General Assembly
Socialist Rhode Island state senator Sam Bell (Democrat, Providence) has gotten a good deal of richly deserved negative pushback over truly terrible legislation he submitted in the state General Assembly (which is not to say that some of the correspondence he’s received hasn’t gone too far). As the cosigners on Bell’s legislation back away from…
Richard August and union organizer Patrick Crowley discuss legislation and unions’ power as a special interest.
In China, the Communist Party has implemented and is continually expanding a social credit system that seeks to use economic opportunities and restrictions to reward behavior the party likes and punish those who do things it doesn’t. The system affects where people can live, how easily they can access credit, the speed of their Internet…
Legislation from socialist state Representative David Morales should be a warning to institutions (whether non-profit organizations or for-profit businesses) about furthering the power of progressives: Industry leaders and university officials in Rhode Island were outraged after a bipartisan slate of lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would allow host cities to impose taxes on endowments…
Somehow, I’d hoped that a silver lining of the pandemic would be a little more wariness among lawmakers about tripping over unforeseen circumstances. But we’re back to normal, now, in ways good and bad, so the state Senate has returned to the pressing business of forbidding Rhode Island stores from offering customers the option of plastic…
When Bill Felkner introduced me to Republican state Senator Frank Maher on the back steps of the State House, I was still new enough to politics-in-the-flesh to think he was a representative sample of elected officials. “He’s one of the good guys,” Bill told me, and he was right. On another occasion, not long after,…
More frequently than I liked, during my years reading the thousands of bills submitted in the Rhode Island General Assembly each year, I’d come across one that made me wonder how anybody could submit such a thing. Legislators couldn’t truly be representative of their constituents if they were expected to be the uber academics we…
Westerly produces another bit of evidence that Rhode Island is not ultimately a free state: [Tom] Riley and Debbie Stebenne said they spent almost $30,000 on a custom party bike for their hotel near Misquamicut Beach. The goal was to bring an attraction to Rhode Island that is already a success in cities like Nashville,…
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss some of the more mystifying realities on the RI news landscape.
Rhode Island GOP Chairperson Sue Cienki discusses with host Richard August a variety of issues and concerns from her political party’s perspective.