Beacon Hill lawmakers and watchdogs are sensing momentum for reform in the new year following comments from House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka about potentially changing the legislative calendar and other rules.
In remarks after his reelection as speaker on Wednesday, Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, said the House “ will consider a number of rules reforms next month when we have our rules debate, from potential changes to the legislative calendar, to reforms aimed at bolstering public confidence in the legislative process.”
”I’m confident that together, we can make changes that will have a positive impact on the Legislature as an institution for years to come,” Mariano added.
Spilka, an Ashland Democrat, also spoke of prospective reforms she said would bolster transparency, including making the first meeting of legislative conference committees open to the public and posting bill summaries online when they’re released by the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
While the Senate and House could make some rules changes unilaterally, others would require agreement between the two bodies.
Spilka and Mariano’s comments follow an unusual two-year legislative session in which a large amount of complex legislation was completed at the very end of 2024, long after the Legislature’s formal session ended on July 31. This flurry of last-minute lawmaking was the subject of negative media coverage that both Spilka and Mariano bemoaned Wednesday, while also defending the Legislature’s productivity.
Scotia Hille, executive director of the group Act on Mass, said the current openness to reform is a stark change from when she first started advocating for greater transparency and efficiency on Beacon Hill around 2020. She said by 2021, the rules debate was seen as an “untouchable” topic for legislators.
“We were really treated like dissidents, and there was a lot of rancor from members of the Legislature that folks would be calling them out on that, so it’s exciting to see that some of the momentum is building,” Hille told GBH News.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, from Gloucester, has a legislative career spanning more than three decades. He said support for reform is currently broader than he’s ever seen before.
“I don’t recall a time when there has been bipartisan, bicameral support of this as a priority for the upcoming session,” he said.
Tarr told GBH News that he “wholeheartedly endorse[s]” another idea floated by Spilka — namely, requiring that legislative committees issue favorable or unfavorable reports on proposed laws during the first year of legislative sessions rather than the second.
Tarr also said that, when the final text of a particular bill is released prior to a vote, legislators should be given more time to read the legislation in question than they currently are.
“We have had too many sessions where we’ve gone all night with little accomplishment,” Tarr said. “We’ve had too many sessions where major pieces of legislation are postponed until the waning hours of the legislative calendar. Certainly, we need to do better.”
The GOP plans to release its own list of proposed reforms in the next few weeks, Tarr added.
Sen. Rebecca Rausch, a Needham Democrat also interested in reforms, told GBH News she is “absolutely” on board with changing the legislative calendar, which she says currently is structured in a way that invites last-minute lawmaking.
“We need to push it up,” Rausch said.
Rausch also suggested increased transparency measures, including making all Senate committee votes public and voluntarily opening up public-records access, from which the Legislature, governor’s office, and Massachusetts judiciary all currently claim exemptions.
“I’ve been filing legislation on that since the day I walked in the door,” Rausch said. “So I think there’s a lot of potential opportunity to uplift and advance meaningfully … transparency and accountability.”
Rep. Michael Connolly, a Democrat from Cambridge, said he welcomes the potential for rules changes, including the calendar.
He described the most recent legislative term as “remarkable” in terms of accomplishments, but conceded “there’s a lot more to be done.”
The seemingly increased openness of legislative leaders to major reforms also comes as the House and Senate reckon with the overwhelming passage of Ballot Question 1, in which voters gave State Auditor Diana DiZoglio the power to audit the state Legislature.
While Mariano and Spilka have suggested that the new law may violate the separation of powers under the Massachusetts Constitution, and the manner in which it will be implemented remains unclear. Its passage also reflects a high level of skepticism about the legislative status quo that apparently spans the entire state, politically as well as geographically.
“I appreciate that Spilka and Mariano both seem to be getting the message of the larger Question 1 victory last fall — that voters expect a greater degree of transparency from the Legislature,” Jonathan Cohn, the political director of the group Progressive Mass, told GBH News.
“Reforms like making committee votes and testimony public, which Spilka named, are long overdue and should just be the start,” he added. “Our Legislature really is an outlier among states in its lack of transparency, and we need the Democrats in the Legislature to model what good blue-state governance looks like — that it can be open and ambitious.”
Material from State House News Service was used in this story.
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