We're a week out from Election Day and major contributions are coming in to support ballot question campaigns. But legislative leaders are leaving the door open to ignoring the will of the voters.
Massachusetts Legislative leaders of both the House and the Senate, when asked, did not rule out altering a voter passed law if they disagree with the outcome. On a visit to Greenfield last week, we asked Gov. Maura Healey about this. She did not answer the question, instead discussing the upcoming election in general.
“I think… let's… let's see how everything works out, in terms of the election... right now I'm very focused on encouraging people to go vote to exercise their freedom to vote in this country,” Healey replied.
Chris Lisinksi, a reporter at the State House News Service explains that this could mean that top Democrats could tinker with the spirit of a measure that's voted in, or outright repeal the will of the voters.
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: It could be anything along that spectrum. We have seen examples of this before. The most recent one that comes to mind for me is legalizing recreational marijuana. Voters approved that, and the Legislature went in and made some pretty significant changes to the regulatory framework itself to figure out how that would work and what that would look like. Precedent shows that they do have the power, and at times, the will, to basically ignore voter approved ballot questions.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: And legislative leaders have been asked, and they answered about potentially tinkering with Ballot Question 1, which would give the auditor the power to closely examine the legislature, and Ballot Question 2, which would remove the MCAS graduation requirement. So, is there some potential for political backlash here? Thanks for voting, but it means nothing?
Yeah, I think that those two areas in particular, have so much riding on them. The MCAS fight is such a heated one that you can certainly see voters and the Mass. Teachers Association pushing the question, which has a lot of influence and a lot of power. Launching a really heated campaign against the Legislature. If they try to step in and prevent whatever voters say from taking effect. And, you know, question one is about the Legislature itself. So, it is already kind of a political minefield.
And we should note some NEPM employees are members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. That doesn't influence our coverage.
One thing that we discussed last week, Chris, I think needs some updating, and that's the long awaited clean energy and climate compromise bill. It has not cleared the Legislature yet. What's going on?
That's right. The 139-page accord finally surfaced last week and senators took a pretty unusual step, adopting an order allowing the Senate to take official recorded roll call votes, even though those are not supposed to happen in informal sessions, which ended for the term on July 31st.
So, the Senate approved it 38 to 2, the same margin as the original underlying bill.
But over in the House, Republicans doubted whether there was a quorum present. There was not a quorum present, as informal sessions are very lightly attended. As a result, the bill stalled out.
We've seen in the past, House Democrats call enough Democrats in to create a quorum and effectively prevent that parliamentary tactic from delaying the bill further. That could happen this week, in the week ahead, or some other approach that we don't yet know about might come to the surface.
So, is passage of this climate bill a matter of urgency for lawmakers at this point?
They're certainly talking about it with urgency, you know, which is a little bit ironic, given that the matter has been in limbo for three months or so because House and Senate Democrats couldn't find agreement with one another. But now that they have agreement on the actual particulars, once again, it is suddenly a topic of urgency. And that's, to be fair, how things typically go around here.
