PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - A dispute between Democrats in the Rhode Island General Assembly is provoking unusually public discord, with some lawmakers openly challenging what they describe as the outsize power of the legislature’s top two leaders to set the state’s agenda.
Pawtucket Sen. Donna Nesselbush stepped down as the Senate’s deputy majority leader Thursday after rising to the floor to protest what she called an “undemocratic process” that promotes “hegemony.”
She was speaking, in part, of last week’s rise to power of the new Senate president, Dominick Ruggerio, and his swift maneuvers to demote two committee chairmen and replace them with allies. Ruggerio, a North Providence Democrat, had told reporters Tuesday that he didn’t want “dissension within my inner circle.”
He said Friday he was “a little taken aback” by Nesselbush’s comments and would have liked her to remain in the leadership team.
It was a jarring power struggle in a Senate with a reputation for harmony under former president Teresa Paiva Weed, a Newport Democrat who resigned from her seat Friday to take a job in the hospital industry. But even those who have protested Ruggerio’s recent decisions said the centralization of power has been gradual and didn’t start with him.
“There’s been a greater concentration of power in the hands of fewer people,” said Sen. James Sheehan, a North Kingstown Democrat who led the Senate’s oversight committee until Ruggerio pulled him from its chairmanship this week. “That’s unhealthy for the process. It’s just not good for democracy.”
In her speech, Nesselbush argued for broader reforms that would give more power to each senator and committee, allowing them to vote on controversial bills and show constituents where they stand.
Bills that don’t have the leadership’s support in both the Senate and state House of Representatives, led by Democratic Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, are routinely put into a limbo status known as “held for further study,” frustrating proponents who spend hours debating the same issues year after year.
A reform push to end that practice was quashed in the House earlier this year. Both chambers have voted to confirm their current procedural rules, meaning they will likely remain unchanged until a new set of lawmakers takes office in 2019.
John Marion of good-government advocacy group Common Cause Rhode Island said the state “has historically had a strong legislature and also a highly centralized legislature,” though he noted that Ruggerio is only its fourth Senate president - it was the lieutenant governor who formally presided over the chamber until 14 years ago.
Mattiello and Ruggerio now have “absolute agenda-setting authority in their respective chambers,” Marion said. “As a result, campaign contributions, lobbyist attention, flow primarily to the leadership.”
Sheehan said Friday that he believes what cost him his role as oversight chairman was his strong advocacy for ethics reform, which he said Senate leaders only “reluctantly” came around to last year, and his insistence on holding hearings on the 38 Studios fiasco. The state’s failed $75 million deal in 2010 with former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company might never have happened, said Sheehan, if what Paiva Weed knew about the legislation was filtered down to the rest of the Senate before they voted on it.
“If there were more eyes scrutinizing that legislation, there’s a good chance the 38 Studios loan guarantee might never have been made,” Sheehan said.
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