Political Scene: Lawmakers make groundhog day effort to exit marriage business

PROVIDENCE — It's a groundhog day Rhode Island kinda thing.

A state legislator introduces a bill to end the General Assembly's role in deciding who gets to perform a wedding in Rhode Island. An out-of-state judge. A favorite uncle. Perhaps, even a member of their own ranks.

The bill might get through the Senate. But that's as far as the effort to remove the legislature from the "marriage solemnization" business has gone in two decades.

Might that change this year?

The answer: very possibly with a push from the majority leader in the Senate and the new — and newly engaged — majority whip in the House.

There is also a palpable drive among lawmakers to get something done fast and early in this legislative session, after a lost, COVID-dominated year in which they barely met.

The House, with new leadership, is just getting rolling. But one month into the 2021 legislative session, Senate committees have already approved bills to:

Mandate minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, enshrine the protections of the Affordable Care Act in state law and block the opening of any more publicly-financed alternatives to R.I.'s traditional — and in some communities, struggling — public schools. (Read: "Charter schools.")

Waiting for new governor

The lawmakers are also making headway on the latest attempts to end legislators' role in wedding decisions.

Putting this in perspective: the state is in suspended animation, waiting for Governor Gina Raimondo to quit mid-term for a new job as commerce secretary in Washington, and Lt. Gov. Dan McKee to take her place.

It could happen by the end of this week, and Raimondo can be seen, on Twitter — in her R.I. State House office — campaigning remotely for U.S. Senate votes for her confirmation, amid a botched vaccine rollout in her home state.

The Twitter reaction has not been kind.

Meanwhile, the R.I. Senate Judiciary Committee held its annual hearing on the wedding bill and stopped just short of voting last Thursday in order to tinker with the wording. A House hearing is scheduled, quite literally, for groundhog day.

Why are legislators voting on who officiates at weddings?

The short answer: State law allows a long list of people to perform marriages — from clergy members and state judges to town wardens on Block Island. But a special law must be passed to allow anyone else to perform a wedding.

In 2019, as an example: state lawmakers voted on 82 such marriage officiation bills; 2020 was a lost year on many fronts.

Roll forward to 2021: Senate Majority Leader Michael McCaffrey and House Majority Whip Katherine Kazarian have again introduced bills to get lawmakers out of the marriage business.

Their bills would give the governor the power to bestow the right to officiate at a wedding ceremony in R.I. on a particular day in a particular city or town at a cost of $25 for in-person processing, $20 if handled electronically.

Hilary Levey Friedman, president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women (RI NOW). cheered the legislation at last week's hearing.

Among her reasons: it would remove an opportunity for Senators to register their objections to same-sex marriage, as some have done, by abstaining or voting against the requests of same-sex couples to pick who officiates at their weddings.

Steven Brown, executive director of the R.I. affiliate of the ACLU, also cheered, but warned the Senate Judiciary Committee against giving any governor "complete, unbridled authority" to grant or deny a request.

“This bill will modernize the process by placing it online and ensuring that it’s available to all Rhode Islanders year round,” said the newly engaged Kazarian, when she introduced her bill.

The impetus? “Some time ago, I was contacted by a constituent in July about their nuptials scheduled for September. Unfortunately, the General Assembly had already concluded its session for the year and there was no other alternative possible," Kazarian recalled recently.

"It broke my heart when I had to tell my constituent there was nothing I could do."

As to why these bills stalled out every other year: House leaders resisted.

“I don’t see the reason why we would give up that positive interaction and place a financial burden on our constituents,” then-House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello told the Associated Press in 2015.

But the House has a new Speaker, K. Joseph Shekarchi of Warwick, and a new leadership team that includes Kazarian in the No. 3 spot.

And she is hopeful.

"I think that this year, with new House leadership, we have a team of legislators who are of the same mindset and want to modernize the services our state provides and make them easily available to all of our constituents,'' she told Political Scene last week.

As for her own wedding plans, "I just recently became engaged!"

"My fiancé’s name is Sam Daniel. He is a senior account executive at Hubspot in Cambridge, MA ...We have been dating for four years this February and first met while working together at our former company, Upserve."

"Like many couples that became engaged during the time of COVID, we are waiting to see how this pandemic shakes out before we make any concrete wedding plans.

"However, being engaged has opened my eyes to how much planning goes into a wedding and I think it would be a great service ... to help make that process a bit less complicated for the intended couple."

Also on the agenda

Other bills already headed to the full Senate for votes:

CHARTER SCHOOL MORATORIUM: The bill would halt the approval of any new charter schools through 2023-24. It would also reverse the state's approval of three new publicly-funded charter schools in Providence, and the expansion of three others.

It's a fierce fight over money and access to free, publicly-funded school choices in a city, where the traditional public schools failed so badly, by so many measures, the state took control.

The teacher unions and their legislative allies are fighting what they call: "the [financial] drain on traditional public schools."

"We need to address systemic failures, institutional neglect, disparities in funding and racial inequities,'' NEARI President Larry Purtill told the Senators, but not by "taking funding away from the majority of students, mainly in our urban core."

But parent Ramona Santos Torres pleaded: "Do not be complicit in holding families hostages to an education system that is harmful. Do not take away the voices and the power of families to decide what is best for our children."

Added Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza: The wealthy can send their children to private schools or move. "Poor folks don't have [those] options ... and we cannot tell poor families that their only option ... is to wait 10 years for the traditional system to improve."

HEALTH INSURANCE: The bill would lock into state law the protections in the oft-challenged Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare.

That would include guaranteed coverage for an itemized list of "essential health benefits," and protections against exclusions for pre-existing conditions and denied renewal because someone got sick.

NURSING HOME STAFFING: This high controversy bill would require 4.1 hours of direct nursing care, per resident per day, and wage increases in the wake of any rate increases for the nursing homes.

SEIU 1199 has led the drive, arguing:

"A quarter of the nursing homes in the state exceed or are very close to the 4.1 hours per day of direct care recommended by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. On the other hand there are the bottom feeders, many of which provide less than 2.5 hours of care per day per resident."

The counter-argument: "The legislation does not consider the numerous challenges facing providers, including Medicaid underfunding, lack of workforce, and the COVID-19 pandemic,'' James Nyberg, executive director, LeadingAge RI, wrote the Senators.

He also pushed back against the union's attempts to link COVID deaths to staffing levels.

"Here in R.I., we have seen very high staffed nursing homes experience significant outbreaks. So I would caution against using the COVID pandemic as a rationale for mandating a staffing ratio."

The bill — which figured in the SEIU's aggressive 2020 campaign to oust lawmakers who did not fully embrace it, including then-House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello — is slated for a full Senate vote on Tuesday.

Licht and the transition

Superior Court Judge Richard Licht ended up where no judge wants to be last week — at the center of a Twitter kerfuffle.

The McKee transition team named Licht as one of the "past government officials [who] have been meeting with state department leaders to discuss departmental operations ... agency budgets,'' and the like.

Licht, a one-time lieutenant governor, is also a former Department of Administration director. Critics questioned whether his role in McKee's transition violated a rule banning judges from engaging in politics

Licht responded to a Journal query via court spokesman Craig Berke:

"Lt. Governor McKee reached out to all former lieutenant governors for help. Licht explained that as a member of the judiciary his ability to assist was limited... As such, he declined a position on McKee’s transition team.

"Because of his prior service as Director of Administration, he did however agree to participate in 2 interviews — one with the Director of Administration and the other with the Director of Office of Management and Budget to identify priority issues.

"He gave no advice and did not participate in any hiring decisions."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Political Scene: Lawmakers make groundhog day effort to exit marriage business

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