It is unprecedented for a former speaker to publicly rebuke a successor of his own party. But Webster and King had learned the value of minority rights in the long years they were in the House minority. Unlike Feeney, they had not forgotten. Those are important, but Feeney also holds their careers in his hand. Redistricting comes up next year.
Computers make it fiendishly easy for troublesome members to vanish.
Nothing the Democrats could do would dissuade Feeney from trying to leave them with fewer than 40 seats so that they no could no longer insist that bills be read in full or uphold a future Democratic governor's veto. Upstart Republicans, however, know that they are expendable, too. They could be purged by pairing incumbents against each other in safe Republican districts. The seeds of today's House dictatorship were planted when the leadership of the Constitution Revision Commission lost two of the votes it needed to put an independent redistricting commission on the 1998 ballot. Feeney had a lot to do with that, too.