The House Civil Liberties Rankings brought out some genuine surprises, but maintained the stunning disappointment we found in the Senate Rankings. Our findings show that most members of the GA have little regard for civil liberty implications, especially on "virtue" bills that seek to correct a genuine concern, but trample individual rights at the same time. A large percentage of bills were commonly voted for/against by the same groups of Representatives, indicating a case of "group think" in which leadership directs its members how to vote. Our top performers in the rankings were those most likely to go against the grain and vote "no" on bills that seemed well-meaning on their face, but contained serious civil liberties concerns. However, none of these top performers achieved an excellent rating, due to the vast number of bills they supported that opposed the ACLU position.

One of our biggest findings in researching the data for both Senate and House Civil Liberties Rankings was that the House intentionally refuses to publicly publish the results of committee votes when a bill is killed using the "held for further study" trick. First, a quick background: When leadership does not support a bill, they almost always still allow a committee vote on it. The committee will then vote to "hold the bill for further study", which essentially kills the bill without a real up/down vote. As we noted in the Senate rankings, with few exceptions, bills held for study usually are neither studied nor brought up for a vote in the future. 

The House, under Speaker Mattiello's leadership, uses the same tactic.  However, in this chamber accountability is lacking - committee votes to kill bills via this maneuver are kept off the publicly-facing legislative website, so voters cannot see which representatives did the deed. As a result, we were not able to retrieve committee votes for 92 of the 131 House bills we scored. Because we use only publicly-available data for vote counts, we had to assign accountability for bills in which the committee vote was hidden. We believe the fairest way to assign accountability on these votes was to assign the committee result solely to the person responsible for the anonymity: the Speaker.  As a result, for bills "held for further study" with anonymized committee votes, a "no" vote was recorded only for the Speaker. The small bit of good news is that Mattiello's anonymous committees blocked 31 "bad" bills that the ACLU opposed. But overall, the harm to the democratic process was breathtaking - of the 131 bills that the ACLU lobbied for or against, the committees blocked 92 of them (70%) from a floor vote, and a jaw-dropping 61 of those bills were supported by the ACLU. We will never know if any of those bills would have become law, but the sheer number of good bills blocked from a vote for the entire House has put an incredible strain on democracy in Rhode Island.

While Senator Ruggerio's "hold for further study" bill-blocking method ultimately accomplishes the same result, every member of the applicable committee is accountable for it, harming their own civil liberties record to appease leadership. This is evident in the Senate Civil Liberties Rankings where members of the Judiciary Committee, which handle the majority of bills with civil liberties implications, saw their scores get decimated by countless "hold for study" votes on ACLU-supported bills.

Our rankings are the first ever "scorecard" to count committee votes. Until now, committee members and leadership got away with killing off good bills, because scorecards like those from the ACLU, Common Cause, and most others score based solely on floor votes (and in some cases sponsorship, which plays a small part). This loophole is how leadership was always able to score much higher than their effect on legislation would suggest. We hope that by bringing these actions to the forefront, it helps educate voters on the current undemocratic process of lawmaking, and pushes voters to demand change.

We evaluated 131 bills with assigned House bill numbers in which the Rhode Island ACLU lobbied in favor or against during the 2018-2019 legislative years. Representatives were awarded a point for floor votes that support the ACLU position, and zero points if they opposed the ACLU position, abstained, or were absent from the vote. Those serving on committees that voted on an applicable bill were awarded a point for a committee vote that aligned with the ACLU position, and zero points for a vote opposing the ACLU position. A "not voting" was counted as a "no" and an absence from a committee vote was not counted at all, since legislators were more likely to miss committee votes than floor votes due to other obligations. We chose not to penalize committee absences for the 2020 rankings, since a penalty already exists on absences from floor votes. This may change in the future if necessary. 

Bills were categorized according to how the ACLU grouped them, with some exceptions. Some categories the ACLU used did not have enough bills to fairly score each legislator, so these bills were moved to the broad "Civil Rights" or "Criminal Justice" category, based on which was most applicable.  A minimum of 4 applicable bills were required to establish each category. While votes for every bill were counted in the overall score, House committees blocked a substantial portion of bills from a vote, leaving legislators with an "N/A" score in the 1st Amendment category, where virtually every bill was blocked.