An end to Blake Filippi’s career-ending lawsuit
Shekarchi actually told the Democratic caucus he would reactivate the JCLS in 2020 but, on the advice of House lawyers, he held off due to pending litigation, which we’ll discuss below.
This Joint Committee was supposed to be a mechanism for Senate and House leaders of both parties to get together and make big decisions about the operations of the General Assembly.
On paper, this is an important committee. In reality, it’s just another committee. Three years ago, Filippi was in a feud with then House Speaker Nick Mattiello. Mattiello didn’t think much of the JCLS and simply didn’t convene it, making decisions himself that otherwise would be sent to the JCLS.
Flip needed an issue to frame his feud with Mattiello as one of good versus evil, liberator versus tyrant. He decided the JCLS was the ticket so, in addition to a relentless effort to stir up public outrage, he filed a lawsuit.
Well, the JCLS thing never really got a lot of traction. As Filippi’s own lawsuit noted, the JCLS had not met in over a decade – and apparently no one except Flip noticed. Or cared.
Make no mistake – Mattiello was a tyrant and was broadly despised by critics left and right. But as some pundits put it, the JCLS is such an “inside baseball” issue that it’s really not an issue at all. Quick: without referring back to paragraph one, what’s the JCLS’ full name?
Is there anyone who follows politics in the state of Rhode Island who was shocked to hear that Mattiello made all the decisions?
In the run-up to the 2022 election, Blake “Flip” Filippi made the surprise announcement that he was not going to run for re-election. Flip had a relatively safe seat, thanks to a lot of campaigning for him by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA), plus he was the leader of the House Republicans.
But he gave it all up, saying that he needed to focus all of his attention on his JCLS lawsuit.
WTF? Over the past 8 years, if there’s one thing Charlestown has learned about Blake “Flip” Filippi is that he needs to be in the public spotlight all the time. Sure, Flip got a lot of coverage after making this announcement until Tina Spears’ landslide election to replace him. But after that, not so much.
I cannot believe that Flip gave up a job that gave him what he craves most – power and attention – to work on a piddling lawsuit about an agency no one’s heard about, or cares.
Filippi
tweeted:
I’m thrilled Leader Chippendale and Speaker Shekarchi have agreed to regular meetings of the JCLS – which was the goal of the lawsuit I filed in 2000. With their agreement in place, I’m more happy [sic] to dismiss my lawsuit, and look forward to the first JCLS meeting in over 10-years.
In a lot of ways, Filippi reminds me of former Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey who was a thing for a few years in the early 2000s when he seemed like a dangerous rising star in conservative Republican politics. After being mayor for four years, he made challenged Lincoln Chafee in the 2006 Republican Senate primary.
