hipolito Fontes the same list of voters, arranged by street numbers, that other candidates received.
Then, Fontes claims, Moreau campaign workers (of which there are probably more of in Central Falls than there are likely Fontes voters) would follow him around as he collected his required 200 nominating signatures, collecting signatures from the same people who signed Fontes’ papers. You see, there is a little known election ordinance in Central Falls that allows a person to sign only one candidate’s nomination papers for any single office, and if a person signs papers for two candidates for one office, only one counts, the candidate who got the names to the Board of Canvassers first.
So Moreau, whose political machine was able to amass thousands of signatures, duplicated many of those collected by Fontes. Because Fontes couldn’t collect anywhere near the number of signatures the mayor did, any of his that were disqualified hurt a lot more than if Moreau had lost a few.
Then, the lawsuit charges, Moreau, being the mayor, was allowed to get into the Board of Canvassers office before it opened on the day the signatures had to be turned it. So of course, his papers were considered to be filed first, so any duplicate names would be put into the mayor’s pile and scratched off of Fontes’. (The same ordinance exists in one other community, East Providence, where it is also being challenged in federal court.) By one account, Fontes turned in 333 signatures, but 134 of them turned out to be names that were also on Moreau’s petition.
You almost have to admire the brazenness of it, but it is still an arrogant abuse of power.
The incumbent mayor shouldn’t be using the power of his incumbency, and using cheap procedural tricks, to stop an opponent from even getting on the ballot.
What is striking about this is the overkill. By any objective political measure, Moreau has to be expected to kick the living spit out of Fontes, a 25-year-old political newcomer, at the polls. Did he really have to go those extra miles to keep the guy off the ballot? What does that kind of tactic say about the person who deploys it, and how he or she exercises power?
I wanted to ask Mayor Moreau that, but he did not return a call inviting him to respond on Friday or Saturday.

* Our neighbors in Massachusetts really have to make up their minds about how they want to fill Senate vacancies. Back in the 90s, the Bay State had a system similar to Rhode Island’s — if a Senator quits, dies or is otherwise incapacitated, the governor would select a replacement to serve until the next general election. All well and good.
Then Democratic Sen. John Kerrey ran for president at the time Republican Mitt Romney was governor. At that moment, it suddenly dawned on the heavily Democratic Massachusetts legislature that, to be fair, the only truly democratic (heh, heh) way to decide the succession of a possible replacement was with a special election. Seemed a tad expedient, but OK, it is hard to argue with the premise that Senators should be elected not appointed.
But now Massachusetts once again has a Democrat governor in Deval Patrick and the Democratic president urgently needs a second Democratic senator from Massachusetts to replace the late Ted Kennedy so that he will possibly have the 60th vote he needs to get a single bill — the health care reform — passed this year, before a special election can be scheduled in the Bay State. So the lawmakers — the General Court, if you don’t mind — are in the process of changing the law yet again to let Patrick appoint a temp.
Why don’t they just be honest about it and pass a bill that says when a Democrat is the governor he or she gets to appoint a replacement, but when a Republican is in the governor’s chair, they have to have a special election?
Some folks were lobbying hard to get a Rhode Island law requiring a special election with no gubernatorial appointment in the meantime, particularly with Republican Carcieri in the governor’s seat and the Rumor That Refused to Die about Sen. Jack Reed about to become Secretary of Defense still extant. But that effort seems to have run out of steam with Reed having finally convinced people he is going to stay put and Carcieri descending into lame duckdom.

* If perhaps you didn’t get enough of President Barack Obama yesterday as he showed up on five — count ‘em, 5 —Sunday TV news shows (conspicuously boycotting Fox News and opting for the Spanish channel Univision instead), you can catch him tonight on, of all places, The Late Show with David Letterman. I have my DVR set to record that baby already. As prepared as Obama is sure to be, Dave will no doubt have an off-the-wall goofball question aimed at knocking the president right off his talking points. It will be worth staying up late for.