ALTHOUGH THE DAYS were dark early in January, the legislative session began with some glimmers of sunlight, as both Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano expressed a commitment to legislative process reform, indicating there would be upcoming proposals about how to make the Legislature more transparent and accountable.
We believe that Massachusetts ought to be a leader in just democratic rule and civic action. However, national rankings place us toward the bottom with regard to public ease of access to information, competitive elections, and financial transparency. Indeed, Massachusetts distinguishes itself by being the only state in the entire country in which all three branches of government hold themselves exempt from public records law. This means that for most residents of Massachusetts, our city councils and town meetings are held to a higher standard of transparency and accountability than our state elected officials.
The remarks from legislative leaders were a sign of growing momentum behind the push for more sunlight on Beacon Hill. When legislators last updated the public records law, in 2016, they created a commission to investigate whether the public records law should apply to them. They ended with no agreement, but more and more advocates have begun to understand that a non-transparent, overly top-down legislative process works against our goals.
The 2018 election saw the election of more pro-transparency Democrats to the Legislature, and although the House was resistant to the reforms proposed by pro-transparency progressives to the rules in 2019, the Senate has been more amenable. Momentum continued in subsequent years, with the People’s House campaign, successful ballot questions in various districts, and new research all underscoring the need to address State House dysfunction and power dynamics.
Last year saw even greater attention to this issue, with the state auditor’s ballot question on auditing the Legislature winning 72 percent statewide (including every city and town) and with investigative journalism focused on the Legislature.
We also saw clearly how concentrating the meaningful work of lawmaking in fewer and fewer hands benefits high-power lobbyists and corporate interests at the expense of grassroots advocates and everyday citizens. It also creates bottlenecks, which was made all the more evident in the most recent legislative session.
The first year of the 193rd session saw a record low number of votes and bills passed. At the July 31st deadline, advocates and rank-and-file lawmakers alike were left blindsided by the failure of nine major bills because negotiations stalled in closed-door committees, hidden from the public and fellow lawmakers. While the Legislature made progress on these bills in informal sessions, it was at the cost of representative democracy.
Informal sessions are poorly attended, and most lawmaking was in closed-door conference committees. The overwhelming majority of legislation passed since July was done without a recorded vote.
Although rules changes alone will not suffice to truly correct the power dynamics and climate at the State House, they are a tool by which the Legislature could be made immediately more transparent. As advocates, we have clocked years of experience helping fellow citizens navigate the legislative process and participating in discussions about what it would take to make it the democratic, accountable, and transparent legislature it ought to be.
Building upon this experience, we generated a list of 13 key rules reforms that legislators could implement this session to serve as a benchmark for meaningful change, delivered to House and Senate leadership in a joint letter last month signed by 30 progressive organizations working across issues.
How do the recent proposals from the House and Senate stack up?
Both chambers passed language to make committee votes public, a critical tool for accountability, although with clearer language from the Senate.
Similarly, both chambers acknowledge that testimony submitted to committees should not remain a black box. People have the right to know who is trying to influence policy decisions. The Senate wants to make testimony public (with appropriate redactions for sensitive information), stronger language than the House’s, which would make such testimony “publicly available” (which might end up only by request). To their credit, the Senate plans to post senators’ committee votes and testimony received by committees regardless of the outcome of the joint rules.
Both chambers adopted language to require public summaries of every bill being heard by a committee—an important way to explain to the public and to rank-and-file legislators (and maybe even the lead sponsors) what bills actually do — although with disagreements over who should write them (the lead sponsors according to the Senate, committee staff according to the House).
In light of the interminable delays that characterized so much of the previous session, both House and Senate want to move up the bill reporting deadline to December of the first year of the Legislature’s two-year sessions, with the House proposing rolling deadlines for committees to report out bills after hearings and limits on extending reporting deadlines.
These differences will have to be negotiated, and the Legislature should, in every case, adopt the version that better welcomes the public into the process.
Other reforms worth noting include the Senate’s proposal to make the first meeting of a conference committee fully open to the public (all such meetings should be, but that is still a step in the right direction), the Senate’s proposal to provide more time before voting on conference reports, and the House’s proposal to require in-person committee attendance—and to track it.
Unfortunately, not every change was a welcome one. Last session, the Legislature treated the July 31 deadline for the formal legislative session as little more than a suggestion, and both chambers have proposed rules changes to normalize such a practice. Pushing more work into the fall encourages delays and minimizes accountability.
The House and Senate should act swiftly to pass a set of joint rules that promote transparency, accountability, and public responsiveness. We’re almost two months into the legislative session with the latest committee assignments in the country—we need to start moving.
And as we move, we must recognize that rules reforms are step one in a wider cultural change needed in the Massachusetts State House. New efforts like reforming the stipend system and reviving a legislative research bureau can also quicken such changes. And, above all, rank-and-file legislators themselves need to be willing to be more proactive and to remember that they ultimately work for their constituents, not for anyone else.
Jonathan Cohn is policy director at Progressive Massachusetts. Scotia Hille is executive director of Act on Mass. Peter Enrich is a member of the leadership team of Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts and a professor emeritus at Northeastern University School of Law.
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