PROVIDENCE, R.I. – I’ve never run for or been elected to public office (thankfully for us all), but if such a misfortune ever were to befall me, I like to think I’d be sufficiently scrupulous in my duties as lawmaker that I wouldn’t simply take any piece of paper handed to me by a sympathetic-seeming person who claimed to be one of my constituents and propose it as state law.
What the hell am I talking about? Well, today, I’m talking about something that happened recently in Rhode Island – but I could easily be talking about the same sort of thing happening in any number of other states over the last several years.
In the recent Ocean State incident, a State Rep. named Grace Diaz handed off a bill called the “Stop Guilt by Association Act” to Sen. Sandra Cano, one of her colleagues in the R.I. Senate, telling Cano that she would introduce the same bill in the House.
Diaz’s bill, it turns out, wasn’t her own idea, but something suggested by a constituent. The man in question told Diaz he had been “accused of something,” but when he was acquitted (or whatever his claim was) the media didn’t report the outcome with the same zest and zeal it did the original accusation.
Struck by his tale of woe, Diaz decided to take up the man’s cause – apparently, without thinking through his proposed solution, or looking into his story. Instead, she just decided to take his proposal to the House floor and ask Cano to do the same in the Senate.
Sometime after Diaz brought the bill to Cano, the local media got a sniff of the fact that the R.I. Senate was considering a bill which would mandate that media outlets must cover certain legal stories in a manner proscribed by the proposed statute – and, more to the point, they caught wind of the identity of the (alleged) constituent who proposed the bill.
Who was that constituent? Why, it was none other than Chris Sevier, the same fine fellow behind the “Human Trafficking Prevention Act” (later branded as the “Human Trafficking And Child Exploitation Prevention Act”), the “Modernization Decency Act” and the “Stop Social Media Censorship Act.”
I’m not going to get into comprehensively listing all the dumb, weird and publicity-hungry shit Sevier has done outside his stint as self-appointed interstate decency lobbyist, but I will note that this is the same guy who has sued for the right to marry his laptop (three separate times) in trying to make some sort of point about same-sex marriage.
I will also point out that while his proposals often get introduced in state legislatures, they generally do not get debated in earnest or voted upon, mostly because every time someone in the legislature who champions one of Sevier’s bills finds out who they’ve been talking to, they drop him and the bills he promotes like a red-hot stone covered in toxic thorns.
Look, I understand that for anyone who has been subject to inaccurate, untrue or unfair reporting, a bill like the Stop Guilt by Association Act might have some appeal. But if you can find me even one serious litigator who has handled First Amendment cases who thinks such a bill would survive court scrutiny, I’d be very, very surprised. And as Rep. Diaz found out (speaking of “guilt by association”) championing legislation authored by Chris Sevier is an investment that returns mostly mockery and scorn.
“If I knew (about his background), I would run ten-thousand-million miles away from that guy,” Diaz told the Providence Journal. “I didn’t do my research. This is an experience that will teach me a lot for the future.”
For the sake of other legislators around the country, or future office-holders who may not have been exposed to coverage of Sevier and his past legislative misadventures, I hereby propose that we circulate his photo at state capitols around the country with a brief and simple note affixed to it: “Do not get in a car with, accept candy from, or propose legislation authored by this man.”
Who knows; the state representative or senator whose embarrassment and mortification we prevent might just be your own!
