Anyone who has spent time around state government is well aware of how the bane of many state workers is the “girlfriend” who gets a job because of non-job-related skills. You can’t criticize her. You dare not discipline her. Whatever she may or may not do, she will never be fired.
One powerful legislative committee chairman once actually brought hearings to a halt and held state business over to the following legislative year in his snit over an alleged slight of his paramour. More “prolific” lawmakers have several lovers on the state dole.
The difficulty thus becomes ensuring the presence of no more than one cumatta per state office, lest there be the proverbial catfight (“Comare” is the correct Italian form of what the uninitiated call “cumatta”). (When the sponsoring lawmaker’s spouse and/or children collect a state paycheck, the cumatta cannot work in the same office as any one of them, either. This is the avoidance of Rhode Island nepotism in its purest form.)
Now, with the General Assembly’s 2007 call to order barely recorded, the Rhode Island Ethics Commission moved to tighten the state’s Code of Ethics regarding nepotism. “Households,” as well as “families,” will be the criteria theoretically used to judge political favoritism.
Unmarried partners of state leaders should therefore be ineligible for favored treatment in applying for state jobs and appointments. Since Rhode Island’s state payroll and the membership of state boards and commissions read (and have always read) like the white pages of the state’s political dynasties, I’ll believe it when I see it.
If the state can’t (or won’t) limit the privileged access of those related by blood or marriage to those in power, how can we believe it is really going to force out the lovers (straight as well as gay) of those living (however closeted) with the people in charge? And even if this did reduce the Ocean State’s rampant nepotism, it still neglects the cumattas — the major beneficiaries of preferential hiring practices.
Although the word “nepotism” comes from the Latin word for “nephew,” nephews (or nieces) are not as much a problem as spouses and lovers. (There may actually be some compare on the state payroll, these being the male side dishes of married female powerbrokers. I haven’t run into any yet, but as women move up in government, give it time.)
It would be nice to believe that the Ethics Commission, which has regained its teeth in recent years, is serious. Still, the likelihood of gay partners being outed in the name of containing nepotism is no more likely than the boom being lowered on the bigger problem — “cumatta on the job.”
If it does happen, I hope the TV cameras are there to get the fireworks.
