Self-Government
If I Were a Betting Man, I’d Bet On Judge Michael Silverstein Throwing Out the New Receivership Law…
…or at least significant chunks of it. I opine this after reading John Hill‘s report in today’s Projo which highlighted a particular line of questioning asked during yesterday’s oral arguments on the constitutionality of the municipal receivership law, to the lawyer for Central Falls receiver Mark Pfeiffer…[Judge Silverstein] pressed [lawyer Theodore Orson] on the lack…
UPDATE: Commenter “Brassband” points out that Article XII of the Rhode Island Constitution expressly makes education a state matter, and gives the state legislature broad authority to reglate it. This removes education from being one of the “local matters” under Article XIII and indeed, the school committee system we have here in RI is defined,…
Keven McKenna, independent candidate for Attorney General and one of the speakers at Saturday’s Tenth Amendment rally, was the President of the 1985-1986 Rhode Island Constitutional Convention. Aware of that item on his resume, I asked him if he thought that the application of the new “fiscal stabilization law” to Central Falls was constitutional… “No,…
Republican Congressional Candidates John Loughlin (District 1) and Mark Zaccaria (District 2) spoke at Saturday’s Tenth Amendment rally at the Rhode Island Statehouse. The interesting and accurate common theme in both of their statements was that protecting rights via the Tenth Amendment cannot depend on theoretical legal arguments alone; it also requires electing representatives, at…
Based on five years of observing the patterns of discussion associated with public policy issues of concern to Rhode Islanders, I’d like to offer a short list of principles that candidates and activists, first-timers and others, may find useful when bringing their ideas to the public… 1. No issue is as complex as someone whose…
Attorney Joseph Larisa, who helped initiate the current “municipal receivership” action in Central Falls, is quoted by John Hill of the Projo as advising the Central Falls City Council to consider going along with the new process defined in the “fiscal stabilization” law signed by the Governor last week…He cautioned that it was up to…
When the news story of Central Falls’ entry into receivership first broke, there was chatter from some quarters and maybe even a little glee — perhaps a bit too much glee — that an era of fiscal reckoning in Rhode Island had begun. But what the terms of the reckoning were, no one was really…
PROEM: Looks like I was too late; the bill has been signed into law. Governor Carcieri, I fear that you’ve been had. Details tomorrow. Governor Donald Carcieri should veto the hastily assembled set of rules for “municipal receivership” introduced to and passed by the General Assembly under the guise of an act “providing financial stability”…
One of the more maundering sections in the Projo’s recent Tea Party editorial began by looking at the view expressed at many Tea Party events that modern government needs to continue to be consistent with the principles of the founding of America…They also make frequent reference to getting back to what the nation’s Founders wanted,…
Bill James, the pioneer baseball number-cruncher who is also a gifted sportswriter, once observed that historians reduce real events to patterns of light and shadow, which popular memory further reduces to black and white. The description of the Tea Party movement offered yesterday by the Projo in an unsigned editorial was derived from a black-and-white…
