Prominent MA Senators Clash on Resolution Dealing with Top Court Vacancy

A mini-debate in the Massachusetts Senate yesterday afternoon over a resolution concerning the nomination of a U.S. Supreme Court justice revealed an intriguing difference of opinion on the requirements of bipartisanship. 

Ken Donnelly, the Arlington Democrat who serves as Assistant Majority Whip, introduced a resolution calling upon the U.S. Senate to act swiftly on the nomination of a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in his sleep Feb. 13 while on a trip to Texas.

Donnelly described the measure as “a simple ask and an important resolution.” It states, in part:

“Whereas there are several examples in history where a judge has been successfully nominated, confirmed and appointed to the Supreme Court in the year preceding a presidential election, including Justice Anthony Kennedy by President Reagan, Justice Benjamin Cardozo by President Hoover and Justice Louis Brandeis by President Wilson, and

“Whereas, in the event of a vacancy on the Supreme Court, failing to timely nominate, consider and confirm the next justice for partisan political reasons would undermine the plain meaning and intent of the Constitution and be a profound disservice to the American people, now therefore be it

“Resolved that the members of the Massachusetts Senate respectfully urge the members of the United States Senate to swiftly and diligently fulfill their constitutional responsibility by granting a fair hearing and a timely vote to the President’s next nominee to the Supreme Court.”

You will recall that the Republican majority in control of the U.S. Senate has said they will not even meet with President Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee, never mind hold hearings or vote on that person.

Donnelly contrasted the endless partisan warfare and cynicism within the U.S. Senate to the normal fair play and comity in the Massachusetts Senate.  Said he, “When we have 34 Democrats in this branch and five Republicans, we make sure the Republicans have a say. To have it happen in Washington, D.C., that the Republicans don’t let the Democrats have a voice is hypocritical.”  [Note: All quotations in this post have been excerpted from a State House News Service account of the Senate session of Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016.]

Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester was quick to disagree.  “This invitation, this resolution,” he declared, “is an invitation to the hounds of partisanship to enter this chamber, to consume our thoughts, to consume our debate, at a time when the issues are pressing and critical.”

Donnelly said, “I believe it is important to make sure that our citizens, the 160,000 people that I represent (in the Fourth Middlesex District), believe in the political system.  For the many people in my district that spent weeks and months and in some cases years going all across this country to elect the President of the United States and have a vote, I feel insulted that the people down in Washington could say the people should decide.  They have decided.  They decided in the election (of 2012) who should be President until January, 2017.  To say otherwise is insulting.  To say our president is a lame duck is a terrible message to send across the world.”

Tarr said, “If we go down the path of this resolution, then I would suspect that, using the logic of the gentleman (Donnelly), we have an obligation to file resolutions every day to express frustration with the inaction of the President and Congress.  We don’t yet have a state budget in place and have not yet lifted the cap on net metering and have not addressed ourselves to the things we want to do with regard to the opioid crisis.

“If we want to say that our time will be consumed by things of a national scale that we are all interested in, we have the ability to take the direction and the focus of the (Massachusetts) Senate away from what we have done thus far and become a proxy for the United States Congress.

“As much as I understand the frustration and concern of many of us on this one issue, I wonder how many other appointments have not been acted on (in Washington).  Are we going to debate those?”

Tarr moved that Donnelly’s resolution be tabled, and it was.  Senate President Stan Rosenberg then announced the resolution would be brought up at the Senate’s next formal session, which will likely be held on Thursday, March 3.

We can only hope that the next discussion on this issue will be as lively as the first. Invitations to the hounds of partisanship and terrible messages, indeed!

A Blogster's Miscellany: Thoughts on Judges, Living and Gone, and on a Former AG

LET’S HEAR IT FOR POLITICS.  Justice Robert J. Cordy has received some serious praise since announcing earlier this month his intention to leave the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this summer, three years before he would have had to retire at age 70.  Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association, hailed Cordy as “a leading voice on criminal justice issues and an intellectual powerhouse on constitutional law,” and said, “Justice Cordy has played a vital role in modernizing court operations, which will leave a lasting legacy on the administration of justice for years to come.”  Ralph Gants, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, told a reporter for The (Springfield) Republican newspaper and MassLive web site that Cordy’s productivity on the court is “the stuff of legend,” adding, “He (Cordy) leaves an enduring legacy as a justice of this court, not only because of the over 360 carefully crafted and reasoned majority opinions he has authored so far, but also because of the countless unseen contributions he has made to maintain the excellence of this court.”  Cordy has a double-barreled Ivy League education: an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a doctor of laws from Harvard.  He had a successful career in private legal practice and served with distinction as managing partner of the Boston office of McDermott, Will & Emery, an international law firm.  However, he never served as a judge before being nominated for the supreme court in late-2000 by Gov. Paul Cellucci, God rest his soul.  Thus it’s impossible to imagine him getting to the top court had it not been for his prominence in Republican circles and his cachet within the Weld-Cellucci administration, which preceded the Cellucci-Swift administration.  Cordy was Gov. Weld’s chief legal counsel for three years in the early-Nineties.  (The legal counsel, I should point out, is definitely not a part of a governor’s political apparatus. Those holding the job dispense legal advice to the governor and work to ensure that the administration functions properly, from a legal standpoint, across the board.  They’re prized most for their legal acumen; should they possess political skills, all the better.)  The Governor’s Council confirmed Cordy’s appointment to the court on a unanimous 8-0 vote in early-January, 2001.  A number of Democrats endorsed him during his confirmation hearing, including then House Speaker Tom Finneran and former Attorney General Frank Bellotti.  “I hope you will learn I am fair-minded.  I am not by nature a partisan person or one who’s afraid of responsibility,” Cordy told the Council, according the account of the hearing from the files of the State House News Service.  That they did. Cordy will end his public service as a total judicial success, with not a single blemish – and many a high point -- on his long (15 years-plus) SJC record.  He will also leave as a living-breathing refutation of the view that our political system can’t ever get anything really right.  It was good GOP politics that made Bob Cordy Mr. Justice Cordy.  And good justice.

SPEAKING OF JUDGES, WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING?  Michael Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest.   I was happy to see that age has not mellowed our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost anything off his fastball.  Chotiner asked, “How well did you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac, we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds.  So you got to know your section very well.  But I didn’t know who Scalia was until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart.  It is 1960.  We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew, if you were a black defendant, forget it.  And this went on for about three weeks.  I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’  And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to be black in the South?’  A bright guy – yeah.  But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake.  There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy.  Money is corporate speech.  This is all preposterous.”  I strongly recommend you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/michal_dukakis_on_the_bush_family_antonin_scalia_and_donald_trump

WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT, COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts attorney general, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways.  A nod of her head during a conversation over coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it.  It’s not hard to see why she may have been interested.  Coakley is a good and honest person.   No doubt she was sincerely sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be out of work.  But that sorrow would not have kept Coakley, or most people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna.  Most everyone in that situation would have reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone is going to replace her, so why not me?  And by now everyone who follows the news is familiar with the story of the embattled university president who survived a coup attempt.  On Jan. 29, you will recall, the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to a (never identified) person close to the university.”  The article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations (emphasis added) with former state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to the same (unidentified)person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the developments.”  Coakley, the article said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter.  The Globe story was obviously planted by someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into concluding her situation was hopeless and deciding to resign in order to avoid being fired.  It was a bluff. McKenna called it.  Soon, an impressive array of persons and groups materialized in her defense.  The tide turned quickly in her favor.  Around Day 3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate for the Suffolk presidency and not  interested in the job.  One can infer that Coakley had come under pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered: Why do you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the board? The situation culminated with surprising rapidity in an agreement between the university and McKenna, which stipulated that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months.  My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months hence, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract extension.  Things at Suffolk could be going so swimmingly by then they'll have to implore President McKenna to stay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LET’S HEAR IT FOR POLITICS!  Justice Robert J. Cordy has received some serious praise since announcing earlier this month his intention to leave the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this summer, three years before he would have had to retire at age 70.  Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association, hailed Cordy as “a leading voice on criminal justice issues and an intellectual powerhouse on constitutional law,” and said, “Justice Cordy has played a vital role in modernizing court operations, which will leave a lasting legacy on the administration of justice for years to come.”  Ralph Gants, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, told a reporter for The Republican newspaper and MassLive web site that Cordy’s productivity on the court is “the stuff of legend,” adding, “He (Cordy) leaves an enduring legacy as a justice of this court, not only because of the over 360 carefully crafted and reasoned majority opinions he has authored so far, but also because of the countless unseen contributions he has made to maintain the excellence of this court.”  Cordy has a double-barreled Ivy League education: an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a doctor of laws from Harvard.  He had a successful career in private legal practice and served with distinction as managing partner of the Boston office of McDermott, Will & Emery, an international law firm.  However, he never served as a judge before being nominated for the supreme court in late-2000 by Gov. Paul Cellucci, God rest his soul.  Thus it’s impossible to imagine him getting to the top court had it not been for his prominence in Republican circles and his cachet within the Weld-Cellucci administration, which preceded the Cellucci-Swift administration.  Cordy was Gov. Weld’s chief legal counsel for three years in the early-Nineties.  (The legal counsel, I should point out, is definitely not a part of a governor’s political apparatus. Those holding the job dispense legal advice to the governor and work to ensure that the administration functions properly, from a legal standpoint, across the board.  They’re prized most for their legal acumen; should they possess political skills, all the better.)  The Governor’s Council confirmed Cordy’s appointment to the court on a unanimous 8-0 vote in early-January, 2001.  A number of Democrats endorsed him during the confirmation hearing, including then House Speaker Tom Finneran and former Attorney General Frank Bellotti.  “I hope you will learn I am fair-minded.  I am not by nature a partisan person or one who’s afraid of responsibility,” Cordy told the Council, according the account of the hearing from the files of the State House News Service.  That they did! Cordy will end his public service as a total judicial success, with not a single blemish – and many a high point -- on his long (15 years-plus) SJC record.  He will also leave as a living-breathing refutation of the view that our political system can’t ever get anything really right.  It was good GOP politics that made Bob Cordy Mr. Justice Cordy.  And good justice.

SPEAKING OF JUDGES, WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING?  Michael Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest.   I was happy to see that age has not mellowed our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost even a bit off his fastball.  Chotiner asked, “How well did you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac, we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds.  So you got to know your section very well.  But I didn’t know who Scalia was until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart.  It is 1960.  We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew, if you were a black defendant, forget it.  And this went on for about three weeks.  I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’  And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to be black in the South?’  A bright guy – yeah.  But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake.  There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy.  Money is corporate speech.  This is all preposterous.”  I stromgly recommend you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/michal_dukakis_on_the_bush_family_antonin_scalia_and_donald_trump

WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT, COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts Attorney General, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways.  A nod of her head during a conversation over coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it.  It’s not hard to see why she may have been interested.  Coakley is a good and honest person.   No doubt she was sincerely sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be history.  But that would not have kept Coakley, or most people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna.  Most everyone in that situation would have reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone is going to replace her, so why not me?  By now, everyone who follows the news in Massachusetts is familiar with the story of the embattled university president who survived a coup attempt.  On Jan. 29, the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to a person close to the university.”  The article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations with former state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to the same person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the developments.”  Coakley, the article said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter.  The Globe story was obviously planted by someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into concluding her situation was hopeless, and that she should resign and quietly go away.  It was a bluff; McKenna called it.  Soon, an impressive array of persons and groups came to her defense.  The tide turned quickly in her favor.  Around Day 3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate for the Suffolk presidency and not interested in the job.  One can infer that Coakley had come under pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered, Why do you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the board? The situation ended with an agreement between the university and McKenna stipulating that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months.  My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months from now, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract extension.  Things could be going so well at Suffolk by then that they will have to ask her to stay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Smart Guys in Everett Saw Steve Wynn's China Strategy from a Mile Off

One of the proverbs lodged in my cranium is, “The judgment of the village is never wrong.”

I buy that.  I also think that units within cities – social clubs, softball leagues, busy restaurants and bars, neighborhoods and even certain street corners -- take on the characteristics of villages in that vital information is exchanged and fresh insights emerge there.

So when I heard in Everett last summer that Steve Wynn had his eye on a large number of Chinese customers for the casino he’s planning on the old Monsanto Chemical site, I paid attention.  Later I wrote a blog post on it. 

Repeating what a friend told me one Saturday afternoon in Everett Square, I wrote on September 14: 

“You watch! Wynn will be doing charter flights from China every other weekend.  He’ll have yachts picking up his most loyal Chinese customers at the Logan Airport dock and whisking them to the casino (on a Mystic-River-front lot, deep inside Boston Harbor).  These high rollers will be dropping Franklins at the tables as soon as they recover from the flight.  And when they’re not betting in the casino or eating at Wynn’s restaurants and shopping at the high-end shops in his luxury hotel, he’ll be sending them in his fleet of limos to the best that Boston offers: restaurants, shows, art galleries, you name it.”

I happened to see on the Internet this morning that Steve Wynn had mentioned Everett during a Wynn Resorts investors call yesterday, and that he’d trumpeted the value to his business of the direct flights that exist between cities in China and Boston.  “Hey, wait a minute,” I thought.  “I heard that months ago.”

I easily found a transcript of that investors call online.  (What can’t you find online?)  Here’s the operative section, from Wynn verbatim:

“I think…the Everett Boston metropolitan area opportunity is enormous.  And we can’t wait to be there.  It’s the first time we’ve ever had a hotel that has nonstop service from every major capital in the world: Hainan Airlines and Cathay Pacific fly nonstop from Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai to Boston.  So does every other world capital, nonstop to Boston.  And we are 12 minutes from Logan Airport with our new hotel.  So all of that sort of makes me feel confident and positive about our future prospects.”

There was also a press release to be found, one that had a vanilla headline: “Wynn Resorts, Limited Reports Fourth Quarter and Year End 2015 Results.”  In the fourth quarter of 2015, the release said, “net revenues were $555.7 million, a 27.0% decrease from the $761.2 million generated in the fourth quarter of 2014.”

Charter Contracting Company, one of the nation’s top specialists in complex environmental clean-ups, is hard at work decontaminating the land where the Wynn Everett resort casino will rise.  Construction of the complex will begin as soon as site remediation is done.  If all goes as planned, Wynn Everett will open late in 2018.

By the sound of yesterday’s investors call, that day can’t arrive soon enough.  Who’d have thought it?  Old Everett riding to the rescue of a mogul from Las Vegas.

The Man and City Combined to Reach Unimagined Heights of 'Buddyness'

“His (Cianci’s) place in the history of American mayors is there for us to look at and conclude that there is no question he changed his city from a wrong turn on the way to Boston to a Destination City.”
               -Tom Cochran, Executive Director, U.S. Conference of Mayors

I never had any dealings with Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, but I’ve spoken through the years with many who did. To a person, they all say roughly the same thing:

He was brilliant and driven, one of the smartest and best politicians they’d ever seen. He rightly deserved credit for the economic and cultural rebirth of Providence, Rhode Island. It was hard to work for him, or be accountable to him, but you always learned something when you were with him.  Unfortunately, you never knew when one of his inner demons would pop out to torment you and/or create a spectacle.

We were once engaged in a project in Massachusetts with a man who’d run the Providence Civic Center (now the Dunkin Donuts Center) for a spell when Cianci was mayor.

“Buddy was a wild man, a total wild man,” the man told us.  “He’d think nothing of calling you at 1:00 a.m. to ask a question about some nothing issue.  But he was a genius.  He could see things in government that other people never could.  He’d make a victory out of something everyone had missed but him.”

This man explained that he’d been hired by the center’s board of directors and reported directly to the board.

“That didn’t matter to Buddy,” he said.  “From the beginning, he made it clear I worked for him, and that, if I wanted to keep my job, I would do what he told me. Period. End of story.  That’s how it was for everyone in Providence.”

Cianci died this past Thursday, Jan. 28, at the age of 74.  Up until a few days before his death, he was still going, fairly strong, as a radio talk show host in Rhode Island.

Of all the things I’ve read about the man since his passing, nothing is as good and as worthy of recommendation as Matt Taibbi’s piece yesterday in Rolling Stone, “One Crazy Hour With Buddy Cianci.”  This is a highly entertaining account of the time in September, 2013, when Taibbi was a guest on Cianci’s radio show together with Stephen Day, former head of the Providence firefighters union.

Here’s a sample from “One Crazy Hour,” told in Cianci’s voice to Taibbi during a commercial break:

“This one time, we’re signing a collective bargaining agreement.  There’s cameras everywhere and when I’m done signing the paper, all of a sudden all of these firefighters are slapping me on the back and shaking my hand.  And I’m panicking.  Why are they so happy?  I lean over and I say, ‘Stephen, what the fuck did I just sign?’ ”

That Taibbi is the author of this piece provided a needed hook (excuse) to write this post: he grew up around Boston and graduated from Concord Academy.  His father, Mike Taibbi, was an outstanding TV reporter in Boston before going on to a distinguished national career at NBC news.

To get Matt’s entire article, click on:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-crazy-hour-with-buddy-cianci-20160201?page=3