The War on Women: Rhode Island Edition
Rhode Island seems like it would be the nation’s bluest state. While an former Republican holds the governor’s office, Democrats dominate the legislature by a 6-1 margin.
But it doesn’t work out that way in reality. Two major factors create some schizophrenic politics in Rhode Island. First, because Rhode Island is a one-party state, it means the Democratic Party holds almost no control over its members and that without that control, it tolerates any number of beliefs under the Democratic tent. Related, it means that any politician with ambition has to be a Democrat. Second, the nation’s most Catholic state means that culturally conservative Catholics can win elections.
My 9 months in Rhode Island has witnessed all sorts of disturbing events from a state this dominated by Democrats. Not only has the state declared war on public workers, slashing pensions and balancing the budget on the back of its employees, but it also passed a draconian voter ID law of the type you would expect from Arizona or Mississippi. Maybe the state’s biggest story in 2012 has been a young woman forcing her high school to take down the Christian prayer located on the wall of Cranston High School West; the powerful Democratic Rep from Cranston, Peter Palumbo called her “an evil little thing” on a local radio talk show.
Now you have Democratic Rep. Karen MacBeth calling for a forced ultrasound bill before a woman can have an abortion, citing her own anger that Planned Parenthood didn’t help her more when she was a single mother.
I don’t think this is going to pass. The chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee, Edith Ajello, has also introduced a bill prohibiting the state to interfere in decisions regarding a woman’s pregnancy. I don’t believe Gov. Lincoln Chaffee has said anything publicly about this, but he is known to be pro-choice.
I highlight this story for a few reasons. First, to note that the war on women isn’t only a Republican war. Second, to question the “more Democrats” mantra of the netroots, something that should work in principle, but hasn’t always proven so successful in reality. And third, because politics in Rhode Island are a fascinating labyrinth of weirdness. It should be a progressive place, but I haven’t seen too much evidence of it.
Aaargh. McBeth is my state rep. I’ll drop her an email, ask her to stop fucking around, act like she’s from a blue state, not freakin’ AL.
Linc Chaffee is the last of the old-fashioned New England Republicans. No way he’d sign McBeth’s bill.
Well, that’s true of all the Northern urban Blue states, isn’t it?
Yes, that’s true. It would probably be more accurate to say that in RI conservative Catholic Dems can make up very large proportions of the legislature.
Massachusetts too.
Is McBeth generally smarter than her disappointment at Planned Parenthood makes her sound? I mean really, “I saw Planned Parenthood, and I thought it helped you plan your parenthood.”
I haven’t talked to her that much. I was at some meetings with her, about the development of a parcel of land behind my across-the-street neighbors.
I got a return email from Karen McBeth:
The bill has already been heard in committee and has been held for further study.
Translation: Its buried so deeply that Indiana Jones and The Librarian together couldn’t find it. Fine with me.
It’s “more and better Democrats”.
Right, though the better has usually been sacrificed to the more. And possibly for quite understandable reasons.
Really? It’s hard to separate out “netroots” from all the other online support nowadays, but looking at DFA, Blue America, and Kos supported candidates, for example, you see a lot more of the “better” than the “more”.
Do you think there is any correlation between the “more democrats” and the “worse democrats” in RI?
Also, if you cannot elect better democrats where there is no republican opposition, when and where can you elect them?
Counter-intuitive, I know, but one party control means a much wider spectrum at the state level.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/04/the-war-on-women-rhode-island-edition/comment-page-1#comment-254294
How wonderful.
If democrats don’t have any opposition they can’t control their party.
If democrats do have opposition, they can’t control their party.
Let’s be fair. Lack of top-down party control isn’t UNIQUE to the Democratic caucus, its just WORSE than the Republicans and it results in rightward deviations… just like with the Republicans.
If you think John Boehner has any kind of control over HIS caucus, you’re deluding yourself.
Well, to be fair, I discount republicans completely. The democrats, as loathe as I am to say it, are the good ones.
That was me.
Exactly: Democrats can’t control their party.
There’s a reason for the Will Rogers joke.
And what makes you so high-and-mighty on the issue of internal coherence and discipline, Mr. Libertarian?
Are you even one of the real libertarians? ;-)
Point taken. But you know that is apples and oranges to a degree. Politics for democrats may be business, but for libertarians its personal.
The Koch’s have recently filed a couple of lawsuits against Cato, and that power struggle has been going on for decades.
And I am pretty sure that a fair number of paleos would prefer I didn’t self-apply the term (if they knew of my existence, that is).
This is absolutely true. When I was growing up in Oklahoma and later when I lived in Chicago, that was the case. Both were solidly Democratic at the times, but that pretty much encompassed everyone except the far right. If anything Oklahoma Republicans were even crazier back then.
What level are we talking about here? It’s mostly one-party states like most of New England, or DC, or various one-party cities across the country, that send the “better Democrats” to Congress.
But on a finer grained level, there can be a minority of “worse Democrat” state legislative districts.
As my uncle Bill used to say, “There ARE two parties in RI. There’s the mobbed up guy, and the not mobbed up guy.”
Do these pathologies translate upward? By which I mean, to RIs Congressional delegation.
Statehouse politics can be weird, and significantly different than the politics of federal offices in the very same state. I usually chalk this up to voters not being as informed as they should; I’m a political junkie myself, and I’ll admit that I have on occasion pulled the lever on people at the state and county level based solely on party affiliation.
And I know much better than that, because I live in New York, and we have our own pathologies at work among many of our putatively “Democratic” elected officials in Albany, and hell, on the county board. They’re a little different than yours (our problems tend to be machine-related as opposed to based on pure apostasy issues; Republicans have NO trouble getting elected in much of New York state) but it’s the same principle.
But I’ve never really heard or RIs Congressional Democrats being particular Blue Dog-ish, so that’s something? I guess?
Well, RI only has two Congressional districts. One was held by Patrick Kennedy (Ted’s son), and is now held by the former mayor of Providence, who is gay and was out before he was mayor. The other, Jim Langevin, is quadroplegic Dem, who tried to get a Health care plan based on Congress’ plan. He is a good liberal, and tight with Nancy Smash.
Both Senators are Dems, and liberal on most issues. Jack Reed is very strong on defense, and might have been under consideration for SecDef, he was very supportive of Gates’ plans to cut cdefense budgets sensibly. Sheldon Whitehouse, former RI AG, is very good on civil liberties.
It doesn’t really translate upwards, because it’s not the median shade of blue that’s the issue here. It’s some legislative districts that are much more conservative than their neighbors. They probably vote against the eventual winner of statewide primary races all the time.
Remember that even the People’s Republic of MA (also a one-party state) passed a No Abortions under Medicaid law in 1977 (Doyle-Flynn amendment. Doyle was my state rep at the time. I know how to pick ‘em.)
It was overturned in short order by both state and federal courts.
Ted Kennedy was ‘pro-life’ at the time as was the majority of the MA congressional delegation in the 70′s.
Yep. And it’s in Boston that the local abortion fund can’t find a bowling alley that will host its fundraiser.
First, because Rhode Island is a one-party state, it means the Democratic Party holds almost no control over its members and that without that control, it tolerates any number of beliefs under the Democratic tent. Related, it means that any politician with ambition has to be a Democrat.
It seems like these ought to be in direct contradiction: if you need the party’s support to get anywhere, doesn’t that mean the party has great control? Or does the fact that there are so many different ideologies within the party prevent it from enforcing any kind of platform effectively?
Not the way politics are run these days.
If you want to be a Democratic nominee for office, there are two hurdles to clear; registering as a Democrat and filing all the appropriate forms, and convincing a plurality of Democrats in the district, state, country, etc. you wish to run in that you should be their standard-bearer.
And you’d be amazed how little control the party can exert there. It exerts some, don’t get me wrong, but national and state parties injecting themselves into contentious primaries is usually something that enrages the people involved.
I’m not an expert on RI, but its a tiny state with a centralized population. I would hazard a guess that many of the culturally conservative putative “Democrats” he speaks of have extensive support networks among a small cadre of highly-engaged voters in their districts who share their values, and once on the ballot they can count on low-information blue voters who vote a straight ticket to get them elected.
Which means that absent some giant scandal they can keep winning elections as Democrats forever and the party can’t do shit about it.
Which is also why, in both MA and RI, the governor is often GOBP.
My theory is that MA and RI voters pick a governor based on his perceived ability to stand up to the state legislature. They know that the Democratic leadership has a veto-proof majority in both houses before the first vote is cast on election day, so they aren’t concerned about the governor’s agenda, so much as his independence from the state house machine, and his “strength.”
When the Democrat seems too cozy with the legislature, or too weak to stand up to them, then the voters know they can elect the Republican without actually getting Republican governance.
Nope. We’re talking about a large state legislature in a very small state. Most times, in off years, less than 20% of voters typically show up. So if you know a lot of people, and can get even the informal support of the local cops/firefighters/teachers, you’re pretty much in.
And yes, in Northern Democratic one-party legislative states like RI and MA, the ideological spectrum in the Democratic party is really, really wide.
Barney Frank was in the MA legislature at the same time as Doyle and Flynn (above http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/04/the-war-on-women-rhode-island-edition/comment-page-1#comment-254259 )
You don’t really need the party’s support. You need to be a Democrat in order to appeal to the voters.
“Pathologies” is a good term (upthread) for RI politics. I find myself saying, “Aren’t they Democrats?” and wincing while reading ProJo. But since I am a snowbird and vote in Florida, I don’t have a leg to stand on.
Fuck, they even cut off your legs if you leave the state!
Growing up with a lot of kin from RI (and URI for that matter) I used to get fed a lot of shit about Jesse Helms from said RI relatives.
“Buddy Cianci?” was the tried and true retort to bring the conversation away from regional politicians that we were embarrassed about.
RI has had it’s own distinctive brand of local politics from Roger Williams, day 1.
Well,Buddy was really just an old fashioned grafter machine pol. They are, and have been, everywhere. In RI, its just on a smaller scale, that’s all.
This is an excellent demonstration of why civil rights and civil liberties shouldn’t be partisan. That, of course, requires that the Republicans to purge the misogynist racists instead of compete as thought #1 Woman-Hating Bigot was a desirable award like they do today. I only hope to live to see a world where no one anti-choice could get elected to Cornchewer County Precinct 4 Constable, but that’s asking a lot of the world.
This doesn’t seem like it necessarily follows. I mean, I can understand that it’s the case, but I don’t think the two always have to go together. A very strict factional system with factional control over individual members and power-sharing at the party level would not be surprising to see in a one-party state, for example.
After today’s discussion, it’s fair to say that the United States engaged in a war on women. After all, every time I board a plane, they throw me in that electronic cubicle to check on what’s in my uterus. I’d vote the Reproductive Rights platform but there are none to be found.
I lived in RI for 2 years and saw the same strange thing – an extremely “Democratic” state inhabited by regressive and ignorant hicks. The views Rhode Islanders have on women are astounding, as this post shows. I’m not surprised the ultrasound bill is basically a legislator using her office to carry out a personal vendetta, that’s how they do it there. There’s a reason I left RI and I do not miss it.
Coming back to this, I have read through the thread and the only time I have seen a cause for this sort of lack of party control is voter turnout.
To me it seems like the bankrolls of national parties would be more than enough to overcome voter apathy at the regional level.
I have a suspicion that there would be some upward moving cash flow and backscratching within the party that would be the main contributor to this problem. That would lead to a situation where the national party is more interested in having more officials with a “D” behind their name than they are with having good officials. That’s all speculation, though.
So why can’t or doesn’t the national party bankroll better candidates, and is there a solution to this problem?
Why on earth would you want to limit an ultrasound for a pregnant women? She should have access to every thing possible, unless…. you’re scared and trying to hide something from her, like her healthy baby. The equipment is right there, and you think it’s a BAD THING to ask the doctor’s to simply OFFER one?