Guest MINDSETTER™ Rep. Nunes: General Assembly Needs a Cinderella Rule, and More

Tuesday, January 03, 2017

Guest MINDSETTER™: Representative Jared R. Nunes

State Rep. Jared Nunes

Lately there has been a lot of attention drawn to enacting a line-item veto in Rhode Island as is the practice in 44 other states. I certainly agree with those who say our state should not be an outlier when it comes to granting our governor this power.

However, constitutionally, the General Assembly could override even a line-item veto with a 3/5 majority vote. In other words, 60%, or 45 representatives could vote to override any line-item veto exercised by the Governor. Clearly, when a single party holds 85% of the seats in the House of Representatives, the power of even a line-item veto is diluted to the point of irrelevance.

A more realistic and meaningful reform is a comprehensive look at the rules which govern how the General Assembly operates on a day to day basis. Because these rules are adopted by each Chamber at the beginning of each two-year cycle, there is no need to amend our state constitution as would be required for a line-item veto.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Currently, the rules are drafted by the House leadership, with minor changes from those used in the previous legislative session. It is these rules that govern committee assignment, appointments, hours of operation, and the general flow of legislation. In other words, they determine how the legislative session will play out in the coming months and years. Many of the current rules are antiquated and antithetical to idea of representative democracy.

Necessary Changes

Many legislators agree that the end of session logjam that resulted in the last day of session in 2016 to extend until past 5 a.m. must stop. There are two major contributors to this logjam. One is the practice of holding all negotiations between the House and Senate until the end of session. When there is disagreement between the two chambers on matters of substance or simply which bills should pass, it seems that each chamber holds their cards until the absolute end of session so as not to lose any leverage. In doing so, bills are held for the sole purpose of seeing which chamber will blink first or as evidenced two years ago, adjourn without any action (remember the chickens).

The other major factor in this logjam is the ability to suspend the very rules of the General Assembly that are supposed to protect the notion of transparency and good order. Under the Rules adopted last year, the Rules can be suspended with the consent of just two people (the majority and minority leaders ) or by a 2/3 majority vote of the House members present.

To end this practice, a more democratic proposal would be to eliminate the Leader’s override and by increasing the vote to suspend to 4/5 of the entire House membership. This will force all representatives to at least be on the record about suspending the rules.

The current rules state that no new bill can be brought before the chamber for a vote or debate after 10:30 pm. The rules, however, do not limit the time in which debate can continue. Therefore, when the House debates one of the most important pieces of legislation, the budget bill, debate can often go on until the wee hours of the morning.

Our constituents would be better served if the deadline to hear a new bill were moved to 9:30 p.m. and a Cinderella rule enacted where all debate or legislative activity must have a hard cutoff of midnight. This rule should not be subject to suspension by any means.

View Larger +

Most people don’t want to have to wake up in the morning to hear about what their representative did while they were sleeping.

Because a lot of the work of the House is also done at the Committee level, the Rules must be reformed to recognize the importance of the Committees as real gate keepers of legislation. Currently, the appointment to and removal from any committee is solely at the discretion of the House Speaker. In the past, following controversial votes, there has been some shuffling of committee memberships. At the very least, removal from a committee should require a majority vote of House members.

The practice of holding bills for further study can be an important tool for crafting good legislation. Unfortunately, “holding for further study” also constitutes an action by a committee, which under the current rules, is all that a member is entitled to which falls far short of a vote. Committees should be required to vote on any bill at the request of the sponsor at some point during session. If the bill is not ready or not in the best interests of Rhode Islanders, let the committee do its job and vote it down.

The one bill that always gets passed out of committee is the multi-billion dollar state budget. The common practice is to vote it out of the Finance Committee the same day the House version is introduced. For this extensive document, I would propose a 72 hour waiting period after introduction before it could receive a committee vote. This is similar to a proposition that recently passed in California. This would be on top of the 7 day wait before it could be considered on the floor. This change would allow the public precious time to digest its contents before it moves forward in the legislative process.

In an effort to make all committee meetings transparent, all of them should be live streamed to the General Assembly’s website. And while we are at it, revamp the website to include an easily searchable database where our constituents can search for committee and floor votes by bill number, date, and subject matter. Currently floor votes are only searchable by date of floor session, so there is no way to see how your legislator voted without first looking up the bill number, tracking the history of the bill, finding the date it was acted on, then searching that date in the floor vote section, then scrolling through the bills until you find the bill you are looking for. Not exactly user friendly.

In conclusion, while there is a lot of emphasis placed on the line-item veto, I believe that we could realize a greater number of reforms beneficial to all Rhode Islanders by simply changing the rules by which the House of Representatives operates.

State Representative Jared R. Nunes represents District 25 in Coventry and West Warwick, having first been elected in November 2010.

Guest MINDSETTER™ Rep. Nunes: General Assembly Needs a Cinderella Rule, and More

Related Slideshow: 2016 Common Cause Legislative Rankings

Related Articles

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast