Legislation

This session, the Attorney General sought to undermine an ACLU-backed 2016 law concerning warrants and cell phone location tracking by promoting legislation allowing law enforcement to keep you in the dark - perhaps indefinitely - if your location has been tracked.

Legislation sought to permit the recipients of "less than honorable" military discharges to qualify for state veterans' benefits when the discharge was based on the veteran's sexual orientation.

Legislation under consideration this year would have required the use by certain state contractors of computer software to verify the hours worked on computers for that contract, but the ACLU was concerned about the inherent privacy issues in the bill.

There were a number of bills this year seeking to improve school security by imposing law enforcement-type enforcement measures into the school setting. Among those was a proposal requiring that ten percent of school aid be allocated to school safety measures.

This bill would have greatly expanded a tax credit for businesses that make donations to "scholarship organizations" that funnel money to private and parochial schools for tuition purposes.

Rather than addressing the problems that have forced people to engage in panhandling in the first place, this proposal instead aimed to punish them for their poverty by making it illegal for a person in a car to pass anything to a person outside the vehicle while in an "active lane of travel."

This legislation sought to require all higher education institutions to arm their campus police, regardless of the wishes of school administrators or students.

This legislation would have clarified that an existing statute that exempts "a book or writing" from sales tax when sold by the author covers both fiction and nonfiction writings.

Products that are necessary for the health and well being of women in Rhode Island are treated, for tax purposes, as luxury items. Legislation sought to change that by exempting feminine hygiene products from the state sales tax.