Report: RI state legislature a nonstop booze party!
A newly elected Rhode Island state lawmaker is actually shocked by the amount of boozing that goes on in the state house:
Providence Democratic Rep. Moira Walsh told WPRO-AM on Tuesday that lawmakers have “file cabinets full of booze.” She described how they recently took shots on the floor of the House of Representatives to celebrate Dominican Republic Independence Day.
Walsh took office in January after ousting a longtime incumbent in last year’s Democratic primary and is known for being blunt. She was fired from her job as a waitress in January after her employer said her liberal political views hurt the restaurant’s reputation.
“It is the drinking that blows my mind,” she told talk show host Matt Allen. “You cannot operate a motor vehicle when you’ve had two beers, but you can make laws that affect people’s lives forever when you’re half in the bag? That’s outrageous.”
Legislative leaders late Tuesday sought to dismiss her claims of rampant drinking, with Democratic House Majority Leader Joseph Shekarchi telling the Providence Journal he has never seen anyone intoxicated on the floor or impaired while voting.
But it’s not uncommon for Rhode Island legislators to have toasts of alcohol during celebratory occasions. One of the biggest is next week ahead of St. Patrick’s Day. Nor are Rhode Island lawmakers alone in drinking on the job, though some other states have sought to curb the practice.
In Massachusetts, late-night antics ultimately forced a rules change essentially banning the House of Representatives from meeting past midnight. A Missouri lawmaker last year proposed legislation banning smoking and alcohol in the Statehouse. And a pattern of drunken-driving arrests of California lawmakers led the legislature to provide them free after-hours transportation, though the free rides were ended in 2015 in an attempt to restore public trust.
Walsh is no stranger to outspokenness. It got her fired as a waitress for speaking her mind:
Adrienne Green: How did you decide to run for the seat of state representative?
Moira Walsh: I’m a waitress, and have been for going on 10 years. I literally went across the street, to the restaurant across the street from my high school, and I got a job there in what I thought was going to be a very transitory period of my life, and it has ended up being my main form of income. A couple of years ago, a coworker of mine tricked me into coming to an industry night for the Restaurant Opportunity Center. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by these really amazing union organizers who were explaining to me that while it might not feel like it, I did in fact have rights as a worker and could stand up for them if I so decided.
I started working to try and organize people within the restaurant industry, and then we started lobbying up the statehouse, which was infuriating. We would go down there every single day and say, “Hey, I’m really poor, and this is really hard,” and just hear this resounding, “We know, and we don’t care.” It took six full months of badgering them everyday—”Hi, can we have a dollar? Can we have a dollar?”—until they finally gave it to us, I’m sure not because they knew we needed it, but more because they wanted to get us out of their hair. That was the point when I realized that there has got to be a better way.
If you go to your boss and your legislator and ask for a raise and they say no, where do you go from there? That was the point at which I decided that if these people weren’t going to represent me, or even pretend to care that we were struggling, then they couldn’t really call themselves my representative, could they? That was when I started the process of running because I was tired of being told that they would tend to me later.
Green: What were some of the experiences that you had in the restaurant industry that made you feel like you needed to fight for higher wages?
Walsh: One of the problems with having your base wage not be your full wage is that you are relying on the kindness of strangers, because tipping is not legally required. It puts you in this diminished capacity, because if one of these kindhearted strangers who is going to be paying your rent decides that he wants to make a comment on the quality of your butt, or how your pants look, or slap you with a menu on the butt—all of these are things that have happened to me on numerous occasions—I have to then make the decision on whether I’m going to stand up for myself and say, “Hi, that is sexual harassment and you can’t do that,” and run the risk of him not tipping me, because I need that money to pay my rent. When you put people in a place where their income is dependent on how much of a doormat they are willing to be, you really set people up for failure.
