Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Fourteen
Monday, June 08, 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.
14
Triumphs (1992)
Reporter Wayne Miller phoned our office on the morning of June 10, 1992, to ask what I thought of the decision.
“What decision?”
“I understand that the Rhode Island Supreme Court just issued an advisory opinion on the Ethics Commission.”
I promised to call him back and raced to the court complex. On the seventh floor, a clerk handed me the advisory opinion. The justices were unanimous. I scanned for key phrases: “The years preceding the 1986 constitutional convention were marked by scandal and corruption in both state and local government. Indeed, widespread breaches of trust, cronyism, impropriety, and other violations of ethical standards decimated the public’s trust in government.” They wrote that scandals had prompted the amendment, and concluded that voters who approved it intended to bestow “the power to legislate substantive ethics laws upon an independent nonpartisan ethics commission subject only to judicial review.”
I stepped into the ornate brass elevator and rode down alone, leafing hungrily through pages. In a coffee shop on South Main Street, I started making notes in the margins. Much of the document reprised proceedings of the 1986 Constitutional Convention, the year Chief Justice Joe Bevilacqua had resigned in disgrace. The justices flagged a comment from delegate Ken Phillips, who had proposed that the Conflict of Interest Commission or its successor agency should “draft, promulgate, and implement” the code of ethics. They also quoted Roger Milette’s remark about getting “the fox away from the chickens. . . . If we are all concerned about the state legislature doing it or doing it right, let’s take it away from them. Let’s give it to another body.”
I sipped coffee to keep from cheering.
The justices quoted section after section of Lauren Jones’s brief. They noted that information booklets had made clear to voters that passage would confer “substantive legislative power regarding ethics” on the proposed new Ethics Commission. This new constitutional language, the justices wrote, now limited the General Assembly’s otherwise unbounded legislative power. “This is not to say, however, that the General Assembly is prohibited from enacting ethics laws altogether; rather, the General Assembly could pass such laws only if they were not inconsistent with, or contradictory to, the code of ethics adopted by the commission.”
That struck me as a crucial concept. The justices seemed to be saying that if the Ethics Commission barred lawmakers from revolving door jobs for one year, the General Assembly could not cut the cooling-off time to six months.
The justices also flatly rejected arguments that the Ethics Commission was an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of government. They wrote that voters had “transferred a portion of legislative power from one representative body to another.” They added: “The representative character of the government still remains. The people have simply vested in the commission a limited share of legislative power to make law in the area of ethics.”
The high court’s only caveat came in a final declaration that no one should construe this opinion as approving all of the Ethics Commission’s decisions and orders. The justices wrote that they would weigh the constitutionality of new rules on a case-by-case basis. Parties who felt aggrieved by a particular prohibition would be free to challenge it in court.
As I stepped out of the coffee shop into bright sunshine, I felt like pumping my fist in the air. Drivers jostled their way northward on South Main Street oblivious to the historic words on these photocopied pages. Back at the Common Cause office, I phoned the reporters who had called for comments, telling them this decision marked a watershed in Rhode Island’s history that would go a long way toward establishing the Ethics Commission’s power.
Gary Yesser, the commission’s unflappable attorney, told reporters that the high court’s unanimous opinion was “a victory for the commission and for the people.” He added that the opinion strengthened the commission as “a truly independent body, exclusively given the responsibility to set and enforce conduct by elected and appointed officials.”
The notion that the General Assembly must not undercut rules passed by the Ethics Commission seemed more than legislative leaders could stomach. House Speaker Joe DeAngelis told the Providence Journal, “I don’t really believe we have been given any specific guidance.” Regardless of what they said, however, legislative leaders had to grasp a new political fact: any ambiguities in the Supreme Court’s advisory would not be resolved before Election Day, now less than five months away. The Ethics Commission’s rules against nepotism and revolving door jobs now carried the force of law. To protect themselves, rank-and-file lawmakers would need to tell voters that they had also addressed these problems.
Ever cordial, Jeff Teitz drew me into his office to review a revolving door bill he was drafting. Written in longhand on a yellow pad, its text made clear that House leaders had decided to go beyond our legislation and the Ethics Commission’s ban on revolving door jobs for lawmakers. His new bill also proposed to bar members of the governor’s staff and other political players from advancing to judgeships or other permanent state jobs. He looked up from his text. “I’m not wild about your revolving door prohibition,” he said. “But if it’s inevitable, then we may as well include executive branch officials who may seek to take advantage of their inside positions. You might say that ‘What’s fair for the goose is fair for the gander.’ ”
Long before I knew Frank Gaschen had sponsored legislation that might have prevented the RISDIC collapse, I appreciated his conscientious work on Teitz’s House Judiciary Committee. Over several years he had sponsored Common Cause proposals that others refused to touch. Gaschen made bills his own by mastering their substance. He had worked on our bill to streamline the Ethics Commission and open its adjudicative hearings to the public, but with the legislative session almost gone, it still languished in the House Judiciary Committee.
On the last Friday afternoon in June, Teitz’s secretary phoned to ask me to meet “the Chairman” in his office. When I arrived, he handed me a draft of a bill. “I’m posting this for a vote on Tuesday,” he said. This was not the RIght Now! bill that Gaschen had filed for Common Cause, but one that had just been introduced by House Majority Leader Tom Lamb and was already marked “Substitute A/7,” which showed that it had already gone through a half dozen drafts before House leaders agreed among themselves.
“Why not Frank Gaschen’s bill?” I asked.
“Not a helpful question,” Teitz answered. “But I think you’ll find most of what you want in this draft.”
I left his office annoyed. Gaschen had shown heroic courage, but House leaders were refusing to credit him for revamping the Ethics Commission. If they passed anything, it would be some version of Lamb’s bill.
Tom Lamb owned several car dealerships. With a grandfatherly smile, he enjoyed negotiating agreements. In 1987, as House majority whip under Speaker Matty Smith, Lamb had sponsored legislation that created Rhode Island’s new Ethics Commission and Code of Ethics. Now, as majority leader, he was the logical sponsor for a leadership bill to improve the commission.
Back at our dingy office, I phoned Rae Condon and faxed her a copy of the bill, then made calls to schedule a meeting of the RIght Now! steering committee. I laid the two bills side by side and began comparing sections. The more I read, the worse Lamb’s bill looked.
Condon phoned back with her concerns and a stream of insights about the state’s history and legal tradition. From her ten years as director of the Conflict of Interest Commission, she knew all the permutations of prosecuting public officials. As she rattled off procedures and cases, I took notes in the margins of Lamb’s bill. She remained deeply skeptical about whether House leaders, including Teitz, would allow any functional changes in the way ethics complaints could be prosecuted. “This may be better than nothing,” she mused, “but not by much. God bless you, if you can persuade Jeffrey Teitz to accept these changes!”
I spent much of the weekend comparing Lamb’s legislation with Gaschen’s. The majority leader’s bill would continue troubling features of the current law: a cumbersome two-step hearing process and the micromanagement of commission procedures. Worst of all, its rigid quorum requirements would make findings of violation against top political players difficult or impossible.
Our goal from the beginning had been to reduce the size of the Ethics Commission and open up the complaint process. The three-year saga of our complaint against Ed DiPrete had taught us many lessons. For example, the 1987 Ethics Law allowed lawyers for the accused to contest each piece of evidence twice, both times in secret: first before a six-person investigative committee, and then with the nine-member adjudicative panel. In effect, the law required our complaint against DiPrete to be tried twice, and Lamb’s bill would perpetuate that process.
“Dear Jeff,” I wrote to Teitz. “The Ethics Commission draft you handed me on Friday afternoon is flatly unacceptable. It retains the worst features of the 1987 statute. If enacted, it would only perpetuate fundamental procedural problems which have hamstrung the commission.” My reply ran three pages. On Monday morning, I hand-delivered it to Teitz’s secretary at the State House.
Within an hour he called me. “There’s no need for alarm, “ he reassured. “I needed to come up from Newport this afternoon anyway. Why don’t we meet at my office and go over your concerns with this legislation?”
Blinding sunlight filled the State House plaza. I found Teitz at his massive desk, silhouetted against a multi-paned window more than twice his height. I knew he had drafted the intricate legal procedures that had forced the fifteen-member Ethics Commission to conduct what amounted to two successive secret trials of former Gov. DiPrete. Lamb’s bill would keep the duplicate process.
“You haven’t been through this,” I told him. “I have.”
After nearly two hours of what felt like arm-wrestling with a giant, I had a sense of which elements in the Lamb bill simply reflected Teitz’s pride of authorship and which were nonnegotiable positions of the House leadership. Each of us backed off on minor details in the text. To my amazement, he went along with the major point: downsizing the Ethics Commission from fifteen members to nine and streamlining its procedures. As with a grand jury, the preliminary investigation would occur behind closed doors, but the trial-like adjudicative hearing would be open to the press and public. The new legislation would raise the maximum fine the commission could levy from $10,000 to $25,000 for each violation.
He rose and reached to shake my hand across a corner of his desk. “I always believed we could reach an agreement,” he said with a smile.
Each of us would have to clear this version with higher authorities. He would carry his notes up to the speaker’s office while I took my understanding of these changes to Rae Condon and the RIght Now! steering committee.
The next afternoon his clerk passed out thick drafts of Lamb’s bill, still warm from the photocopier. It was now marked “92-H 9002 Substitute A/12.” I scanned this twelfth version, checking points of contention. Teitz had been true to his word, and he walked his committee through the new draft. “This legislation,” he said, “streamlines the Ethics Commission from fifteen members to nine. It deletes the requirement that there be two sets of hearings on the evidence.”
His exposition took ten minutes. I sat with my back to a tall window open to a bright summer sky. All the changes appeared exactly as we had agreed.
“Finally,” Teitz told his committee, “we have increased the maximum fine the commission can impose for ethics violations from $10,000 to $25,000 per violation, a significant increase but a reasonable one.”
He called me as the first witness, and I moved quickly to a chair at the far end of the table. Predictably, this close to ending the legislative session, representatives filled every chair along both sides of the table, their loose-leaf binders overstuffed with hundreds of bills. Halfway between Teitz, at the head of the table, and me at its foot, sat Frank Gaschen. His RISDIC testimony had raised his public profile and briefly made him a hero. I assumed that some of the representatives around this table had badgered him on RISDIC’s behalf, but if he harbored any resentment, no trace showed in his eyes.
I introduced myself as testifying both on behalf of Common Cause and the RIght Now! Coalition, and went on to reinforce the points Teitz had already made. Lamb’s bill was the one slated for passage.
Following me, Sara Quinn testified that the revised bill still fell far short: “You’re just compounding the problem.” She suggested that this bill might actually be intended to discourage complaints.
Rep. Mary E. Levesque, a lawyer from Jamestown, cut her off. “How can you infer motive?” she demanded. “To suggest that we’re doing this for some horrible reason really is not fair.”
Without taking umbrage, Teitz compared the bill’s new receptiveness to complaints against public officials with procedures for investigating medical professionals. “I don’t think what we’re doing here is treating public officials more favorably,” he said.
I felt for Teitz. He had to walk a line between lawmakers who hated the Ethics Commission and keen-eyed critics, like Quinn, who demanded perfection. This was not perfect but would achieve most of our goals. Teitz had nudged House leaders toward a compromise that would streamline the Ethics Commission and open its proceedings to the public as never before. This bill would address many problems the Common Cause complaint against Ed DiPrete had revealed.
The Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send Lamb’s bill, 9002 SubA/12 to the House floor.
Jeff Teitz drew me into his office and handed me a revision of our revolving door bill. Instead of fitting on half a page, as Rae Condon’s original text had, this version filled three legal sheets. It retained the original bill number and still listed Rep. Nancy Benoit as sponsor, but everything else had mushroomed.
“You and I both admire Nancy,” Teitz said. “But there’s no consensus within the House leadership to enact a law so narrowly focused on legislators. It seems unreasonable to bar members of the legislature from judgeships and other lucrative jobs while you leave the door open for a governor to insert his favored staff into those same positions. You and I both know that happens all the time.”
This was a seismic shift. Instead of resisting Rae Condon’s original revolving door draft, Teitz was now proposing to expand its reach. His new draft barred both state elected officials and senior State House staff. Based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision, he targeted top staff in “senior policy-making, discretionary, or confidential positions,” whether in the executive branch or the legislature. “The point,” he said, “is to make sure a governor can’t buy the silence of his legal counsel by appointing him or her to the judiciary.”
I assured him that he would have no quarrel from our side if he chose to close the revolving door on both legislators and staff members. I slid a copy of Bill Colleran’s revolving door chart across Teitz’s desk. It showed that during the six years DiPrete served as governor, five of his top staff had become judges.
Teitz smiled. He directed me further down in the bill. “On the other hand, I’m sure you’ll also agree that it would be acceptable for a governor to appoint a member of the legislature to what we’ve called a ‘senior policy-making, discretionary, or confidential position.’ ”
I asked for an example.
He smiled. “Suppose Bruce Sundlun wanted a new director for the Department of Health. And suppose, hypothetically, that he recognized the expertise Nancy Benoit has developed during her years in the House. Under the bill she introduced at your request she would be excluded — in spite of her obvious abilities and that expertise — from seeking or accepting that employment.”
I asked if his point was that such a position would last only as long as the governor’s term of office.
“Precisely,” he agreed with a smile. “As a department director, she would serve at the governor’s pleasure. A subsequent governor might keep her in office, but no one could rationally argue that her appointment constituted a permanent state job.”
Finally, Teitz proposed an exception that would allow legislators or senior staff members to seek election to other constitutional offices. “Technically,” he explained, “your narrow ban on employment might preclude me from running for attorney general.”
I knew from previous conversations that Teitz longed to become the state’s top prosecutor. During twenty years in the General Assembly he had gained vast expertise, but his private law practice had languished. He had never built up the financial resources needed for a statewide race. Now he thought our proposed ban on lawmakers’ seeking or accepting state employment not held at the time of their election might be interpreted to bar him from campaigning for attorney general.
“I think you agree,” he continued, “that election to a constitutional office is an entirely reasonable exemption. The notion of getting a job through election is categorically different from a revolving door appointment.”
I did agree. From the beginning, our goal had been to stop the backroom deals that allowed legislative leaders or governors to reward their loyalists with permanent state jobs. His proposal required the legislator or staff member to campaign for election.
As I slid documents into my briefcase, I asked how ready House leaders were to pass other items in the RIght Now! platform that still seemed stuck in his committee.
Teitz smiled. “I think you have every reason to be optimistic. While I’m not as sanguine as you are about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the powers of the Ethics Commission, there’s no question that it has shifted the political calculus.”
Other factors shifted the calculus in wild ways.
On June 18, like a mischievous boy one-tenth his age, Bruce Sundlun upended the game board. He nominated four judges, including his executive counsel, Judith Colenback Savage. Had Teitz’s latest draft passed, her seeking or accepting the judgeship would have constituted a revolving door violation. I knew Savage as the ambitious lawyer who argued for Sundlun against the Ethics Commission’s authority to adopt a code of ethics. Only thirty-four, she would vault over the state’s three lower courts and begin her judicial career in Superior Court, the state’s penultimate tribunal. Sundlun thrust her ahead of three seasoned men he nominated for the more pedestrian District Court.
The Senate also went wild in those final days of June. Factional intrigues that had roiled Senate proceedings for many months suddenly surged out of control. After the Supreme Court’s June 10 advisory opinion on the authority of the Ethics Commission the hallways hummed with rumors. The high court’s advisory undercut Majority Leader John Bevilacqua, who often ranted against the commission, its rule-making powers, and its revolving door rule. Only five days after the high court’s advisory, Bevilacqua had embarrassed himself in testimony before the RISDIC investigating panel. He could not shake off the fact that only a day after he learned of RISDIC’s peril, his mother and his top adviser had cashed out their credit union accounts. As if to rub salt in that wound, Jeffrey Teitz — who had led the 1986 impeachment investigation against the son’s late father — now sat in judgment on his actions.
Like a volcano that makes the earth quake before it erupts, members of the Bevilacqua faction began dropping hints. When I asked Judiciary Committee member David Sholes about the revolving door bill, he answered with a cryptic comment: “If we were going to pass a revolving door bill, it might as well include municipal office holders and candidates for state office, don’t you think? If you want reform,” he added coyly, “you might as well go all the way!”
Sholes’s uncharacteristically precise answer startled me. During the next hour, I managed to speak with Sen. Tom Lynch, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, and with Bevilacqua himself. Almost verbatim, each mentioned “going all the way” by closing the revolving door for “municipal officials and state candidates.” That formula gave me a glimpse of their battle plan. Instead of burying the revolving door in committee, they would pack it with amendments and send it back to the House. Senators loyal to Bevilacqua would claim the mantle of radical reform and stuff the bill until people choked on it.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sauntered into the mahogany-paneled Room 313 and took their seats. Then Lynch arrived and his clerk distributed Benoit’s revolving door bill — now in the Senate’s substitute version. As I skimmed a copy, it became clear that Bevilacqua loyalists were orchestrating a radical reversal. This version would still bar members of the General Assembly and top staff members from almost all permanent state jobs, including judgeships, for one year after they left office. But it would also lock the revolving door often used to reward candidates for statewide office with judgeships, and seal off the ways that local officials landed permanent municipal jobs.
Lynch described the tougher revolving door restrictions now embodied in the bill, and his committee instantly recommended passage to the entire Senate. This version seemed supremely clever and cynical. Senate leaders meant to stuff the bill. Rather than let their move pass in silence, I told reporters this was a ploy: “What we have now is a bill that’s prepared to self-destruct.”
On the Senate floor two days later, the faction led by former Majority Leader David Carlin attacked with the most personal sarcasm I had ever heard in the Senate chamber. “Sometimes motives are so conspicuous they poke you right in the eye,” Carlin declared, heaping scorn on Bevilacqua and Lynch. “Senator Lynch finally has religion? That is baloney. It’s a crock! The only thing Senator Lynch has done before the day before yesterday was serve as an obstruction to revolving door.”
Senator Bill Irons followed, shouting that the latest iteration was “a smoke screen, a falsehood.” He warned that Lynch’s new version could not pass the House and would never reach the governor’s desk.
I watched in amazement. Only days earlier, Bevilacqua’s troops had done all they could to kill any ban on revolving door jobs, while the Carlin forces had demanded the toughest restrictions imaginable. Now their positions had completely flipped. Amid accusations of hypocrisy and obstructionism, Bevilacqua’s Democrats all voted to pass the more radical bill and send it back to the House, while Carlin’s faction and a handful of Republicans voted no. The bill passed by a vote of 25–23.
Carlin’s forces had lost the vote, but their arguments had made the complicated legislative process intelligible. The victorious Bevilacqua team saw that they might bear the blame if the revolving door bill did not become law.
One day later, to prove his sincerity, Lynch marched into his committee room and handed four separate revolving door bills to the clerk. While they were being distributed, Lynch took his tall center chair with gleaming dark wood behind him. “Anyone who wants to vote on these bills,” he announced, “can vote 100 percent for revolving door, 75 percent for revolving door, 50 percent for revolving door, 25 percent, or against revolving door.”
That was true. His bills addressed nearly every conceivable revolving door option. Bevilacqua’s leadership team had clearly decided they must undercut the charge that they had scuttled reform by passing a bill they knew the House would kill, so they would send the House an entire menu of revolving door options. With the Bevilacqua and Carlin factions now vying to prove their purity, Lynch’s Judiciary Committee approved all four bills in a series of unanimous votes. All four bills went to the full Senate. On the Senate floor, Lynch moved each bill, and Irons offered each seconding speech. All four passed unanimously, and a Senate page marched them across to the House of Representatives.
I had not been privy to conversations in the Bevilacqua camp but marveled at the mercurial transformation. I smelled fear and sweat in the Senate chamber. The surge of victory felt better than the shock of failure only one year earlier when our Hail Mary maneuver had won Senate passage of Teitz’s Campaign Finance Law moments too late for final passage in the House.
Then news leaked that a screening panel Sundlun had appointed to winnow judicial candidates had given the governor a list of ten judicial candidates that did not include Judy Savage. Sundlun growled to the reporter who broke the story that his handpicked panel was wrong: “They chose not to consider everybody. I thought they owed it to the people who had expressed an interest to interview them.”
Throughout the legislative session, Sundlun had scorned the revolving door bill as intruding on his authority to appoint. Now that he had sent four names to the Senate, he threatened to veto any revolving door bill that interfered with their confirmation.
Jeff Teitz handed me the text of an amendment that Sundlun had sent him. He said Sundlun had demanded that this revolving door exemption be included in the final bill. Only a few lines long, it declared unequivocally that any judicial nominee appointed before the bill became law would be exempt. Without that line, Sundlun would veto the bill. I assumed that Savage had drafted it for him. I asked Teitz if we had any choice.
“That depends on whether you think he’s bluffing.”
“I don’t think he’s bluffing.”
“Neither do I,” said Teitz. “The practical question is whether getting your bill enacted is worth letting him make two final revolving door appointments.”
The House and Senate chambers had no air-conditioning, and the humidity soared during debates that stretched late into the first two nights of July. Jackets and ties came off. Fans did little good. The acrid vapor made lawmakers petulant and prompted an almost uncontrollable urge to escape.
For all the newsprint and ink lavished upon the RIght Now! proposals, only Jeff Teitz’s Comprehensive Campaign Finance had become law. Other bills seemed either beached or swept away in riptides. The inspiring January rally that ringed the State House with chanting activists had faded from memory.
On July 3 members of our steering committee made their way into Hasbro’s headquarters in Pawtucket. The air-conditioned boardroom smelled of fresh coffee. Trays of gourmet chocolate-chip and oatmeal-raisin cookies lay on a snack table. Alan Hassenfeld set a sympathetic tone. “We may not end all uncertainty today, but I’d like to hear what you want to do about the latest revolving door developments. I know some of us are suspicious that they’ll adjourn the session with our bills left becalmed, like sailboats on a sultry day.”
Business leaders around the blond wood table were troubled over our failure to get four-year terms for the governor onto the November ballot. That constitutional issue had been their primary goal during our entire year together.
I reminded them that in spite of negative remarks John Bevilacqua had made about four-year terms, both the Senate and House had passed ballot questions. “Once they’ve done that,” I said, “they’re almost certain to finish the job.”
“There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” said Jim Hagan, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce executive. He had served in the Senate and knew the drill. “The word I’m getting,” he said, “is that each side might pass versions that would differ by only a word but would not be identical.”
“Are there any differences between the House and Senate versions?” Hassenfeld directed his question toward me.
“None that I know of,” I said, with a sudden sweat. Weeks had passed since I checked the House and Senate resolutions side by side, word for word. “Both versions accomplish what we want.”
Hagan pursed his lips. “The only thing that counts is when exactly the same resolution passes both chambers.”
Our proposed amendment ran more than five hundred words. Besides changing the length of terms for the governor and the other four statewide executive officials, we had sweetened the mix by allowing voters to recall any general officer charged with a felony, convicted of a misdemeanor, or against whom the Ethics Commission found probable cause for a full investigation. We had also proposed that a blue ribbon commission be appointed to study the General Assembly, which was one of the largest in the United States and among the lowest paid.
Gary Sasse, director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC), said he had been talking with leaders in both the House and Senate about the proposal. “They recognize what’s wrong with the status quo,” Sasse said. “I’m not sure how serious they are about making changes, but I think they’re ready to appoint a panel that would do the work and report back.”
“And if that happens,” Hassenfeld asked, “would they appoint you to chair the study?”
“You never can tell,” Sasse said with a self-effacing smile. He knew legislative process as well as anyone in the state. Players in or out of state government saw him as an honest broker.
I gave a status report on our bills. Most had passed the House or the Senate but not both. I explained the plethora of revolving door bills and Sundlun’s threat to veto any version that failed to exempt the judicial nominees he had already sent for Senate confirmation. We quickly reached consensus — Sundlun would not back down and we had no choice but to accept his one-time judicial exemption to the revolving door legislation.
“I can live with that,” Jim Miller said, “but a lot of people across the interfaith community are really bewildered by all this gamesmanship they see. They don’t trust the last-minute wheeling and dealing over what should be clear principles.”
“Would they rally one more time?” Hassenfeld asked.
Miller replied that he could get the word out but it would be hard to organize much over a July 4th weekend.
“Would they make announcements in churches and synagogues?”
“Many would.”
Hassenfeld asked Hagan if he could rally the chambers of commerce.
“I’d try,” came the reply, “but I have no idea who checks their fax machines on the Fourth of July.”
“You don’t have their home numbers?”
Hagan flinched at the thought.
“Hey, Jim,” Hassenfeld chided gently, “we’ve come so far. If you’ll fax me ten names, I’ll phone them myself. And I’ll ask those ten to call ten. If everyone around this table contacts ten people, and the Council of Churches gets word out to its congregations, we can rally one more time.”
And so, over a gray and drizzly Fourth of July weekend, the steering committee called out the troops for one final State House event. We would signal the General Assembly that people were still watching.
When senators and representatives returned on July 7, many stepped out of the elevators into a swarm of protesters who crowded the rotunda, central stairways, and balconies. Most lawmakers and lobbyists dodged the crowd by climbing zigzag stairways at the far ends of each floor.
By the great bronze seal beneath the dome, Alan Hassenfeld addressed the crowd, his tone at once sad and fierce. “I am angry and disillusioned,” he said. “I don’t believe that our lawmakers understand that the will of the people must be served. We have written thousands of letters. We have made thousands of telephone calls. We have held numerous news conferences. And this time, we are angry. As the General Assembly enters its final hours, it is time for action. The people have clearly spoken. Yet, to this date, they have been ignored. This is wrong.”
The following afternoon, members of the House Judiciary Committee listened to Jeff Teitz’s explanation of the latest revolving door legislation. After countless meetings with Teitz and hearings in the judiciary committees at both ends of the building, it felt like déjà vu for the tenth time. During three intense weeks since the Supreme Court affirmed the Ethics Commission’s authority to adopt a code of ethics, the revolving door bill had caromed back and forth, improbably gaining energy with each bounce.
Teitz explained that they had before them a Substitute B version of Rep. Nancy Benoit’s bill, which they had approved weeks earlier. “As you may remember, the Senate closed off access to a number of positions, including judgeships, that were allowed in our earlier version.”
Though his committee was weary, Teitz parsed an exemption that would allow staff members who had served five years in state service before moving into a senior position to move back. He then explained a section that would authorize the Ethics Commission to grant exemptions to the revolving door law if that would not “create an appearance of impropriety.” He asked for a motion to delete the Senate’s most recent changes that made municipal officials and statewide candidates subject to the revolving door. He explained why that represented an unreasonable expansion of the original bill.
Exhausted, the committee voted to delete.
“The final section,” Teitz said, “addresses the governor’s request to exempt his four recent judicial nominations. I believe the RIght Now! steering committee has not taken a position on this but will not actively oppose it.” Through thick glasses, he looked my way, and I nodded in affirmation.
Frank Gaschen signaled Teitz. “Mr. Chairman, do you have any word from the Senate that they’ll go along with this?”
Teitz said he did not, but he hoped they would be satisfied. “This version prohibits legislators and senior staff members from permanent state jobs, including judgeships. It accomplishes more than anyone thought possible when we passed an earlier version in this committee a few weeks ago.”
Rep. Charles T. Knowles, a burly Democrat from Narragansett, announced that he would vote for the much-amended measure, but he poked fun at the process, teasing, “One can only begin to imagine what the Ten Commandments would have looked like had the Rhode Island General Assembly been on Mount Sinai with Moses.”
The next day on the House floor, representatives offered amendments that would have blasted loopholes in the bill and others that would have excluded Sundlun’s recent nominees to revolving door judgeships. Teitz fended them all off, warning that further changes would kill the bill. After fractious debate, representatives punched their green and red buttons an hour before midnight on July 9. By a vote of 82–4, they approved this latest iteration of the revolving door bill.
They also approved Majority Leader Tom Lamb’s revised bill to streamline Rhode Island’s Ethics Commission and reduce its size from fifteen to nine members.
On a rainy day with temperatures near ninety, the 1992 General Assembly began what everyone expected to be its final day. Amid distant thunder and rumblings that Sundlun’s judicial nominees might escape the new law but be scuttled in confirmation hearings, senators began slogging through hundreds of bills on their final calendar.
Ten months earlier, John Bevilacqua had railed against the Ethics Commission’s move to promulgate rules for public officials, and he had publicly blasted the original revolving door rule. Only last March his Judiciary Committee had pummeled Bishop George Hunt during his testimony in support of ethics bills. But now Bevilacqua’s faction had executed a 180-degree pirouette in unison — from scorning a revolving door ban to demanding the toughest one imaginable, from mocking an anti-nepotism bill to claiming it as their own.
While senators droned through their calendar, I had hours to ponder the change. During the past month John Bevilacqua had squirmed under television lights, trying to explain away his ethical lapses regarding RISDIC. Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Supreme Court had unanimously affirmed the Ethics Commission’s authority to adopt specific ethics rules for public officials. Scores of insurgents had filed candidacy papers to challenge his troops in the September primary, now barely two months away.
Beneath those motivators I sensed a deeper spur to action. The very vehemence of Bevilacqua’s protest made me believe Sundlun had picked these four judges without consulting him. Had the proud Senate leader pushed to name one or two judges among the four and been spurned? Without an electronic bug in the majority leader’s office I had no way of knowing.
During a break for committee meetings, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to recommend the House-passed revolving door bill to the full Senate. Final passage seemed to be a foregone conclusion.
My sense of duty compelled me to watch the Senate’s final debate on our legislation to streamline the Ethics Commission and open its adjudicative hearings to the public. Charlie Silverman came into the Senate chamber, and I waved him to an empty seat next to mine. Short, bald, and immaculately dressed, Silverman was a key player for Operation Clean Sweep and the Public Interest Alliance. Unlike firebrands who seemed to relish bashing politicians and the RIght Now! Coalition alike, Silverman focused on the issues. Throughout the spring I had seen how hard he worked for reform. He was quietly pragmatic about legislation and those who struggled to produce it.
“Did you ever think you’d see this day?” he murmured.
I shook my head and whispered my amazement at the change we were witnessing.
“Maybe it hasn’t been so bad for us to play bad cop while you play good cop,” he mused. “I would never have guessed that John Bevilacqua and Tom Lynch would become champions of a tougher revolving door bill.”
When the revolving door bill finally came up, there was little debate and even less grandstanding. After being bent, bashed, twisted, and bounced, it came out better than I could have dreamed. It had become more comprehensive and better prepared to withstand legal challenge. The final Senate vote was 42–4, with four senators absent.
Former Majority Leader David Carlin had announced his candidacy for Congress from the 1st District, which stretched from Newport up the East Bay to Woonsocket and Burrillville. While he faced two primary opponents, these State House battles were over for him. Win or lose in the primary and general election, Carlin would leave the state Senate. His loyalists were already coalescing around Senators Bill Irons and Paul Kelly to carry on the battle against Bevilacqua.
In the final grueling hours, the other bills on our RIght Now! list won final passage: a ban on nepotism, bills to streamline the Ethics Commission and open its adjudicative hearings to the public, and the proposed constitutional amendment that would let voters decide on four-year terms for statewide general officers. Completely beneath the radar, legislators also passed a resolution that authorized DeAngelis and Bevilacqua to appoint a commission to study the operations of the General Assembly and recommend a blueprint for the twenty-first century. Gary Sasse had talked about this, but I wondered how he pulled it off.
The legislative marathon finally ended well after dawn the next day, deeper into July than any session since 1971. A final gavel at 6:59 a.m. sent senators on their way without confirming Sundlun’s four judicial nominees.
Gov. Sundlun announced a celebratory bill signing in the magnificent State Room adjoining his office. I arrived early and found the bills he would sign arrayed on a table by the podium. Rectangular red stamps marked each bill’s travel from committees to floor calendars and then to committees and calendars in the opposite chamber. Over the months, I had piled up photocopies and scribbled in their margins, but now the actual bills lay within reach, and I touched each one.
After Sundlun’s bluster against the revolving door legislation, I half expected him to let it become law without his signature, but it lay on the antique table with the others. With Jeff Teitz’s comprehensive campaign finance bill, which had become law in April, these neatly folded documents spanned the entire RIght Now! agenda: open adjudicative hearings on ethics complaints, a streamlined Ethics Commission empowered to impose a $25,000 fine for each violation, a broader ban against nepotism, and a durable law to end revolving door appointments. Also on the table lay the joint resolution that would place our constitutional amendment for four-year terms before the voters. Since the people — rather than the governor — needed to ratify the proposal, there was no legal need for Sundlun to autograph it.
Sundlun marched into the room, buoyantly triumphant after his trip to New York for the Democrats’ 1992 nominating convention. He seemed to exult in having closure after the contentious struggles that marred his first two years in office.
Speeches brimmed over with mutual admiration. “This has been an extremely positive session,” Jeff Teitz told the crowd. He had crafted legal language and brokered political compromises that lay behind every document on the table. He predicted that these bills would “mark a rebirth in public confidence.”
In his turn toymaker Alan Hassenfeld radiated the playful energy that I had come to love. “We proved to all the naysayers in this state that the people of Rhode Island can make a difference and can stick together.”
Sundlun signed the bills into law, applause filled the room, formality dissolved, people shook hands, and some hugged.
Throughout the ceremony, a breeze blew through tall southerly windows. As people scattered, I stepped out onto the balcony above the plaza where Sundlun had been inaugurated nineteen months earlier. The broad marble stairs below gleamed white in the sunshine, empty now of flags and dignitaries. Gone also were the crowds of depositors who had assembled there to vent their rage. Instead, the scent of fresh-cut grass wafted up as a groundskeeper drove his ganged mowers. Trees that had been bare when marchers arrived in January for the interfaith rally now shaded the three parallel brick walkways. The icons and banners had vanished. The rattle of drums and blare of trumpets had long since faded away, but the seven months since a shofar wailed for repentance had been the most momentous of my life.
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 Nine
- 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 Eleven
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Twelve
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Ten
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
- 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 Thirteen
