We already wrote about this in January and the situation has not improved. The times are still perilous and state legislatures need alert, energetic leadership. Last year Senate President Dominick Ruggerio was so sick he missed a third of the sessions. This year’s session is off to a similar start. The ProJo reports “With his absence on Tuesday, Ruggerio will have missed four of the eight once-a-week Senate sessions so far this year.” He has been hospitalized since February 19th, and the hospital expects to keep him until March 12th.
That’s nearly a month! It’s not as if the people of Rhode Island don’t have experience with hospitals; for us brain surgery is an out-patient procedure. His chief of staff, John Fleming, is trying to gloss over what is obvious to everyone:
“He’s fragile, so they are trying to build him up, and he’s in this program and they got him up walking every day. He’s eating like a bear,” Fleming said.
Fleming said the goal of keeping Ruggerio at Fatima is to “put some weight back on him.”
Good lord what kind of health insurance do these guys have? We civilians get sent home with instructions on how to remove the staples he’s getting held over so the hospital can fatten him up a little? Clearly, he is very ill.
Journal reporter Katherine Gregg writes that Senator Jonathon Acosta of the rules committee has “broached the Senate president succession question.”
“To prevent any conflict a year from now, a month [or] God forbid, a week or so from today, I think it’d be better that we address this and agree upon this as a body … so that we have a collective understanding of how to interpret,” Acosta said.
Yes . . . god forbid. But we are all going to die and responsible people plan for it.
I think we can see what’s at work here: Ruggerio is now contemplating his legacy, writing the headline, and he wants to die in the top office. But we have a state to run.