A Full-time General Assembly
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Rhode Island General Assembly is one of the 10 state legislatures in the U.S. that work the least, is the lowest paid, and has the least amount of staff to help Senators and Representatives do their jobs. They call these states Part-Time Lite, and they’re a throwback to citizen legislatures of the past.
But in the 21st century with its complicated and difficult problems, that old model isn’t working. It takes time to identify the cause of a problem, which is what you need to know before you work on it, and it takes even more time to come up with a realistic solution. And the simple fact is that our legislators can’t do that on a six-month, part-time schedule.
Instead, our legislators are forced to cut corners like settling for short-term fixes that will need to be worked on again instead of fixing the problem outright. Or letting outside groups that want to help themselves instead of helping us write their bills. Or voting on bills they haven’t studied or even read. And of course, there’s less time to interact with the people they represent, too.
The problem is most apparent at the end of the legislative session in May, when the Statehouse is like a pressure cooker that’s ready to burst. Senators and Representatives run around like school kids in a panic, pulling all-nighters to get their papers written and projects done before the semester ends. The place is chaotic and unprofessional and doesn’t help anyone do their job well. It’s a bad way to treat our legislators and a terrible way to get things done.
If we want a General Assembly that works for us, we need to give our Senators and Representatives the time to study and deliberate and develop real solutions to our problems. We need to give them the space to be thoughtful and thorough and to hear us when we tell them what we need, and a full-time legislature is a way we can achieve that.