• Rhode Island Senate President Dominick Ruggerio is recovering from pneumonia in the hospital and is expected to remain there through March 12.
• Ruggerio’s prolonged absence has raised questions about the Senate’s succession rules.

PROVIDENCE – With news that Senate President Dominick Ruggerio remains at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital and will be unable to preside over the state Senate for at least one more week, his colleagues are beginning to tiptoe around the rules that govern succession.

The 76-year-old Ruggerio – a political warhorse who has served in the Rhode Island legislature for more than four decades – has given no indication that he plans to step down barely two months after his reelection to the Senate’s top post.

But several of his colleagues openly discussed, and questioned, how the process of choosing his successor would play out during a Monday meeting of the Senate committee that is working on the proposed rules for the 2025-26 session that began on Jan. 7.

The visibly fragile Ruggerio, who in November survived a bid by Democratic colleagues to unseat him, was reelected president on opening day of this year’s legislative session with support from 26 of 38 senators, including all four Republicans. 

Eleven Democratic senators, including all nine who voted against Ruggerio in a November caucus, voted “present” that day instead of yea or nay on another term as president for Ruggerio.

How is Ruggerio doing?

Hospitalized since Feb. 19 with what a note to his Senate colleagues called a “touch of pneumonia,” Ruggerio has for the last week been in a rehab unit in the hospital and is expected to remain there through March 12, according to his chief of staff, John Fleming.

He is no longer battling pneumonia, but “everybody’s seen him,” Fleming said.

“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.”

“He’s doing wonderful,” Fleming continued. “I spent two hours with him Saturday talking business. He was very, very alert. He was the best I’ve seen him in a long time. He’s put on some weight, and they figured that they want to keep him there to build him up to stop what he’s been going through.”

With his absence on Tuesday, Ruggerio will have missed four of the eight once-a-week Senate sessions so far this year. Senate President Pro Tempore Hanna Gallo is expected to preside again in his place.

What about succession rules?

Monday’s rules committee conversation ranged from Sen. Jonathan Acosta’s renewed objections to the Senate dress rules to a proposed new rule, which was roundly applauded, to have the Senate post written testimony online as the House has done for several years.

The kudos came from the senators who sit on the rules committee and others, including Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, who said the House move in this direction has been a tremendous boon to promoting transparency and the public’s right to know.

No votes were taken during Monday’s meeting of Senate Rules, Government Ethics and Oversight, which recessed until Thursday to consider some other tweaks suggested that day.

Acosta broached the Senate president succession question, reading the current rule out loud and noting that it could be interpreted in more than one way.

“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.

Acosta pointed to lines pertaining to a vacancy in the office of the Senate president.

The current rule says: “Should the office of president become vacant during the session, the president pro tempore shall preside over an election …”

Acosta said he thinks the rules mean that an election for Senate president would be held at the next “regular meeting of this body,” but it could be interpreted as the president pro tempore presiding for an unlimited period of time.

It is not yet clear if the committee will consider any potential amendments to this rule.