Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 38
Monday, November 23, 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 4
38
Kingly Power (1999–2001)
The caller barely whispered, “I hope you’ll understand why I can’t tell you my name.” I pressed the phone to my ear. She said it was important for Common Cause to review a folder at the Department of Environmental Management (DEM). I scribbled the case number and went that day.
A clerk brought me the folder. DEM had charged Peter K. Wiechers with illegally draining a pond on his farm and clearing marshland along its shore. For bulldozing the centuries-old refuge of migrating birds, Wiechers could face a $3,000 fine and the more costly obligation of restoring the wetlands. Wiechers had hired an environmental lawyer, Sean O. Coffey, who tried to negotiate a settlement.
I knew Coffey as a former senator and skilled attorney who had served as counsel for DEM, but as I paged through the legal documents it became clear that Wiechers had fired Coffey and hired new lawyers. A familiar signature jumped out at me: John B. Harwood. I had never met Wiechers or seen his farm, but I understood why he had fired one of the best environmental lawyers in Rhode Island and hired an attorney with no wetlands experience. Harwood’s patronage on behalf of his clients and friends was legendary: he delivered public jobs with excellent benefits and was repaid with reliable tips and eager cooperation across state government. I knew state offices where employees played video solitaire, immune to discipline or firing, more loyal to their patron than their agency. No wonder the person who phoned me had barely spoken above a whisper.
An ethics rule barred public officials like Harwood from advocating for private clients before state agencies where they exercised “fiscal or jurisdictional control.” To my mind the speaker exercised fiscal control over DEM through shaping the agency’s budget and using his surrogates on the Unclassified Pay Plan Board to set salaries. The only exception to the ethics prohibition allowed lawyer-legislators to practice law in state courts of public record. But DEM was an administrative agency, and Harwood surely knew that its wetlands hearings were out of bounds.
I assumed that the whistleblower who whispered this file number to me had also contacted Operation Clean Government and leaked it to reporters. The secret would come out, but Harwood had beaten ethics complaints before. After six years as speaker his power seemed unassailable, even regal.
Two days after Christmas of 2000, when few were paying attention to political stories, John Harwood’s wife received a lifetime appointment as a magistrate in the Superior Court. Patricia Lynch Harwood would start at $100,157, a large step up from the $20,484 annual salary she got for one morning and one evening each week in the Pawtucket Municipal Court. Chief Justice Weisberger announced the appointment of his former law clerk. “I have a very high opinion of her abilities,” he told reporter Jonathan Rockoff. Joseph Rodgers, Chief Judge of Superior Court, confirmed the wisdom of this choice. “I don’t think,” Rodgers said, “she should be disqualified because she is married to the speaker of the House of Representatives.”
Harwood swatted away any suggestion that he had influenced his wife’s appointment or salary, insisting it made no difference that the House controlled the state budget or that he appointed two members to the Unclassified Pay Plan Board that set salaries for department directors, judges, and magistrates.
Beyond favoritism, Patricia Harwood’s appointment raised the question why magistrates were multiplying like rabbits.
By becoming a magistrate, rather than a judge, she avoided the judicial selection process that voters established in the 1994 constitutional amendment. Deprived of their historic patronage through judgeships, the General Assembly had begun creating magistrates and allowing chief judges to appoint them with no public scrutiny.
Both Bob Arruda of Operation Clean Government and I blasted Patricia Harwood’s appointment. “The question arises of the appearance of patronage and nepotism,” Arruda told the Journal. “In a court system that is seeking to build public confidence, they cannot afford those questions.”
Alan Flink, former president of the Bar Association and a member of the Common Cause board fired off a letter to the editor declaring it “unimaginable” that an appointed judge could appoint a magistrate to a life term without review. Flink reminded readers that House leaders had trashed the nomination of Margaret Curran: “It is quite ironic that a superb appointment to the Supreme Court was struck down by the House and an appointment of the spouse of the House speaker to a judicial office sails through without public scrutiny of any kind. It’s just plain wrong.”
Operation Clean Government also wanted to know who else had applied for this magistrate position. The group filed a public records request for the names of the thirty applicants Chief Justice Weisberger claimed to have considered. Court officials and the state personnel administrator refused, but could not cite a section of law that backed their position. “The public should know,” announced Bob Arruda.
Public pressure mounted. A Providence Journal editorial denounced the way Patricia Lynch Harwood landed a “plum job” through a covert process. “The public cannot help harboring suspicions that this was an inside deal for the speaker — especially since court officials refuse to release the names of the thirty applicants to the public. The Judicial Nominating Commission, by contrast, releases the names, résumés, and applications of those who seek judgeships.”
After nearly a month of saying that other applicants did not want their names released, Chief Justice Joseph Weisberger released the names of nine.
John Castellucci, a Providence Journal reporter, reached me on my cell phone at the State House. Did I know that Daniel V. McKinnon, Harwood’s cousin and law partner, was the top contender to replace Patricia Lynch Harwood in the Pawtucket Municipal Court?
I laughed. “Let me get this straight — Patty Harwood got this municipal judgeship while she was at McKinnon and Harwood. Now that she moves up to Superior Court, McKinnon will follow her in the Pawtucket court?”
“You got it.”
“Who made the nomination?”
“Chip Hoyas, a member of the city council,” Castellucci replied. I knew Hoyas as a highly political insider on the Senate staff. A childhood game came to mind, and I saw McKinnon sliding into a vacant seat. “I suddenly have this picture of a game of musical chairs,” I told the reporter. “The ironies are so rich, so troubling. But after a while, nothing surprises.”
After two days of public criticism and talk show fire, McKinnon withdrew his name, blaming what he called “self-appointed guardians of what is righteous and holy.” He complained: “They are driving good people out of government. I could make more money spending the same amount of hours in my office.”
M. Charles Bakst, the Journal’s political columnist, approached me with a stunning question: Had the mere fact that Patricia Harwood’s husband was speaker of the House made her a magistrate, even without his intervention? I answered that no one could tell. “I wonder if there’s a sweeping effect when you’re in the speaker’s family or law firm. The speaker may not even need to ask for the favor. His reach becomes almost kingly.”
Harwood’s unbounded power brought him legal clients but also began prompting more tips and leaks to the press. His role in the Wiechers wetlands case was hardly unique.
In February 2001, the Providence Journal headlined his advocacy in a liquor license dispute. The Fox Point Citizens Association had complained that Big Daddy’s, a huge nightclub near the Providence waterfront, was filling neighborhood streets with traffic, noise, and crime. The city’s board of licenses conducted hearings on the club, and voted unanimously to reject the owner’s request to renew her liquor license.
She appealed to the state’s liquor control officer and bolstered her legal team by hiring John Harwood. At the hearing, Harwood grilled neighborhood leaders, including Providence Rep. Paul E. Moura of Providence, who had backed the neighbors’ case against Big Daddy’s. Harwood and Moura were friends and political allies, and Moura — caught between his constituents and his speaker — treated Harwood with elaborate respect. Over and over Moura called Harwood “Mr. Speaker.”
The president of the Fox Point Citizens Association told reporter Ariel Sabar what that meant: “We all kind of said, ‘Oh my God!’ We knew he was the speaker of the House, an enormously powerful and influential guy.”
The Big Daddy’s dispute landed on the docket of State Liquor Control Administrator Jeffrey J. Greer, a lawyer I had known for ten years in several government posts. He came across as modest, consistent, and professional, and we had lunch occasionally. He struck me as virtually impervious to intimidation. He lived by a motto he took from Ben Franklin: “Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.”
Despite intense pressure from Big Daddy’s attorney John Harwood, Greer declared the club “a continual festering sore on the neighborhood.” He found the club owners responsible for “a chronic pattern of disorderly activity” and upheld the license revocation. Big Daddy’s closed for good.
As the third longest-ruling speaker in Rhode Island history, Harwood relished his reputation as a hard-checking hockey player. He denied that his legal work for private clients before state agencies was improper. “I have to feed my family,” he told reporter Ariel Sabar.
But as each new revelation prompted a rehash of prior stories, an aura of sleaze surrounded him. With the prospect of another damaging story slated for the Providence Sunday Journal’s front page, Harwood did something unexpected and unprecedented — he sent out a press release announcing that he would refrain from representing private clients before state agencies. “As speaker of the house,” his statement read, “I must not only refrain from unethical conduct, but I must adhere to ethical standards that assure my legislator colleagues and most importantly the people of Rhode Island that my conduct, both at the State House and in my private law practice, is acceptable.”
That did not last. Only days after Harwood’s public announcement, a new House bill proposed to legalize his lucrative practice. Harwood’s protégé, Rep. William J. Murphy, filed legislation that would bar rules or regulations of the Ethics Commission from “in any way prohibiting or restricting the practice of law by any individual duly admitted” to the practice of law in Rhode Island. Like a slap shot in hockey, Murphy’s bill was a frontal assault on the state’s Code of Ethics. It would exempt lawyer-legislators from key ethics rules.
Murphy also filed a companion resolution: the House would ask the Supreme Court whether his first bill would violate the 1986 Ethics Amendment to the Rhode Island Constitution. He requested immediate consideration of his advisory opinion request. No one outside the House leadership had seen the text of Murphy’s resolution, nor had any committee heard testimony or voted to recommend going to the Supreme Court. No one publicly discussed the wisdom of scrapping the Ethics Commission’s jurisdiction over lawyer-legislators.
The request for an advisory opinion passed on a voice vote usually reserved for inconsequential matters. Harwood wielded the gavel, and like a magician performing a trick, he did his sleight of hand on the record and in plain sight.
An ingenious ploy, Murphy’s legislation would appeal to judges who thought the Ethics Commission was trying to usurp power and become a fourth branch of government.
The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing on Murphy’s bill exempting lawyer-legislators from the ethics panel’s jurisdiction. I emailed an alert to reform groups and concerned citizens statewide. A week later, as members of the House Judiciary Committee arrived to hear the bill, a crowd surrounded the doorway. Inside, except for committee seats at the table, protesters packed the room.
The committee clerk answered a phone call and announced that the hearing had been cancelled. She said the speaker’s office had decided to wait for the Supreme Court’s advisory.
Harwood assured reporter Katherine Gregg that the delay was news to him.
Murphy told Gregg he had requested the postponement, although not to “short-circuit” opposition to his bill. “I’m willing to sit down with them at any time,” he said.
The entire exercise made Harwood’s team look foolish and conniving. The next morning, leaders of Operation Clean Government filed an ethics complaint against the speaker. Sara Quinn had bundled Harwood’s intervention on the wetlands case and liquor license hearings. Bob Arruda and Beverly Clay had co-signed the complaint. Within days of the House request for an advisory, the Supreme Court invited briefs from the Ethics Commission, attorney general, Bar Association, and “all other interested persons or organizations.” Those of us who opposed the House move on lawyer-legislators had two months to file.
Common Cause had no budget for litigation, but the executive committee set out to raise extra funds. Karen Pelczarski researched and wrote a brief for Common Cause. She argued from the 1986 constitutional amendment on ethics and the Supreme Court’s 1992 and 1993 advisory opinions that affirmed the Ethics Commission’s constitutional authority to write ethics laws “subject only to judicial review.” Her brief noted that federal elected officials were barred from “receiving compensation in connection with any proceeding before any federal government agency.” She listed similar prohibitions in twenty-five other states that banned legislators from the private practice of law before government agencies. In eight additional states such appearances were permitted but circumscribed through strict disclosure requirements.
“Lawyer-legislators,” Pelczarski wrote, “occupy positions of trust from the public as well as their private clients, and should therefore be required to adhere to ethics codes as well as codes of professional responsibility. If a lawyer-legislator undertakes private representation of a client against his or her governmental unit, either the client or the public must necessarily suffer.”
She described the range of potential abuses by lawyer-legislators: “Legislators have the ability to retaliate against agencies that give unfavorable rulings to their private clients, including taking action to cut agency budgets, weaken their powers, and challenge their regulations. Agency officials are aware that legislators possess the power to retaliate, and consequently may feel pressured to take actions in favor of legislators’ clients and thereby lose their impartiality. Although lawyer-legislators may not actually retaliate, the appearance of undue influence alone can be damaging.”
Twelve days after Pelczarski filed the amicus brief for Common Cause, House leaders abruptly withdrew their request for an advisory opinion. As they had filed the request with minimum publicity, they also withdrew it without notice. From the gallery, I saw Murphy drop a folded resolution at a counter below the rostrum. An instant later the clerk announced its number and asked for immediate consent. Members of the House barely heard what it was about before they approved the withdrawal by “unanimous consent” with a voice vote.
Rep. Nicholas Gorham was a legislative bulldog. Short and sturdy, with tousled hair, he seemed eternally cheerful in the face of overwhelming odds. A classic New England Republican, he practiced law with his father, a former House minority leader and state senator. Gorham believed passionately in separation of powers and gladly led the charge even when doing so guaranteed retaliation.
With several other Republicans, he filed a resolution to hold a constitutional convention — specifically to address separation of powers. His resolution incorporated Almond’s Question 6:
WHEREAS, The voters of the state of Rhode Island resoundingly approved, by sixty-six percent (66%), in the general elections of 2000, the following question: “Should a Constitutional Convention be called to expressly establish that the Rhode Island government consists of separate and co-equal legislative, executive, and judicial branches similar to the governments established by the United States Constitution and by the Constitutions of all 49 other states?”
I stood with Gorham in the tiny GOP corner of the House chamber, reviewing its text. “Let’s see,” he said with a grin, “if they dare to vote down what two-thirds of the voters approved last November.”
His bill finally got a hearing late in the evening on March 29 when only a handful of House Judiciary Committee members remained. Gorham acknowledged that the state Supreme Court had rejected separation of powers. “The justices left the question squarely before us,” he said, “and sixty-six per cent of the people voted for a chance to resolve it. Once the voters have spoken plainly, it’s our duty to answer on the record.”
He reprised the state’s historic “Bloodless Revolution,” when Democrats seized control of the General Assembly and sacked the entire Supreme Court. “My party, the Republicans,” he admitted, “had controlled the General Assembly non-stop for more than eighty years. But they got greedy. They created boards and commissions to serve the needs of their friends and business associates. My party abused power.
“But in the Great Depression,” he continued, “the people elected Democrats under Theodore Francis Green, Robert Quinn, Thomas McCoy, and others. The people did the right thing for Rhode Island.”
His candor about the history captivated the few who remained in the room. He described how the newly-empowered Democrats had reformed state government: “They abolished the Republicans’ self-serving commissions, and Lt. Gov. Quinn called for amending the Constitution to bar senators and representatives from holding any other state office during their terms.” Gorham relished the authority of Quinn’s words from the grave.
“Quinn’s prescription in 1935 was a constitutional amendment,” Gorham said, “but the newly empowered Democrats never let the voters decide. And here we are — sixty-six years later — back in the same mess. Only now Democrats are driving the gravy train.”
Gorham had baited his rhetorical hook. He eyed the remaining committee members around the table. Several avoided his eyes, staring down at their thick binders of bills. Only Rep. David Cicilline spoke in support of Gorham’s resolution. For four years, Cicilline had been sponsoring amendments to establish separation of powers; all had died in this committee.
Carl Bogus followed Gorham. He introduced himself as a law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, and then launched with a question: “If I were to ask you what the most basic principle of American democracy is, what would you say?” He let the question hang. When no one spoke, he offered two answers. “The first is that ‘We the people’ get to vote. The second is that all power is not placed in one set of hands. That was the genius of the founders: they separated power among three branches and established checks and balances between those branches.”
Without notes Bogus described challenges the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress had faced as administrative agencies developed in the twentieth century. “How could they create bureaucracies and make sure checks and balances continued?” He looked for an answer, but again no one spoke, and he continued: “What they did was to carefully divide power over administrative agencies. Congress decides what the agency is, what its powers are, what its funding may be. But that’s where the authority of Congress ends. Congress cannot operate the agency or appoint those who execute the law. Congress oversees the agencies with an elaborate structure of review.”
No one disputed his point.
“Less than two years ago,” Bogus continued, “the Rhode Island Supreme Court said this second most important principle does not exist in Rhode Island. Four justices wrote that plenary power rests in one set of hands: yours.” He had led methodically and logically to that absurd conclusion.
“So what happens now?” he asked. “The citizens of Rhode Island are asking you to do an extremely difficult thing: give up power. No less than the most basic principles of American democracy are at stake here. Americans have fought and died for these principles.” He asked the Judiciary Committee to send Gorham’s resolution for a constitutional convention to the full House. “For an up-or-down vote,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
Rep. Raymond E. Gallison, a Democrat from Bristol and Warren, picked up Bogus’ observation that Congress creates federal agencies but the president appoints the officers that run them. “You say that the Rhode Island legislature makes these appointments. So what are the agencies here that the General Assembly has taken over?”
“A long list,” said Bogus. “Among them are the Coastal Resources Management Council, the Lottery Commission, and the Unclassified Pay Plan Board. I can rattle off thirty others if you’d like.”
Gallison shook his head. “They may appoint a few individuals, but I don’t see how the legislature has complete control of those agencies.”
Bogus raised his eyebrows. “The appointees are the servants of those who appointed them. We are not children. In the political realm, people are appointed and do what the appointing authority asks. Otherwise they’re not reappointed. That’s why the United States Constitution and most other state constitutions are explicit in prohibiting legislative appointments to administrative agencies.”
By my time to speak only four representatives remained in the room, and the speaker’s protégé, Rep. Bill Murphy from West Warwick, was presiding. Looking far younger than his mid-thirties, Murphy wore an impish grin.
I passed out the lists of votes to approve or reject Question 6 in each of the state’s thirty-nine communities. Eleven towns, I explained, had approved the measure by seventy percent or higher. “The lowest percentage of approval votes,” I noted from the chart, “was recorded in West Warwick — 59.4 percent.”
“West Warwick?” Murphy quipped. “My town?”
I told him no other city or town fell below sixty percent. “Even so, Rep. Murphy, a lopsided majority of your constituents want you to address separation of powers.”
“Thank you,” Murphy said, cheerily. “We’ll take it under advisement.”
The House Judiciary Committee would not vote that night, but met again to vote on dozens of bills. At one point, I walked behind the seat of Chairman Robert E. Flaherty on my way to the door and noticed his list of bills with the usual codes — a smiley face or frown — beside bill numbers, indicating whether House leaders wanted them passed or held for further study. The committee never voted on Gorham’s bill, effectively killing it.
Seven weeks after the House Judiciary Committee buried his call for a constitutional convention, Gorham emailed me to meet him in the House Minority Office, where he came right to the point: “So what do you know about Rules 32(e) and 32(g)?”
Triumphantly, he handed me photocopied pages with those sections highlighted. The first stated that if the principal sponsor of a bill asked in writing for a vote, the committee must vote within eight days unless the sponsor agreed to a later date. The second permitted a sponsor who had not been granted a vote to write a letter to the speaker, who then became responsible to have the bill discharged from the committee for a vote by the entire House. Harwood’s leadership team had established these rules in 1993 to gain Republican support and burnish their reform credentials.
“Try it,” I laughed. “The worst they can do is stiff you again.”
On May 22, Gorham delivered a letter to the speaker’s office. It summarized the committee’s failure to vote and formally requested that Harwood “order the immediate discharge of 2001-H 6022 from the Judiciary Committee to the House floor.”
During the next month, nothing happened.
On June 28, the final night of the 2001 legislative session, Gorham rose at his desk and publicly invoked Rule 32(g) to place his resolution on the House calendar. He read aloud from his letter.
For a shocked instant, everything stopped. Harwood waved Judiciary Chair Robert Flaherty and House Minority Leader Bob Watson to the rostrum.
Watson — the only one of the four still wearing a suit jacket — brought Gorham. Harwood peered down from above for a brief private conference. They finished and returned to their places.
“Bottom of the calendar,” Harwood intoned and banged his gavel. This was uncharted territory.
I watched from the gallery above and behind the weary representatives. I knew that during the hour or two before Gorham’s bill came up Harwood’s lieutenants would find a parliamentary way to win. I saw whispered exchanges — hands shielding mouths — as indecipherable as football coaches on distant sidelines.
At a microphone below the rostrum, the clerk called a campaign finance reform bill we had wrestled over all spring. Like Murphy’s bill to gut ethics enforcement involving lawyer-legislators, this campaign finance legislation originated in scandal. The Providence Journal had reported that Woonsocket Mayor Susan D. Menard had spent thousands of dollars from her campaign account at luxury clothing shops. Our 1992 Comprehensive Campaign Finance Law prohibited the personal use of campaign funds; it cited an IRS definition and limited legal expenses to “gaining and holding public office.”
Legislative leaders routinely stretched that definition to bizarre lengths, often treating lobbyists to dinner at country clubs and pricey restaurants. They paid with credit cards that they covered from campaign war chests, which were replenished by lobbyist contributions. Lawmakers and lobbyists had used that cozy arrangement to evade the zero-tolerance gift ban — until their backers on the Ethics Commission demolished the rule.
In the 2000 election John Harwood had faced no opponent in his Pawtucket district. Kathy Gregg reported that Harwood raised $180,290 during the year, mostly from lobbyists; he spent $165,970, much of it on expensive meals, sports tickets, gifts, and eighteen out-of-state trips. Gregg noted the speaker’s campaign finance reports did not explain where he went on most of those jaunts or how they related to his “gaining or holding public office,” a requirement of the 1992 Campaign Finance Law.
Harwood’s majority leader, Gerard M. Martineau, had raised $84,145 and spent roughly $73,325 on fancy meals and golf outings. Senate Majority Leader Paul S. Kelly and Sen. William V. Irons, who ousted Kelly late in 2000, had done the same on a smaller scale. In a legislature where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 5 to 1, the latter had little ability to shape legislation and raised mere pittances. Outspent by a ratio of 10 to 1, House Minority Leader Robert Watson told the Providence Journal: “The Republican caucus is Chelo’s and Appleby’s, not Capital Grille and Raphael’s.”
Over several years, Common Cause had been pressing the Board of Elections to audit campaign accounts for improper expenditures, but the board claimed it had no authority for such probes. Year after year, efforts to strengthen the law had failed. But headlines in this spring of 2001 evoked the quasi-public abuses of credit cards and lobbyists’ gratuities. Under the pressure of public disgust, legislative leaders finally formed a Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Campaign Finance Reform. They directed the panel to resolve “ambiguities” in the law over what constituted “personal use” of campaign funds.
Reform advocates seized the opportunity to push proposals that had been routinely buried in previous years: an auditing and compliance program within the Board of Elections and Rep. Edith Ajello’s bill for online filing and disclosure of campaign finance reports. Electronic reporting would allow reporters and citizen researchers to examine contributions and expenditures without copying reams of data. Neither idea was new; together they would make the campaign finance system more accountable and transparent. Both were incorporated verbatim in the ad hoc committee’s legislation, which Sen. Maryellen Goodwin introduced on June 21.
Goodwin’s bill split the difference on what seemed to be legitimate expenses for the “seeking, holding, or maintaining a position within the legislature or other publicly elected body.” It outlawed country club dues, most sports tickets, and sundries, but explicitly permitted trips and meals related to the duties of a particular office. It also obligated campaigns to document expenditures, so that legislators could no longer take their families to the Virgin Islands for Christmas and write it off as a campaign expense as Harwood had done.
Goodwin’s legislation passed the Senate on June 27 and advanced to the House, which took it up on what would clearly be the last night of the 2001 legislative session. The campaign finance drama played out between skirmishes over separation of powers.
Chaos often reigned on the last night of the session. With House rules suspended, bills backed by the leadership routinely flew over obstacles — sometimes without committee hearings or time for representatives to read their text. Rep. Elaine Coderre, a trusted leader who had served as co-chair of the ad hoc committee, presented Goodwin’s Senate bill and explained it briefly. Everyone in the red-carpeted chamber knew that Coderre spoke for the House leadership.
I was alarmed when Portsmouth Rep. Charles J. Levesque moved to raise the threshold for mandatory electronic filing of campaign finance reports from $5,000 to $10,000. From the gallery, I could not see the text of his amendment, but I understood instantly that it would have excused many legislators from filing their reports electronically. Whether Levesque meant to create a two-tiered reporting system, his amendment would have done so. I felt relieved when Rep. Gordon D. Fox, who had served on the ad hoc panel, urged his colleagues to reject Levesque’s amendment, and they did, 66–9. After minor technical amendments, final House passage came on a vote of 89–0. Campaign finance reform — compromised and imperfect but still a long step forward — went back to the Senate for a final vote.
Without warning, the clerk droned the number of Gorham’s separation of powers resolution. Before the sound faded, Judiciary Chair Bob Flaherty was on his feet. He moved to recommit the resolution to his committee. Rep. Timothy Williamson, the committee’s vice chair, shouted a second. From the rostrum, Harwood declared that a motion to recommit was not debatable. This was a classic parliamentary power play.
Fifty-seven House Democrats quickly sided with Harwood to prevent public debate, while twenty-five voted to address the issue. The move to recommit preempted the need for a vote against separation of powers, but aborting the debate had the same result. The public call for a constitutional convention to address separation of powers was dead — at least for 2001.
I met Nick Gorham in an empty hallway outside the chamber. “Harwood won tonight,” he said, “but it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory for him.” He handed me a printout of the vote, which included thirteen Republicans and twelve Democrats who voted for a full debate on separation of powers. I liked the balance and promised a Common Cause honor roll.
“Gotta go back in,” he said energetically. We shook hands and then hugged.
The young lawyer reminded me of Thomas Wilson Dorr, the lawyer-legislator who drafted the People’s Constitution 160 years earlier and led the People’s Convention of 1841. With chunky torsos and round faces, both Gorham and Dorr ran fearlessly at their foes; both understood the need to study history and shape it; and both worked toward government structures that would empower ordinary people to participate.
Dorr lost the rebellion that historians later named for him. In 1844 the victors convicted him of treason against the state and sentenced him to life in prison. Months in a frigid jail cell broke Dorr’s health. Released by an act of the General Assembly, the iconic advocate died of pneumonia in 1854 believing he had failed. I hoped Gorham would fare better. But would he or any of us live to see separation of powers in these marble halls? Or would legislative leaders continue to rule Rhode Island as they and their predecessors had for three centuries?
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: Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 26
- Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 28
- Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 29
- Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 30