Romney’s Big Chance
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[Commentary]
This is a wonderful rare opportunity for Mr. Romney to show leadership with the Democratic stronghold legislature that could only bolster his image as a Presidential Candidate. If he’s able to get the provisions in this drunk driving bill restored he can only look even more Presidential than he already does.
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EILEEN MCNAMARA
Romney’s big chance
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist | October 23, 2005Governor Mitt Romney has a fresh opportunity this week to demonstrate whether he can actually accomplish something on Beacon Hill.
The governor has pledged to ship a drunken driving bill back to the Legislature with amendments to restore tough provisions that had been excised by a House and Senate conference committee.
The governor rightly complained that the measure lawmakers sent to his desk last week reflected the will of the defense bar, not the will of the people. No surprise there, since five of the six legislators on the House-Senate conference committee are lawyers who represent drunken driving defendants.
It is not enough to be right, however. Romney, whose presidential ambitions for 2008 are at war with his re-election prospects for 2006, needs to prove he can win this fight if he hopes to be a credible contender for either office.
The numerical superiority of the Democrats in the Legislature, long the excuse of Republican governors for their stymied agendas, should be no obstacle. Not this time. Not with lawmakers suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds. Not if Romney is willing to lead.
The public is on his side. Ron Bersani, whose granddaughter, Melanie Powell, was run down by a repeat drunk driver two years ago, has put a human face on this issue, walking the corridors of Beacon Hill for months lobbying for the changes that the committee deleted, including mandatory jail sentences for drivers with blood alcohol levels well above the legal limit. Romney need only remind voters that the tougher version of this measure was known as Melanie’s Bill in memory of that 13-year-old Marshfield girl.
The Legislature has the votes to toss aside Romney’s amendments, but there is a risk in ignoring the will of the people, who are in no mood to coddle those who drink and drive. The death of a Bridgewater State College student early Friday morning — allegedly struck by an underage classmate who had a blood alcohol level 11 times the legal limit for a person her age — will only fuel fresh outrage at the lethal combination of car keys and alcohol.
The deleted provisions of the bill would have targeted repeat offenders in particular, but they also would have had a deterrent effect. Among the provisions lawmakers removed was a section allowing prosecutors to submit court records documenting a defendant’s prior drunken driving convictions. Since those records could only be introduced during the sentencing phase, after a defendant’s conviction, it is hard to see how they would compromise a defendant’s rights, as lawmakers argued.
Did lawyer-legislators send that section to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to secure an advisory opinion on its constitutionality or to protect the profitable work of defending drunk drivers? Thirty-seven percent of the Senate and 22 percent of the House are lawyers.
The Legislature, never held in especially high public esteem, has done itself no public relations favors of late. The conference committee rushed its deliberations on this bill last week to allow several legislators to catch a plane for a 10-day vacation in Spain and Portugal. One of the committeemen rushing off to the Iberian Peninsula while the Legislature was still in session was Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty of Chelsea, the House chairman of the Judiciary Committee who took the lead in weakening the bill.
House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi publicly fretted last week about the constitutionality of introducing prior convictions in the sentencing phase of a trial, but he was out of town for the House debate on the bill, playing golf in Las Vegas, an avocation that has consumed more of his attention than legislation since he assumed the speaker’s chair last January.
There are not many moments on Democrat-dominated Beacon Hill when a Republican governor can use his bully pulpit to do much more than preach. This is one of them.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
