WHILE THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of reports on what the Massachusetts State House fails to achieve, lobbying and advocating directly with the Legislature reveals a lot more of the hows and whys. It is a highly exhausting experience that at times can feel fruitless, a result of how experienced the Legislature is at retaining the status quo and punishing less powerful opposition.
There is a toxic culture in the State House, particularly in the House, stemming from the speaker’s consolidation of power, which trickles down to leadership, to rank-and-file reps, and, lastly, to the advocates and organizers themselves. The culture incentivizes a Stockholm syndrome-like relationship to power, where reps fall in line for crumbs from leadership, and advocates and organizations fall in line for access to the reps.
Despite all of this—and maybe in spite of it—organizing is incredibly fulfilling work. With the increasing wealth gap and worsening of living standards in this country, it is a privilege to work on issues one believes in. That’s why it’s imperative for advocates and grassroots organizers to recognize the systemic dysfunction of insider politics. We must all ask ourselves: How much is it worth appeasing leadership if the rewards are crumbs? How much is it worth retaining access to the Legislature if it’s almost always for their benefit?
In order to understand the pressures that advocates face, it’s important to know the culture representatives work in. A 2018 article by former lobbyist Philip Sego does a really good job at explaining the dysfunctional structure of the State House, and details how nothing passes without the speaker’s final say, as well as how representatives are punished and rewarded for going against his wishes.
The assigned committee position and rank of every rep is designed to reinforce this uneven power structure, as well as each step a bill takes in the legislative process. Notably, Sego also mentions how anyone part of the political process—whether they’re advocates, reporters, or legislative staff—will lose access to the Legislature if criticisms are levied against it.
This culture incentivizes certain behaviors from electeds. Most of the time, officials will base how they vote off the internal culture they’re enmeshed in, prioritizing professional advancement from leadership and horse-trading with their colleagues over constituent representation or the actual issues themselves.
How officials will vote on a bill is shaped more by who files it rather than what the bill actually contains. This leads to a great disconnect between what is verbally and theatrically supported by officials and what is actually accomplished. Legislators talk about change without having to actually act upon it.
This disconnect is obscured from the public because most decisions take place behind closed doors. Purportedly progressive legislators can portray themselves one way to their constituents and behave quite differently behind the scenes. For example, representatives like Marjorie Decker of Cambridge pressure peers to not introduce bills, preventing colleagues from having to take a public stance. Similarly, reps will introduce amendments, but it’s usually for symbolic effect, as most amendments are withdrawn before they come to a position-exposing vote. Reps like Denise Garlick from Needham will try to interrupt peers on the floor, bullying them into not speaking on their own amendments. A lawmaker can even cosponsor and publicly support a bill while privately expressing opposition to leadership and colleagues.
It’s no secret all this behavior stems from professional incentives and political crumbs from leadership. When a representative falls in line with leadership, they are more likely to be rewarded career-wise, including better committee positions, better offices, leadership roles, lucrative stipends, extra staff, and earmarks for districts.
This encourages a competitive free-for-all among rank-and-file reps instead of unified organizing against the consolidated power at the top. If one causes a “ruckus” by acting against the speaker, whether by voting differently than him, bringing a bill he doesn’t like to a vote in committee, or speaking publicly with even the slightest criticism, other reps will immediately ostracize that person, distancing themselves to prevent their own career benefits from being taken away.
Every legislative session the officials in the House will praise some sort of legislation they passed in order to justify this broken system. It could be the ROE Act, the climate roadmap bill, the Grand Bargain bill, or a recent criminal justice bill. What is never talked about, however, is how House leadership already kept these bills in committees for years to decades without ever bringing them to a vote, usually after the Senate already unanimously voted in favor of them. Once leadership finally allows something to be voted on, the House almost always waters down huge provisions included in the Senate’s version—and then congratulates itself for it.
All of this is why it is not nearly enough for legislators to declare themselves “progressive” or vocally support already popular issues. This does not get progressive legislation through a corrupt Legislature that is far more conservative than the people it represents. It takes officials who are willing to do things like object to the nomination of the speaker, vote against the speaker, cast very lonely votes session after session, endorse challengers over incumbents, ask for even more than what advocates are already asking for, publicly mobilize and utilize the bully pulpit, and organize for publicly recorded votes.
Elected officials will sometimes deviate from this unhealthy culture when they begin seeking a higher office, because they will no longer be held to the speaker’s vice-grip and it will look good for their upcoming run. But we need officials who behave this way consistently without other motives.
We need more electeds who talk less about partisanship, and more about anti-corruption from the top that transcends party lines. We need less celebration of incremental wins and more addressing of why so much popular legislation fails to pass in a Democratic supermajority House when the issues are on the very Democratic Party’s platform itself. You can see this in the extremely rare leaders with enough political courage to call out what isn’t working and what we could have, rather than what we should be grateful for and what we already have.
These tendencies and habits are passed down to advocates and organizers. Advocates will work with elected officials to file bills or amendments and, if they’re exceptionally lucky, get them voted on. In Massachusetts, we’re even luckier if we get to see how everyone voted.
If an advocate works with a representative to file legislation or rules reform that goes against what the speaker wants, he or she will be met with the same top-down resistance that officials encounter. As a result, advocates will choose which rep should file a bill based on their “political capital” and relationship with the speaker in the hopes he’s merciful and chooses to pass it with an unrecorded voice vote, and not based on which rep has the courage to fight for the bill and stand for a public roll call vote.
Gov. Maura Healey, Senate President Karen Spilka, and House Speaker Ron Mariano at a briefing in the Senate Reading Room. (Photo by Bruce Mohl)
Elected officials will work with advocates on a bill for months and publicly speak in favor of the effort. Then, after facing private pushback from their colleagues, they will ghost the advocates, gaslight them, internally spread slander, and sometimes even write an op-ed (like Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa of Northampton) or speak publicly on the House floor against the very bill they worked on (like Jack Lewis of Framingham), completely throwing months of organizing down the drain and getting rewarded with a staff member immediately after.
If an advocate pushes too hard or too publicly—or associates with an organization that does—electeds will privately punish them by calling endorsers to withdraw support, funders to withdraw donations, and even bosses to get them fired. Leadership may also publicly attack an organization or an entire nonprofit community in general for fighting hard for what they believe in. This pressures other advocates and organizations to not stick their necks out to express support, and leads to its own division between otherwise allied advocates. Even though there’s more ofus, we are swayed against unified organizing to protect our individual access to the Legislature the same way reps protect their individual access to the speaker.
These top-down pressures incentivize advocates to not ask for“too much” (like school funding that the Legislature already owes based off an old and out-of-date study), or ask for something “radical” (like a public vote),with the threat that you will not be able to get your foot in the door. Sometimes even the biggest unions in the state are unable to find a rep willing to file an amendment that merely clarifies language on a bill.
This resistance also leads to advocates discouraging one another from filing similar legislation with different organizing strategies, with bigger asks, or on quicker timelines in earlier legislative sessions, with the fear that these methods may hurt their own individual strategies or relationships with an elected. This is the same individualistic, divide-and-conquer trap that reps fall into from leadership.
It’s no surprise that the representatives themselves endorse incumbents over challengers, even if the challengers are better on the issues—such as when Rep. Mike Connolly of Cambridge endorsed Rep. Kevin Honan of Brighton. Advocates and unions will also engage in this disingenuous behavior. This is out of a shared fear: While state reps may be afraid of losing a colleague’s co-sponsorship or support on a bill, advocates may be frightened of losing access to their inside connections to file their bills.
Although it may be a challenging thought, it is worth considering the possibility that one’s current activist work or affiliation with a specific organization may not be enough for initiating concrete change for the masses. For instance, many groups fall into the trap of prioritizing the collection of bill co-sponsorships or developing inside relationships over everything else, all while safeguards in the Legislature already ensure these things will have an almost negligible effect.
It’s imperative that as advocates we endorse challengers who are better than their incumbents on the issues, ask reps to do more than merely co-sponsor bills, advocate for more than what’s already considered “acceptable” by those in office, support organizations that are on our side (even if they are not willing to reciprocate the support), prioritize allying with electeds who are better on issues over their relationship quality with the speaker, ally with advocates who differ on strategy but agree with the issues, and endorse people, organizations, and policies based on their merits, regardless of their “reputation” in the State House. We need to prioritize creating effective change over individual or organization prestige.
It’s important advocates recognize these institutionalized norms, as they directly affect constituents themselves. There is little accountability for how representatives interact with constituents, which is exacerbated by the Massachusetts incumbency problem and how uniquely difficult it is to win against incumbents in this state. Since losing one’s seat is not a huge threat, representatives can ignore meeting requests, block constituents on social media, or blame them with no fear of repercussions.
In the rare case a vote on a contentious bill ends up publicly recorded, don’t be surprised to see an official like Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier on social media telling voters to not shame reps, or other officials like Rep. Marjorie Decker blaming other parties in less powerful positions. Although our electeds are the ones pushing the vote buttons, it is somehow almost always someone else’s fault (almost always in a less powerful position) for why they voted a certain way. It’s diffusion of responsibility.
The State House gradually instills these tendencies and habits over a long period of time, while simultaneously weeding nonconformists out of the process. To an extent, in our culture, and even outside of politics in general, we are all incentivized to prioritize individual survival and sustainable careers over ethical incentive and personal autonomy. These challenges to merely live another day and achieve a modicum of success are only exacerbated by the continually disappearing middle-class and worsening mortality and class mobility rates.
This is why change needs to start with all of us, from the ground up. We need to be unafraid to ask more from challengers, incumbents, advocates, and ourselves; and we need to do it with the understanding we all face this same systemic oppression which prioritizes profit-incentives, career labels, and backpatting success stories over any consideration of morality or humanity.
Asking for “more” from someone isn’t an attack, as our elected representatives will try to gaslight us into believing, but rather, it’s an impartial and honest strive for the collective good, without conceding to any individualistic loyalty. You can never ask for “too much” from someone in a more powerful position than you, and it is never a “bad time” to ask.
Division over strategy is almost always a tactic beneficial to the more powerful and wealthy. Always be wary of messaging that criticizes organizing as ”too aggressive” or ”bad strategy” or ”not timed well,” as these are narratives trickling down from the top that have nothing to do with the issues themselves and are, in fact, an attempt to deflect from them.
There’s a notion that one must have powerful people on your side in order to achieve substantive change. The truth is in fact the opposite. Those in power must have us on their side, that is where their power comes from. They need us. It is always easier and more tantalizing to defer to a powerful person in a private setting than it is to organize and gather more support in a public one. It’s a path of least resistance, but it’s a much longer path with a less fulfilling destination.
Organizing and advocacy work is some of the most selfless and noble work one can do. This piece is in no way discrediting that type of work, but emphasizing how much responsibility we have in establishing healthy interpersonal norms, prioritizing the people’s will over what’s politically polite or expedient, and pressuring elected officials to represent the people over their lobbyists, leadership, and colleagues. This piece is a rallying cry for the incredible power we have that’s too often taken for granted and gaslit out of us. This piece is a reminder that we can always do more, speak more truthfully, and act more out of humanity than out of the repeated patterns that are already set in place.
Travis Benson has organized for multiple electoral candidates and advocacy organizations, including Erika Uyterhoeven and Act on Mass.
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