Self-Government
It seems that no plan for fiscal reform in Rhode Island is considered complete until it eviscerates democracy in some way. The pension reform plan submitted to the General Assembly yesterday by Governor Lincoln Chafee and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo is no exception. The offending section is 36-10.2-7 which creates procedures that both municipalities and…
Determining whether it was a legitimate exercise of authority for the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education to make certain illegal immigrants eligible for in-state tuition at RI public colleges and universities takes us into a murky borderland in the civic landscape occupied by “public corporations” and “quasi-public entities” that have been created…
The initial Projo report on today’s announcement that the receiver for Central Falls will file for bankruptcy highlights one of the many high-level policy, political and legal issues that municipal bankruptcy is going to involve…In a commercial bankruptcy, the judge has the authority to order the sale of assets, even the closing of the business,…
This is very likely going to be a memorable week in the history of self-government and public finance. In addition to the Federal debt-ceiling issue which needs to be resolved by Tuesday in order for the Federal government to be able to keep paying everything it owes without resorting to various less-than-scrupulous financial gimmicks, the…
Ted Nesi of WPRI-TV (CBS 12) has the scoop on the Rhode Island Speaker of the House’s position on binding arbitration…House Speaker Gordon Fox says the outpouring of opposition to binding arbitration last month was even louder than to Governor Chafee’s sales tax plan – and makes it highly unlikely the issue will come up…
The bill being heard today by the House Finance Committee that would give municipal bondholders a “first lien” on local government treasuries (H5376), introduced on behalf of the Rhode Island Department of Revenue and already passed by the Senate Finance committee (S0614), should not be passed into law. Peder Schaefer of the Rhode Island League…
The Tea Party Movement is anti-democratic, avers Roger Williams University Law Professor Jared A. Goldstein in his working paper recently posted to the Social Sciences Research Network titled The Tea Party Movement and the Contradictions of Popular Originalism. In Section C of the paper, under the subheading of “The Tea Party Movement’s Anti-Democratic Agenda”, Professor…
Michigan is on the verge of enacting a law that, at least as it is described in the CBS News account, will be very similar to Rhode Island’s “municipal fiscal stabilization law“, i.e. it will allow the executive branch of state government to replace an elected municipal government with a single individual who assumes full…
The recent events in Wisconsin and Indiana, where elected legislators fled from their states to avoid voting on issues where they and their public-sector union patrons would lose, followed by union protests and counter-protests, are part of a recurring dynamic of history where a group that has grown accustomed to the benefits of a set…
Over on the municipal side in Central Falls, lawyers for Receiver Mark Pfeiffer have made their latest arguments explaining how the suspension of municipal democracy in CF is constitutional. Here is the most thoroughly unconvincing one, from John Hill‘s report in today’s Projo…Pfeiffer’s lawyers disputed the usurpation argument, saying that in May, before Pfeiffer’s appointment,…
