Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 23
Monday, August 10, 2015
Between 1986 and 2006, Rhode Island ran a gauntlet of scandals that exposed corruption and aroused public rage. Protesters marched on the State House. Coalitions formed to fight for systemic changes. Under intense public pressure, lawmakers enacted historic laws and allowed voters to amend defects in the state’s constitution.
Since colonial times, the legislature had controlled state government. Governors were barred from making many executive appointments, and judges could never forget that on a single day in 1935 the General Assembly sacked the entire Supreme Court.
Without constitutional checks and balances, citizens suffered under single party control. Republicans ruled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Democrats held sway from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. In their eras of unchecked control, both parties became corrupt.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTH Philip West's SECRETS & SCANDALS tells the inside story of events that shook Rhode Island’s culture of corruption, gave birth to the nation’s strongest ethics commission, and finally brought separation of powers in 2004. No single leader, no political party, no organization could have converted betrayals of public trust into historic reforms. But when citizen coalitions worked with dedicated public officials to address systemic failures, government changed.
Three times—in 2002, 2008, and 2013—Chicago’s Better Government Association has scored state laws that promote integrity, accountability, and government transparency. In 50-state rankings, Rhode Island ranked second twice and first in 2013—largely because of reforms reported in SECRETS & SCANDALS.
Each week, GoLocalProv will be running a chapter from SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, which chronicles major government reforms that took place during H. Philip West's years as executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island. The book is available from the local bookstores found HERE.
Part 2
JUDGES AND LAWMAKERS
23
Revolving Door (1993)
Only days after he won re-election in 1992, Gov. Bruce Sundlun warned Rae Condon and me that he would challenge the Revolving Door Law, which he had signed the previous summer. Neither the governor nor his advisers explained why he had signed the law he now sought to overturn. He also challenged the Ethics Commission’s revolving door rule, which prohibited members of the General Assembly from seeking or accepting permanent state jobs — including judgeships — for one year after leaving office.
On September 21, 1993, spectators rose as the Supreme Court’s deep green velvet curtain swooshed open. Only four justices stepped forward to seats behind their long elevated desk: Acting Chief Justice Joseph R. Weisberger along with Justices Florence K. Murray, Donald F. Shea, and Victoria Lederberg. Chief Justice Thomas Fay had not yet resigned, but his chair remained empty.
Appellate lawyer William P. Robinson strode to the center podium on Sundlun’s behalf and intoned the ancient judicial greeting: “May it please the Court.” His wild white mane of hair standing out amid the dark wood columns and carved panels, Robinson attacked both revolving door rules as unconstitutional, arguing that barring legislators and senior government staff from permanent state jobs stigmatized “a whole class of people.” He ignored the fact that the rules allowed public officials to accept top positions as long as the job would end when the governor left office. Robinson declared it “irrational to exclude from government service people whose only distinguishing characteristic is that they have been in government service.”
Ethics Commission attorney Gary Yesser countered his arguments. The revolving door rules — both the commission’s and the legislature’s — freed the governor from the pressure to hire politically connected players who traditionally won such appointments as rewards for loyal service. “The message,” Yesser told the court, was that people who sought public office must understand that there would be “no job at the end of the rainbow.” So, far from narrowing the field of candidates a governor could consider, the revolving door had broadened the chief executive’s choices beyond political insiders: “There are a million others he can go to.”
Lauren Jones took the podium for Common Cause and asked why Sundlun was challenging the constitutionality of a law he had signed only months earlier. “Where was his sensitivity to the Constitution then?” Jones asked. “The only thing I can see that intervened was an election.” The brief Jones had written pro bono for Common Cause reminded the justices of their words only fifteen months earlier about rampant corruption in the mid-1980s that had given rise to the Ethics Commission and led to the revolving door rule.
Jones skewered Sundlun’s argument as self-contradictory. “The Governor asserts that the revolving door measures serve as a disincentive to ‘people of talent and selfless vision’ who might seek public office. That statement describes the problem in a nutshell. If the only reason that people accept public service is to better enable them to gain a state job, it demonstrates that there is a need to stop that practice.” He noted that the Ethics Commission and General Assembly had both approved revolving door rules to control widespread abuse, citing precedents to insist that it was “not the function of the court to substitute its judgment for that of legislators.”
Less than two months later, the four justices ruled unanimously in support of both laws. With refreshing clarity, they wrote, “The revolving door legislation addresses the imbroglio of public officials who use their present positions and contacts as unfair bargaining tactics in gaining future employment with the state or a municipality.” The justices also tied the revolving door ban directly to language of the 1986 Ethics Amendment: “The legislative aim of the revolving door provisions is to ensure that public officials adhere to the highest standards of conduct, avoid the appearance of impropriety, and do not use their positions for private gain or advantage.”
Finally, the four justices stated that rules adopted by the commission and the law enacted by the legislature complemented one another and were thoroughly compatible. They added, “The General Assembly has properly enacted the statute under its concurrent jurisdiction in the ethics arena.”
Reading the opinion made me light-headed. Rhode Island’s highest court was unequivocally affirming both the revolving door prohibition Common Cause had pushed for four years and the legislature’s more comprehensive ban. The justices slammed and double-locked the door through which pliant insiders had — for generations — made their way into permanent state jobs. Lawmakers who held their noses when they voted for it would now have to live by its provisions.
With his challenge now decisively rejected, Sundlun said he would abide by the law. “The legality of the revolving door statute has been established,” he announced. “Any doubts as to the constitutionality of the legislation have been resolved. I am satisfied with the result. The executive and legislative branches now know what the rules are and how they apply.”
Deep in the opinion lurked an issue I was only beginning to understand in its Rhode Island context: separation of powers. Sundlun’s lawyers had argued that the revolving door rules improperly impinged on his executive authority to appoint government officials. In fact, the high court declared, Rhode Island’s Constitution gave the governor only flimsy appointment powers.
In his amicus brief for Common Cause, Lauren Jones contrasted the powers of appointment granted to Rhode Island governors and to American presidents. “The tradition established by Rhode Island’s Royal Charter,” Jones wrote, “which carried over into the Constitution of 1842, was not one in which the appointment power was an executive branch function as found in the U.S. Constitution. Virtually all governmental power was given to the legislative branch.”
The justices agreed that no Rhode Island governor had possessed appointing powers comparable to those of an American president. Their advisory opinion noted that the revolving door rules of the Ethics Commission and General Assembly had not seized “powers that are central or essential” to the governor. Neither had the ban on revolving door jobs disrupted his performance of any constitutional duties.
All my adult life I had assumed that state constitutions were scaled-down versions of the U.S. Constitution. I had finished high school, college, and graduate school without recognizing significant differences that now began to dawn on me. How had I remained so ignorant for so long? Would my ignorance ultimately undermine what we were trying to accomplish?
H. Philip West Jr. served from 1988 to 2006 as executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, chronicles major government reforms during those years.
He helped organize coalitions that led in passage of dozens of ethics and open government laws and five major amendments to the Rhode Island Constitution, including the 2004 Separation of Powers Amendment.
West hosted many delegations from the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program that came to learn about ethics and separation of powers. In 2000, he addressed a conference on government ethics laws in Tver, Russia. After retiring from Common Cause, he taught Ethics in Public Administration to graduate students at the University of Rhode Island.
Previously, West served as pastor of United Methodist churches and ran a settlement house on the Bowery in New York City. He helped with the delivery of medicines to victims of the South African-sponsored civil war in Mozambique and later assisted people displaced by Liberia’s civil war. He has been involved in developing affordable housing, day care centers, and other community services in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
West graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., received his masters degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and published biblical research he completed at Cambridge University in England. In 2007, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Rhode Island College.
Since 1965 he has been married to Anne Grant, an Emmy Award-winning writer, a nonprofit executive, and retired United Methodist pastor. They live in Providence and have two grown sons, including cover illustrator Lars Grant-West.
This electronic version of SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006 omits notes, which fill 92 pages in the printed text.
Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption
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- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter One
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Two
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Three
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Four
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Five
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Six
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Seven
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eight
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Ten
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eleven
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Twelve
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Thirteen
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Fourteen
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 15
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 16
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 17
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 18
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 19
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 20
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 21
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 22
