Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

What was Governor Carcieri thinking last Wednesday when he did that last-minute 180 on the cigarette tax bill?
In case you were one of the 10 percent of Rhode Islanders busy looking for a job last week, here's what happened:

The governor submitted his supplemental budget plan last month with some additional taxes, including a $1 a pack hike in the cigarette tax, and higher taxes on HMOs, as well as fee increases for people to restore licenses that have been suspended and other motor-vehicle related items.  There were also a slew of other budget adjustments - including wiping out revenue sharing to cities and towns - and non-fiscal items that would radically change the relationships between cities and towns and their employees in that document.
The revenue items had deadlines for passage. The administration originally said they had to be passed by Feb 3 to bring in the amount of money budgeters wanted to bring in. After discussions, that date was changed to Feb. 17, tomorrow.
For many reasons, there was no way for the entire supplemental budget could be passed by tomorrow - actually, tomorrow was the implementation date, the legislation needed to be passed by last Thursday - so Costantino did what seemed like a stand-up thing. He took the revenue proposals the administration told him had to be passed right away and he incorporated them into a piece of legislation that he sponsored. He didn't tell the governor's staff, "Hey, this is your baby, have a Republican put his name on it." No, he sponsored the bill himself and prevailed on other committee Democrats to cosponsor it - Providence Reps. Tom Slater and Joe Almeida, no friends of the governor, and Central Falls Rep. Gus Silva. They got the measure through the finance committee - over the loud objections of the governor's Republican allies - and out onto the floor of the House.
Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee, also part of the budget negotiations with the administration and the House, also made accommodations to get the governor's revenue items passed. Before they even had a bill that was passed by the House, the Senate Finance Committee scheduled a special early session at 3 p.m. on Thursday to act on the bill that was to have passed the full House the previous day, and the full Senate would have voted on it an hour later and sent it to the governor.
A lot of Democrats were doing a lot of work, and spending political capital, to get the governor's proposals passed according to the governor's timeline.
Then, to hear Costantino tell it, an hour before the scheduled vote on the House floor, a call comes from the governor's office that yanks the rug out from under them - the governor no longer supports the bill containing his own proposals and, according to the top Republican in the House, Minority Leader Robert Watson, will veto the bill if it is passed.
The nice-guy governor whose stock in trade has been his reputation for forthrightness, honesty and straight shooting looks peevish and political, and worse - for anybody who would like to see state government accomplish something amid this economic crisis - he looks like a double-crosser.
Although House Finance Committee Chairman Steve Costantino doesn't use that phrase, you can tell that is what he now considers Carcieri to be. And that does not bode well for the administration.
If Carcieri wants to get his supplemental budget passed in any recognizable form, if he wants to get his 2010 budget (due out next week) passed with what are sure to be controversial tax measures in it, if he wants to get beyond arm-wrestling over who gets to spend Rhode Island's share of Obama money he has to go through Costantino and the General Assembly. The governor made that infinitely harder on himself last week by his last-minute reversal on the cigarette tax and other revenue proposals last week. HIS cigarette tax and other revenue proposals, it merits repeating.
The governor's cause is also not helped by the fact that Watson makes no secret that he and the other members of the tiny GOP House caucus - barely enough bodies for a pickup game of pond hockey - turned the governor during a meeting on the day of the vote.
Watson had been publicly calling on Carcieri to veto the bill for about a week, using the ideological argument that the tax provisions of the supplemental budget should not be passed before the spending cuts and union busting provisions being sold as "tools" to allow cities and towns to eat the Carcieri cuts in state aid without raising property taxes.
Well, one reason the rest of the supplemental budget could not be passed all at once is that an actuary determined that the Carcieri administration had overestimated the amount that would be saved from the pension proposals by $50 million, about half of the savings that were estimated.
The whole idea of a supplemental budget is to bring the budget into balance with midyear corrections. It is pointless to pass a supplemental budget that doesn't balance, because you are going to have to make more changes down the line anyway.
So when Costantino and the House Democrats went out on a limb to get the governor's tax proposal passed, there was no good reason for Watson and Carcieri to saw that limb off behind them. It was done to make a puerile political point, and Watson underlined that by publicly carving a notch in his belt after the bill was pulled from the House floor.
What did Carcieri and the Republicans accomplish? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the move was counterproductive. They killed a bill containing revenue proposals the administration generated and that the governor said were important to bring the current year's budget into balance while at the same time alienating the people administration staffers had been working with to forge a budget deal. And they did it for purely partisan purposes, making them look bad, or even worse, silly, to the public.
The minority leader's blustery belliocosity serves a worthwhile purpose on the House floor (and is exceedingly entertaining to watch) but it might not be the strategy you are looking for in delicate budget negotiations.
On Friday, Costantino sounded genuinely surprised and profoundly discouraged by the governor's actions. He says he still has not been given a reason for Carcieri's last minute move.

"It's one thing if you have completely disagreed on an issue from Day One," he said. "You know it, it's just an ideological difference. You can accept that have the battle. Whoever wins, wins; whoever loses, loses and you move on to the next issue and you keep working.
"It's very difficult to work on a budget if you don't have a spirit of cooperation," he said. "There has to be a sense that when (conclude) an agreement, everyone is on board and you are going to follow through with it. When the rug is pulled out it creates distrust, when you think there is an agreement and it doesn't happen, it undermines the negotiating process, it undermines the strategy to compromise, particularly when it is his proposals, that kind of emphasizes this."
So to get back to the question that started this column: what was the governor thinking?
We may never know. I phoned the governor's office asking for five minutes of his time to explain it, or in some other way find the rationale for the seemingly ham-handed action. But that message never even got a response.
So we are left to think that:
1) The administration feels guilty about what they did and doesn't want to talk about it.
2) They don't give a fig about the public or what it thinks, so they aren't going to explain themselves publicly, or
3) Your guess is as good as mine.
When information is withheld, speculation rushes in to fill the void; nature and the press abhor a vacuum.
This fight is likely to get uglier from here on, and the only winners are likely  to be the reporters and commentators. The public will be among the top losers.
So it goes.