- We don't necessarily have more corruption than other places, but we have sort of more flamboyant corruption.

- Buddy Cianci taught us a lot about what Donald Trump does, the way corruption can be hidden behind an entertainer's smile or an entertainer's laugh.

Buddy was better at it than Trump is, I think.

- Welcome to "One on One."

I'm Ian Donnis.

The politics of judicial selection remains a hot topic in Rhode Island.

That's because former lawmakers and legislative staffers continue to get jobs as judges, despite attempts to depoliticize the process.

All eyes are now watching to see if House Speaker Joe Shekarchi applies for a state Supreme Court vacancy.

Joining me to talk about this and other good government issues is Common Cause Rhode Island Head, John Marion.

Later in the show, we'll hear from long time former Common Cause director, Phil West.

(dramatic music) Executive Director of Common Cause Rhode Island, John Marion, welcome to "One on One."

- Oh, thanks for having me.

- Let's start with House Speaker Joe Shekarchi.

There's a lot of interest now in whether he will seek to apply to become a justice on the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Why would that be bad for Rhode Island if he did that?

- I've worked well with Speaker Shekarchi over the years.

I think maybe as an attorney he would make a fine justice.

We just believe at Common Cause that he needs to wait a year because of the revolving door laws that were passed in the early '90s.

Rhode Island went through a period in the '80s and '90s where there were a lot of scandals on the courts, and the people of Rhode Island, very resoundingly, in the early '90s passed changes to our Constitution and the Ethics Commission put in some changes to law that say you can't go from the legislature to the bench without waiting a year.

And we continue to believe those laws are in effect and so we think he needs to wait a year.

We saw someone else, now Justice Erin Lynch Prata, go through without waiting out that year, but we continue to think that legally she should have had to wait that year.

- Erin Lynch Prata was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 when she decided to pursue an opening on the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

The legal staff for the Rhode Island Ethics Commission agreed with your view that the revolving door law barred her as a sitting lawmaker from going directly to the Supreme Court, but the Ethics Commission voted five to two, that it was okay for Lynch Prata to pursue that opening.

Why do you think the Ethics Commission came down in that way?

- Yeah, so I would correct it just slightly.

I don't think they said it was okay.

They just said that they didn't agree with the staff's draft opinion that she would have to wait a year, and most importantly, they did not put in place any presidential opinion or decision of the Ethics Commission about whether the revolving door does not apply to the Supreme Court for legislators.

So there is nothing legally in place on which I think Shekarchi can rely to say that this would be legal.

I think the commission as it was composed at that time, and the membership has changed almost completely since 2020.

At least five of them were uncomfortable with the staff's decision, but they weren't comfortable enough to contradict the staff and put something in its place.

- To play devil's advocate, Shekarchi is known as a consensus builder.

He has a lot of legal experience, he has a temperament that might be suited to being a judge.

If he has these attributes, why is timing a factor that should disqualify him for one year?

- Yeah, because we saw in the '70s and '80s, particularly speakers of the House use that really powerful position, arguably the most powerful position in all of the state, to get themselves or people close to them onto the state Supreme Court.

And the result was a lot of problems in the courts.

And Speaker Bevilacqua in 1986 had to resign.

He was chief justice too.

He had been speaker and then made himself chief justice.

He resigned under the threat of impeachment in '94.

Justice Fay resigned again under the threat of impeachment and actually was convicted of a crime for what he did in terms of administering the courts as the chief justice.

So the people I think saw those examples in the 1994 said, no, we wanna swap out this system in dramatic fashion because we wanna kind of sever that tie between being in the legislature, particularly being speaker of the House and being on the bench in that fashion.

And so we think that's why that year is important.

You can't bar them for life from seeking that, at some point down the road, but you shouldn't be able to sit as a current lawmaker and use the power that comes with sitting as a current lawmaker in order to get a leg up on the competition and getting that important job.

- Let's switch gears.

Common Cause has joined a lawsuit seeking to stop the Trump administration's Department of Justice from getting access to sensitive voter information in Rhode Island.

How would you describe what is at stake in this case?

- Yeah, so I think everything's at stake.

So this is part of the Trump Department of Justice has kind been weaponized to try to go back and prove his debunked theory that he actually won the 2020 election.

And so they are going around to all the states and demanding very sensitive personal information, social security, partial social security numbers, and the like.

And they wanna create this master database that will help prove, again, debunked theory that there are massive numbers of people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be there, including non-citizens.

So it's really just kind of a fishing expedition in order to kind of satisfy Trump's ego.

And so we felt we needed to push back on behalf of voters because we don't know.

And the DOJ lawyer who argued in a courtroom in Providence has admitted in a filing that they're not gonna necessarily be able to control that data once it gets pooled into a database by the Trump Department of Justice.

So we just don't think all that sensitive information should be shipped off to Washington.

- John, you've been watching state government in Rhode Island for a long time.

We see a lot of boondoggles and shortcomings most recently, of course the Washington Bridge, there's trouble with the state payroll system, the roads are in bad shape.

Does Rhode Island state government have a competence problem?

And if so, what could be done to address that?

- I don't think we necessarily have a competence problem.

I actually think it goes to kind of the model of how we decided to do a lot of big projects in government, which is we don't hire state employees to do them.

We hire contractors.

So we don't build bridges, we hire contractors to build bridges.

We don't institute new software systems.

We hire contractors to institute those software systems.

And we haven't been doing a particularly good job of oversight and management of those contracts.

So it's on the executive to manage the contracts well, I don't think they have, I don't think Gina Raimondo did a particularly good job.

I don't think Dan McKee's done a particularly good job, but it's also incumbent on the legislature to do good oversight to make sure that management is happening.

And I don't think that oversight has been as robust as it should be.

I think that General Assembly hasn't sort of dug in to the issues on the staff level of why these mistakes keep happening.

- There's a newish conservative leaning group, The League of Rhode Island Businesses, which is moving aggressively to support legislative candidates this year.

The group known by its acronym LORIB has created 40 independent political action committees to funnel more fundraising support to the candidates it supports.

Does this raise any concerns from a campaign finance perspective?

- They've complied with the law.

The problem is the law.

Their behavior under the law.

So I don't think they have necessarily done anything that I'm aware of that is illegal, but the law is not sufficient.

So Rhode Island, again, it kinda comes outta this period in the '80s and '90s, you're gonna talk about as with my predecessor.

Rhode Island very loudly in the '80s said, and they put it in our Constitution, we need good disclosure and we need good limits on donations.

But crafty people have figured out ways to poke holes in that.

I think this League of Businesses is crafty in that way, and they figured out how to kinda funnel through multiple political action committees.

So we actually have legislation that tries to close eight different loopholes in the law.

This is one of them.

They are loopholes that have come from groups on the left, one Matt Brown's campaign sort of developed and have come on the right.

And so we're sort of agnostic to the ideology of the people who found these loopholes, but we wanna close these loopholes and kind of reinvigorate our campaign finance law.

- One of the issues supported by your organization Common Cause is modernizing the state's open records law known as the Access to Public Records Act, or APRA, the governor's office and state executive offices have been very opposed to modernizing this.

Is the outlook any better this year?

- It's always going to be a challenge because it's an aggressive piece of legislation that really tries to advance the law in dozens and dozens of different ways.

My experience is you need a kind of workhorse sponsors.

I think we have a couple of workhorse sponsors this year, and Senator DiPalma and Representative Knight, we're roughly halfway through the session.

I know they're continuing to kinda have the conversations with leadership about trying to find some compromise on it.

So I think something could happen on it this session because we have those sponsors who are gonna kinda try to work on it over the next three months.

- John, you and I have lived through our share of government scandals in Rhode Island.

We remember the fall of House Speaker Gordon Fox, the disastrous trip to Philadelphia by some state officials in 2023, and many others.

How do you think Rhode Island deserves or does not deserve its longstanding reputation for corruption and sleazy political behavior in the current moment?

- Yeah, actually by some measures I think we're improving, and I think I've always kinda hypothesized that we don't necessarily have more corruption than other places, but we have sort of more flamboyant corruption, right?

Like Buddy Cianci kind of marketed corruption as his shtick.

And I think some of the things like the Philadelphia trip just because there's almost like a level of humor to the corruption have kind of landed us on the national stage.

It's endemic to kind of the human condition that some people are gonna try to cheat and we need to kind of always be vigilant and always be closing the loopholes in the campaign finance law and so forth to deal with it.

I don't think we're necessarily worse than any other place.

- In closing this as an election year, we saw back in 2024, only about a third of House of Representative seats in the General Assembly were contested.

Fewer than half of the seats in the Rhode Island Senate.

What would it take to bring about more legislative competition and what is the effect of having so few contested races?

- Yeah, this is a national phenomenon, so Rhode Island is not unique in that as the parties have polarized and as states have moved bluer and redder because people are voting down ballot, not splitting tickets anymore.

That there's just less incentive for people to run and challenge incumbents.

I think we could do a few things, public financing of campaigns, which is something we use to spend a lot of our time on.

Has proven in Connecticut to help increase competition.

I think there's a lot of proposals before the legislature about things like rank choice voting, or fusion ballots, or liberalizing the ability to create new political parties.

And I think some combination of those things might create some opportunities for people to sort of deal with the polarization of the two major parties on the national level, but kind of create space for people at the local level to run under other banners.

- Executive director of Common Cause for Rhode Island, John Marion, thanks very much for sitting down with us.

- Oh, thanks for having me.

- And we'll be right back with more discussion about good government in Rhode Island.

Longtime former executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island, Phil West, thank you for joining me.

- Thanks for having me, Ian.

Good to be with you.

- Phil, you literally wrote the book on your time as executive director of Common Cause from 1988 to 2006, a time when the state was awash in scandals.

To what extent have things changed since then?

- I think we're better, not in every area, but I think we're better and part of it is because the Ethics Commission survived a lot of efforts to undercut it and now we have legislators almost 100% filing annual ethics disclosure forms about their outside interests.

The other thing that I think is really important is separation of powers that we no longer have legislators sitting on 65 boards and commissions where the temptation was always present to steer contracts and higher constituents and things like that.

So those two changes, a stronger Ethics Commission and separation of powers in the American model, I believe have really made a change.

- If we had the time, you could probably recite 15 reforms that were inspired by the scandals, the '80s and '90s.

One of those was the creation of the judicial nominating commission in 1994, which was supposed to take some of the politics out of the process of selecting judges in Rhode Island.

But we see that often former lawmakers and legislative staffers still become judges and magistrates.

What are your thoughts on what could be done to improve the process?

- Well, I think first of all that that was the least effective of all the reforms that I worked on, and I could give reasons for that, but I don't think that's relevant now.

The pattern that you've described is accurate.

What we see is that a whole bunch of members of the Senate have made their way from serving in the Senate, whether in the Judiciary Committee, or as majority leader, or whatever into judgeships.

That was not supposed to happen.

It has happened repeatedly shamelessly really, and I'm deeply troubled about that.

- Is there anything that can be done about that?

- Well, Dawn Euer, the senator from Newport, has three bills that are in.

I won't get into the details of what they're about, but I think if they were to pass, they would make a real difference.

Judicial nominating process inevitably is political.

It has to involve the other two branches of government, but the danger is that if there are deals going on under the table between the governor and the leaders of the Senate, then it's very hard to change it.

Alan Flink, who is head of the Bar Association in the early 1990s when we worked on this, used to say that there are two paths to judgeships.

One is through the Bar Association and good legal work, the other is through the legislature.

And unfortunately that second path has become the dominant one now.

The other thing that's happened has been there's this creation of magistrates.

There were no magistrates, or maybe there were two, I think, in the early 1980s.

Now they're 24, 25.

- And that's a bit of a end run around the process.

- It's a complete end run because they're appointed by the heads of the various courts and without any passing through the judicial nominating process.

And so it becomes a first step toward a judgeship.

- Let me ask you, Phil, what do you think are some of the other key elements of unfinished business of government reform and improving government in Rhode Island?

- Open access to government records, open meetings is always a problem.

And that's one that requires constant updating, especially as we are in the digital age.

I think the one that scares me is that we're beginning to see gambling from poly market and some of these other ones on the outcome of all kinds of things, and the temptation then is to put money into it to change the outcomes.

There's use of confidential information.

So I think that that use of confidential information for personal gain is an immense danger, hugely so in Congress, less so, but still importantly in state government.

- There are a lot of great qualities about Rhode Island, but people can also cite a lot of ongoing problems with the function of government, bad roads, underperforming public schools, et cetera, et cetera.

For all the reforms that happened after the scandals, the '80s and '90s, what do you say to people who think they're not getting a good bang for the taxpayer buck in Rhode Island?

- Well, first of all, I can understand their feelings.

I think we forget sometimes that enormous amounts of pension obligations were built up with dishonest pensions before the early 1990s, and we were able to clean up some of that in law and the continued offenses have stopped, but the expenditures have continued and will continue until people who were my age have died.

So pension system has been a bleed from the economy.

I think we also need better legislative oversight, and we are still in a transition of creating that.

The claim previously was that if you had legislators on RIPTA and on all these different boards, they provided oversight, they seldom did.

But we have not yet gotten to the point where the legislature sees it as its responsibility to do that.

There was a brief time and there have been times when they tried after the credit card scandal in late '90s when Senator Linehan led a commission that looked at some of those abuses.

But that's the kind of oversight that needs to be systematized and really established.

- You mentioned some bad pension deals.

One of those happened in Providence when Buddy Cianci was mayor.

There were compounded cost of living adjustments that blew up the unfunded liability for Providence's pension and that's an ongoing issue in 2026.

You were around for Buddy Cianci's time, his second run as mayor.

How do you think the city of Providence is doing now compared to then?

- I think it's better.

I was terrified that Buddy was gonna win in 2014.

And I think Jorge Elorza came in and worked really... First, Angel Taveras came in, David Cicilline came in, Angel Taveras came in, Jorge Elorza came in.

So we've had several mayors who I think have been honorable and have worked diligently, but it takes a long time to correct after a really corrupt mayor.

People still give Buddy credit for a lot of things that I don't think he deserves credit for.

Should I speak of the dead that way?

But it's a real problem.

Buddy Cianci taught us a lot about what Donald Trump does, the way corruption can be hidden behind an entertainer's smile or an entertainer's laugh.

Buddy was better at it than Trump is, I think.

- Phil, we talked a little bit earlier about judicial selection, so I'd like to ask you about the possibility of House Speaker Joe Shekarchi applying for an opening on the Rhode Island Supreme Court as I asked our guest in the first half, John Marion, if Shekarchi has the right temperament, if he's a consensus builder, should he squander what he might see as an opportunity to move to the Supreme Court because the timing does not align with what some people consider it to be?

- Well, first of all, the two revolving door provisions, there's an ethics commission provision and there's a provision in law that, and they were passed in 1991 and 1992, and they really dovetail and they're very strong, and I think it's virtually impossible for him to avoid violating those provisions if he applies now.

If he applies, anyone can go to the Ethics Commission and file a complaint against him.

A complaint was not filed against Erin Lynch Prata, but I think one might be with him.

I think if he waits out the mandatory revolving door cooling off period, there will be other opportunities.

We have several other justices, Suttell and Robinson, who are probably nearing retirement.

And in a few years, his credibility will still be strong if he waits his time.

- You referred earlier to the battle over separation of powers, if I remember correctly, that was approved by voters in 2004.

And of course we know the American system of governance is based on the idea of checks and balances between three branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Can you point to tangible differences that separation of powers has made for Rhode Island?

- Well, I think most importantly that all of those 65 boards and commissions had to be reconfigured.

And I have not attended all of their meetings, but my belief is from what I have read, what I've seen, that many of them are functioning better than they were.

But that's only an impression.

I don't have statistical basis for making that case.

- One of the other reforms that grew out the '80s and '90s was downsizing the legislature.

They're now 75 members of the House of Representatives, 38 in the state Senate instead of respectively 150.

How would you describe the difference that has made?

- Well, the downsizing has not significantly increased the workload, but the more important part of that change that the voters approved in 1994 was to provide a decent salary.

Before that, legislators had to serve for $300 a year for eight years to get into the pension system.

That amendment in 1994 ended the legislative pension system, but it provided a compensation, started at $10,000 a year.

It was raised automatically in accord with the consumer price index, so now it's close to $20,000.

I think that has made a difference.

Still legislators, part-time legislators are overworked and underpaid.

- In closing, Phil, as a longtime observer of state government and an advocate for good government in Rhode Island, is there something that sticks out to you as a great white whale that is an undone thing, something that you see as a crucial need for the public in Rhode Island that has alluded forward motion?

- I think the question of gerrymandering, in other words, redistricting an election to some kind of thing like the Alaska system or some other one that would lessen partisanship.

We have a lot of very conservative Democrats, and if we had a primary system that sent forward to candidates regardless of party, some other states have tried that.

There are different ways it can be done.

But I think we need to lessen partisanship and particularly partisan gerrymandering.

- Why is it that some states have a less partisan redistricting process?

- Well, they've passed it by voter initiative and we don't have voter initiative in Rhode Island.

The Democratic Party of which I'm a member, now I can be, has resisted a process that would establish what I think would be a more pragmatic, more effective, less partisan way of electing legislators and statewide officials.

- Phil West, longtime executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island.

Thank you very much for showing us on "One on one."

- Thank you.

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