Carroll Andrew Morse
The weekly legislative review will start a little early this weekend. On Wednesday, March 13, the House Judiciary Committee will hear several bills on removing the master lever (i.e., the straight-party option) from Rhode Island election ballots. For various reasons, the most important of these bills is H5778, submitted at the request of the Secretary…
1. The idea of the executive branch of the United States government creating a kill list, or a capture or kill list, is not a question of whether the President can order the Armed Forces to respond to organized threats that cross into the United States. Targeting a foreign facility or foreign forces operationally engaged…
To fill in some of the unplanned posting slack in these very interesting times we’re living through, I present to you an actual notebook dump (with annotations). The underlined phrases are entries from my Anchor Rising dead-tree notebook, followed by a brief description of the posts they were (and still might) supposed to become. Meanwhile,…
10B. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees will hear large rafts of bills on motor vehicle law on Tuesday, March 5 and Thursday, March 7, respectively. {H5505, S0470, S0564} and S0355 toughen penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, H5779 for driving to endanger, and {H5379, S0565} for both; H5666, submitted at…
Local Impact: Coventry Inobvious Priorities: H5101 >> no driving with a dog in your lap; S0008 >> warning labels that say cell-phones may cause brain cancer (for the record, the American Cancer Society’s position is here); S0171 >> laundries must post prices of each garment cleaned. 19. One inobvious priority slides its way into the…
Numbers between $17M and $25M are being reported as the cost of the sequester to Rhode Island state government spending. However, if a few state departments did nothing more than stay within their original FY2013 budgets, and the funding tentatively intended for their overruns could be intelligently redirected, the impact would only be about half…
A bill (H5068) requiring cities and towns to post an armed guard at every school in Rhode Island was posted Tuesday for a House Municipal Government hearing today. Here’s the complete text: The school committees of various cities, towns, and school districts, shall appoint a guard to each school building within their jurisdiction. The guard…
10. S0330: Independent voters would not need to become a member of a political party, to vote in that party’s primary. (S Judiciary; Thu, Feb 28) 9. H5389: Spencer Dickinson’s proposal for a binding arbitration process for teacher contracts. In the Dickinson process, only the school committee could choose to go to binding arbitration, but…
Local Impact: Coventry, Foster, Johnston, Middletown, North Kingstown, Woonsocket 2 Anyone know the background on this one? H5322: Prohibits unauthorized use of the emblem of the Attorney General of the state of Rhode Island. 21. S0341: A potpourri of changes to criminal law, including the decriminalization of a first offense for shoplifting or driving without…
My previous post referenced the circularly structured political spectrum that Justin proposed a few weeks ago. Samuel G. Howard criticized Justin’s mapping in a post at Rhode Island’s Future, one objection being that choosing individual emphasis versus community emphasis as a defining axis leads to problems that are intractable…I suspect it would be difficult for…