Is almost as nice as doing the right thing:
ON Thursday, the Rhode Island House of Representatives is expected to approve legislation to extend the right to marry to all Rhode Islanders, regardless of sexual orientation. I plan to sign the Marriage Equality Act into law immediately after the vote, on the steps of the Rhode Island State House, overlooking downtown Providence. This is the same spot where, in my 2011 inaugural address, I called for Rhode Island to embrace marriage equality.
Signing the bill will be gratifying for many reasons. When I first defended gay marriage in 2004, as a Republican United States senator, most of my party colleagues were extreme in their opposition. In fact, to draw a line in the sand, they scheduled a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in June 2006 — just before the height of a campaign season.
In the end, only six Republican senators joined me in opposing the amendment: Susan Collins, Judd Gregg, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter and John E. Sununu. Of those, only Mr. McCain and Ms. Collins remain in the Senate. Even many of those Republicans opposing a constitutional ban avoided taking a position on gay marriage by saying it was an issue best left to the states. But I went further and announced my support for full marriage equality.
I was one of only four members of the entire Senate to take that stand, along with Senators Ron Wyden, Edward M. Kennedy and Russell Feingold — three of the most socially liberal members of the chamber at the time. Hardly common company for a Republican.
As it turned out, I did lose office in 2006, as part of the general rejection of Republican leadership that year. But I was elected governor as an independent in 2010, and I was proud to see that my stand on gay marriage stood up well over the years.
Good for you, Mr. Gov. Chafee. If there were more like you in the GOP, this would be a better country.
raven
Well well, nighty night.
eta Chafee is an independent.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
But there aren’t, and so it ain’t.
Meanwhile, in the Illinois Lege, Dems and Republicans both are working overtime to find a way to gut public employee pensions, raise retirement age and increase employee contributions, even though those same legislators have taken “holidays” from contributing to the pension fund for the past 30 years.
Morzer
Before you lavish too much praise on Chafee, I’d suggest you think about this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-01/chafee-s-confusion-about-moral-obligation.html
I am delighted that Rhode Island now has legal gay marriage and I congratulate its citizens and legislators on doing the right thing – but let’s not make Chafee into a model of civic virtue just yet.
raven
“He is the first independent to serve as Governor of Rhode Island since John Collins, who served 1786–1790.”
Chris
Wow. I know it’s THE issue with momentum behind it, but a Republican politician coming out for it still boggles my mind.
raven
@efgoldman: I’m glad I’m not on the listserv for my unit tonight.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer:
If he were the model for the generic Republican (I know he is actually an independent), the country would be in far better shape.
Chris
@efgoldman:
Amen and fuck them. If it pisses off the Catholic Church, it’s probably good.
Baud
So 20% of states now have marriage equality. I haven’t calculated the % of population, but it’s probably higher given California.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
I very much doubt that. Chafee is just as disingenuous, incompetent and dishonest as the extremists when it comes to fiscal matters. We shouldn’t overlook these things just because Chafee did the right thing on gay marriage. Yes, I give him some props for this moment of enlightenment – but that doesn’t outweigh his rape of workers’ pensions while coddling Kurt Schilling’s idiot investors.
lojasmo
I like Chafee, and I always have, even when he was a republican.
This despite Morzer’s complaints.
Baud
@efgoldman:
New Jersey should be pushed. The governor’s election is next year, I believe.
Jay C
@Baud:
Has California actually started authorizing/recognizing gay marriages yet/again? I thought there was still some sort of legal BS* hangup still preventing a mass-rush to the altar in the Golden State.
BS AFAIC, that is: I’m sure a lawyer could explain that it’s some Great Constitutional Apocalypse or whatever….
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: Given that my current vision of the generic Republican is Louis Gohmert, I stand by my opinion.
@Jay C: A case involving it was argued in the Supreme Court earlier this year. The opinion will come out before the end of June. Assuming it goes the way it should, the rush for the altar can begin in July.
lojasmo
@Jay C:
SCOTUS case, IIRC. SHould be decided next month.
Chris
@Baud:
Fuck, yes. Someone get that piece of shit out of the governor’s office.
Comrade Jake
The juggernaut of history marches on my friends.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d be interested to learn how you think Chafee’s view of matters fiscal differs from that of Gohmert.
Baud
@Jay C:
Hmm. I don’t know. I just know that it’s in the hands of the Supremes right now.
Ash Can
There in fact used to be more like Chaffee in the GOP. They started bailing when Reagan was elected, and only dwindled further since.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: I think Chafee is actually interested in governance. I don’t think Gohmert is. That is really the fundamental difference, and I think it matters.
Morzer
@efgoldman:
It’s also disingenuous to assume that poor innocent Chafee was completely unable to do anything about the arrangement with Schilling. He could have taken action – as the article makes perfectly clear. Nor is he willing to answer the obvious question of why exactly Schilling’s idiot investors should be paid while Rhode Island’s workers lose out.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@efgoldman:
Bullshit, how about honor your commitments.
Villago Delenda Est
@Morzer:
Yes, just this. Chafee may be on the right side of history on gay marriage, but he’s a grovelling toady of the .01% on that pension deal…fuck over the people who had a contract. If only they had been overpaid thieving banksters, their contract would have been sacrosanct.
Chris
@Ash Can:
The crazy used to be more evenly distributed between the parties, with the GOP having a moderate and a conservative wing both. The merger with the Dixiecrat crowd drastically tilted the balance in favor of the conservative wing by basically stuffing all the country’s crazies into the same party. The moderates either came around to their point of view, moved over to the Democrats, or were forced out.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
What I don’t see is any difference in the outcome of those supposedly different views. You’ve got the same willingness to screw over pension holders, the same inability to come up with anything like a coherent economic policy, the same inability to explain why you should cosset people who made a bad investment rather than letting them go to the wall. You can argue that Chafee does a better job of sounding reasonable and wringing his hands in public, but I don’t honestly see that as much of a benefit to the people of his state or the United States as a whole. Olympia Snowe was supposedly more moderate and said intermittently moderate things – but when push came to shove she was perfectly willing to go along with the teabaggers. If Chafee sounds more reasonable than Gohmert, it has a lot to do with the fact that Rhode Island isn’t the crazier part of Texas from which Gohmert hails.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
It’s this year, which is why Chris Christie did the smart political thing when Sandy hit, and did everything he could for the distressed people of his state. To include profusely thanking Obama for Obama’s prompt response and assistance.
Even if it does give the teatard scum the angries.
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
Well, credit the people of New Jersey for insisting on those steps. If Christie were the governor of a wingnut state, he’d be forced to blame Obama for the storm.
Eric U.
I was kinda surprised that Christie made the news again this week for thanking Obama for the help after the storm. I’m sure that riled some teabaggers up
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: I guess, the difference that I would expect between a Chafee-generic and Gohmert-generic GOP would appear in things like Manchin-Toomey, the debt ceiling fiascos, and the filibuster everything strategy. Chafee and his ilk may be all about the 1%ers but, in my view, they aren’t stupid.
gbear
@Villago Delenda Est:
Any chance that the state workers can take the breach of contract to court to have their contract honored?
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, we shall have to agree to differ. I think Cole’s approach here is naive and enables the GOP crazies by indulging in a fantasy of the GOP moderate – who simply does not exist any longer, unless he is evoked to provide cover for the seething mass of crazy by such persons as David Brooks.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@efgoldman: I pay taxes in the United States of America, and the state I currently work for is trying to do *exactly* the same thing to its employees right now. There is *absolutely no fucking excuse* for looting employee pensions.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@gbear: In Illinois, it’s written into the state constitution that they can’t do what they are wanting to do with pensions, and yet they’re determined to do it anyway, and risk the inevitable court battles along the way.
Omnes Omnibus
@Morzer: Well, in any case, a Chafee generic GOP does not exist. The one that does is full-on cray-cray.
Morzer
@efgoldman:
I would also appreciate it if you don’t try and tell me what I believe or don’t believe. I cited an article with solid reporting in it to make my point. If you are so desperate to defend Chafee that you have to accuse critics of him of trolling, I’d say you’ve gone far beyond the bounds of a civilized debate and a principled disagreement and tried to make it personal. I’d like to think you were better than that.
Hill Dweller
@Omnes Omnibus:
The Republicans’ insanity is the result of Obama’s failure to lead.
Gin & Tonic
@Morzer: For better or for worse, the yeoman’s share of the work on the pension issue was done by Gina Raimondo, the (elected) state treasurer, a Democrat. The contracts, as efgoldman said, were and are unsustainable in today’s economy, and Raimondo was able to get much wider agreement than I ever expected, even from pensioners and unions. “Honor the contracts” is easy to say, until honoring them drives municipalities into insolvency, as for instance Central Falls.
Gex
@Baud: And New York.
Morzer
@Hill Dweller:
Wait, I thought it was because he had the temerity to mention the victims of Sandy Hook when discussing gun-control.
Or is this the official Obama coulda shoulda had a drink with Mitch McConnell week?
It’s hard to keep up sometimes.
Roger Moore
@Morzer:
If only Obama weren’t so insistent on being blackity black black, the Republicans might give him the time of day. And if he didn’t insist on being a Democrat, they could really make some deals.
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic:
So how does this differ from the generic teaparty line about cutting Social Security/Medicare etc etc etc? Aren’t you in effect arguing that the teabaggers are right and we can’t raise taxes and we are going to go bankrupt so.. well, we just have to cut pensions and benefits and so the world goes and no-one is to blame because… what then? And this still doesn’t justify Chafee deciding to bail out investors in Schilling’s failure. All that achieves is to say that Rhode Island is so open for business, any business, that you can fail and the suckers will pay. If that isn’t an invitation for taxpayers to be fleeced, what is? After all, it’s those supposedly unraisable taxes that are going to be used to pay back the investors.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@Gin & Tonic:
I have no problem if you can get buy-in from the affected parties. But states and municipalities don’t have lifespans. They don’t have *one shot* to prepare for retirement. I’d say the same thing about companies who screw their workers out of pensions, or leave them at the doorstep of the PBGF. Except states are different from companies in one very material way. A US state hasn’t ever ceased to exist (as much as I wish some of them would).
Tom_B
@lojasmo: I’d love it if SCOTUS did the right thing and tossed DOMA on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. Depends on Kennedy, I think. I’d rather marriage equality not get litigated in all 50 states. But for Roe v. Wade, abortion would still be illegal in about 40 states. The rednecks in my state pushed through an unpopular anti-equality amendment as a referendum during the primaries, so there was no turn out to speak of, and I’d love to see that shoved down their bigoted throats.
Gin & Tonic
@Morzer: The 38 Studios thing was a clusterfuck and I’ve never attempted to excuse it.
The pension issue was and remains a real problem, and I think Raimondo did mostly admirable work. For whatever reasons, the state and many (most?) municipal pension plans were and are drastically underfunded. Drastically. Raising property taxes in those municipalities to the levels that would be required to bring the pension plans to actuarial soundness in any reasonable period of time is simply impossible, unless you want a municipality full of abandoned property.
A town or county or even a state can’t create money, as the Federal government can. There really is a difference.
Hill Dweller
@Roger Moore:
The Republican party has been crazy for a long time. Granted, they’ve escalated the insanity since Obama was elected, but it was predictable.
The crazy thing for me is the Village’s refusal to acknowledge the crazy. I know they’re hacks, scared of being called liberals, but this is complete abdication of their responsibilities.
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic:
But the counterargument to the Federal government can print money claim will be, and has been for years, that this will ultimately damage the currency, America’s credit rating and economic standing etc etc. That’s why I think it is an immensely dangerous move to go along with the argument at the local/state level – because once you’ve accepted it there, it’s going to be very hard for you to turn around and deny it at the national level, especially when the nation sees that you’ve actually implemented policy based on that argument. This is why I genuinely don’t believe that Chafee and Gohmert’s supposedly different approaches will take you anywhere very different in the end. Nor do I think that Democrats are going to get anywhere by just accepting this way of framing the issue.
Gin & Tonic
What’s your solution? A town’s police pension plan is funded at, say, 25% of what it needs to be based on independent actuarial analysis. Two or three decades of bad decisions and completely unrealistic assumptions of investment returns. You’re here now – what’s the next step?
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic:
For starters, don’t spend good taxpayer dollars bailing out investors who should have known better.
Are you happy to accept the right wing framing of all this and just go along with the march to disaster that they are inflicting on us at every level?
Seriously, why can’t or won’t Democrats come up with an alternative approach?
I would genuinely like to know the answer to that question, because I think we must either come up with a better approach or throw in the towel.
Gin & Tonic
@Morzer: You’re not answering my question. Municipal (town/county) pension plans are drastically underfunded. Many are still (!) being funded based on assumptions of 8-10% annual returns. They have no chance of meeting future commitments. What are your choices?
Rhode Island has 36 towns. One has already gone insolvent. 3-5 others are on the brink. How do you fund the pension plans without bankrupting the towns?
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic:
You aren’t answering my question either. Are you happy with accepting the right-wing framing of this?
Seriously, is our role as Democrats to be the ineffective nice people who shake their heads at the cruelty of right wing policies, but are secretly relieved to see them carried out because it lets us off the hook for coming up with anything better?
I think, by the way, that it ought to be fairly easy for you to answer my question. I am not asking you to come up with a whole new fiscal strategy on the fly – just whether you are happy to see Democrats basically doing what the Republicans want and whether you are happy with our apparent collective inability to find a better solution.
smintheus
The Bishop of Providence is declaring with a big sad that ‘clearly we have now entered a post-Christian era’. Also…
What a priest-ridden state RI is, thank goodness the legislature finally thumbed its nose at Bishop Tobin and his fellow bigots.
Morzer
@smintheus:
Apparently the ways of Providence are still mysterious to the good Bishop.
smintheus
@Morzer: Yah. Tobin is a fish out of water in RI.
Gin & Tonic
@Morzer: “Framing” has fuck-all to do with it. When I say “the pension plan has insufficient funds to meet future commitments” that’s not a Democratic or a Republican statement; it is a statement of fact. If you’re told “you have pancreatic cancer and your chances of surviving a year are less than 5%” do you bemoan the “framing”? It’s not a political statement. The pension plans are underfunded. Period. The state treasurer worked very hard with most “stakeholders” (I hate that word) to manage everyone’s expectations. I think overall she did a good job.
Suggest a way to fund the shortfall.
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic:
Stop ducking the real issue here. Framing has everything to do with this. Once you agree to these cuts at a local level, you’ve got no argument at the national level. Why? Because you’ve already accepted the key argument. You might be perfectly happy just to go along with these things because it stops you from having to think about the future, but there’s a considerable difference between a life-threatening disease and a fiscal issue. Stop trying to use bad analogies to run away from unwelcome facts here. After all, aren’t you the person who just advocated endless printing of money at the federal level? What is that if not an attempt to delay coming up with real economic policy?
Are you happy to just passively go along with the endless cuts demanded by the teabaggers – which is where your approach will take us? Or are you interested in finding another solution?
Is that such a hard question to answer?
SiubhanDuinne
@Comrade Jake:
The juggernaut of history marches on my friends : The juggernaut of history marches on, my friends :: Let’s eat Grandma : Let’s eat, Grandma
scav
@smintheus:
Hardly even requires thought.
belieber
Once a Republican always a Republican. Wrong way Cole proves that again and again and yet you boot lickers will defend him.
Villago Delenda Est
@efgoldman:
Sorry, not the problem of the pensioners. They agreed to those pensions as deferred compensation for not getting raises in previous years…at least I know that is the case in Oregon.
Now, why aren’t the pensions sustainable? Could it be because the pension funds were looted by bankster thieves in the form of fees and so forth? Well?
Heaven forefend the banksters don’t get their swag. It is far beyond time for banksters to go to jail as thieves.
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
Now all Rhode Island has to do is waterboard Curt Schilling and it’s all good.
Ruckus
If there were more like you in the GOP, this would be a better country.
Or at least it wouldn’t sound so much like an asylum. People opposing things that they actually like, just because they don’t want to piss off the other lunatics.
Yutsano
@belieber: And we will continue to point and laugh at you Durf. Herp.
Joey Maloney
>@Gin & Tonic:
“For whatever reasons”? Let’s not pretend this was some kind of natural disaster, a hurricane, some other act of God. There’s a very simple reason why those plans were underfunded: the money that should have gone into them was raided by the state and municipalities. It was diverted into the general fund to make it possible for everyone, but especially the wealthiest, to pay unsustainably low tax rates for decades.
And now that the chickens have come home to crap all over the roost, it’s working people that have to pay for the top tier’s decades-long tax holiday. That’s unconscionable.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: If Christie wants to run as a Republican Presidential candidate in 2016, he cannot support marriage equality.
daveNYC
@Villago Delenda Est:
No. They aren’t funded because the municipalities didn’t fund them. That would have cost money better spent on tax cuts.
Your obsession with banksters can get pretty stupid sometimes.
Cluttered Mind
I think wishing there were “more like Lincoln Chafee” in the GOP is already a flawed wish because Lincoln Chafee himself is no longer a Republican. He ran as an Independent because he could not win a GOP primary, and he himself has to be aware that the GOP is no home for him anymore. There can’t be more like Lincoln Chafee in the GOP because there aren’t any in it at all.