Look No Further Than Washington Bridge for Why We Need to Vote Yes on Constitutional Convention
Ken Block, MINDSETTER™
Look No Further Than Washington Bridge for Why We Need to Vote Yes on Constitutional Convention
The primary purpose of a ConCon is to provide voters with a mechanism to check a government that has run amok. In the case of the bridge, neither the governor’s office nor the state legislature has held the malfunctioning RI Department of Transportation accountable for its failures.
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Our executive and legislative branches of government are not doing their jobs, and we have no other mechanism in place to protect us from elected officials more interested in covering up than investigating what has gone wrong.
Proposals for an independent Inspector General have languished before our legislature for years. While there is broad support for an Inspector General, the legislature's entrenched powers do not want someone they can’t control nosing around in their sandbox.
The Rhode Island General Assembly does not willingly embrace changes that go against its own interests or the interests of the Speaker, President, or many of its members. This resistance to change is a source of frustration for many. It took 50 years of hard advocacy to eliminate straight-party voting in our state. It took a major financial crisis to win separation of powers changes to how our government operates. More than 70% of voters want the governor to have a line-item veto, which 44 other states already have, yet the General Assembly will not consider it.
It is worse than the General Assembly won’t consider it. The only way voters would ever have a chance to approve a line-item veto is if the legislature votes to put it on the ballot, which they have refused to do for a decade. Current Speaker Joe Shekarchi has received thousands of emails of support for the line-item veto, many of them sent while he was the House Majority Leader. He has no excuse for ignoring the clear will of RI voters to change how our budgeting process works. How dare he take it upon himself to deny RI voters the opportunity to change how our government works by voting to approve the line-item veto as a question on our ballot.
The thing most broken with how our government works is this: if the Speaker doesn’t want the change, it is impossible to get.
We need a ConCon because the Speaker has an iron grip on the state and will not loosen it. It should not take decades to make fundamental changes to how we do things that most other states already do. It should not take thousands of emails every year and hundreds of advocates wasting many hours sitting around the basement of the statehouse to make the case for change fruitlessly.
Those opposed to a ConCon are mostly narrow interests that profit from the way things work now. They don’t want their lucrative apple cart upended. Others look back to the last ConCon, held two generations ago, and worry that whatever happened back then (attempts to restrict reproductive rights) might happen now. This is blatant fear-mongering. When voters in red states are allowed to vote to protect reproductive rights, they have done so the majority of the time. There is no other possible outcome in deep blue RI than for the voters to defend those rights. One hundred years from now, will those opposed to a ConCon trot out the 1986 convention as a reason not to hold one?
A ConCon is in our constitution for a reason. That reason is to do the things that our government refuses to do. Not since the credit union crisis in the early 1990s have we seen the RI government more in need of change than what we are faced with right now. The power to change how our government works is right there before us. We don’t need a tone-deaf Speaker. The first step is to approve Question #1. Vote ‘Yes’ for a Constitutional Convention. Let’s clean this mess up together.