Following the ballot question last fall, in which more than 70% of Massachusetts voters gave the state auditor the power to dig into the work of the legislature, the state Senate last week made some changes to their operating rules. The deputy editor at the State House News Service, Colin Young explains what tweaks lawmakers made.
Colin Young, SHNS: There were a lot of changes [centered] around trying to give lawmakers more time to review bills and amendments when they come up. So, there were some changes to sort of standardize those processes. There's a requirement that lawmakers would have to file bill summaries with their legislation.
And then one of the things that jumped out to me, Carrie, was actually something the Senate did not adopt; an amendment to the rules that would have mostly required in-person participation. Ever since the pandemic started five years ago, the Senate has been allowing senators to debate and vote remotely, and there was an attempt this time around to curtail some of that. But senators roundly rejected that idea and will continue this session to meet and debate and vote remotely.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: …if needed.
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, curiously, they also rejected an attempt to make clear which senators were participating in person in the chamber and which senators were voting remotely.
Going back to the topic of auditing the legislature; the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance says the state House has retained a law firm to help them fight Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s effort to audit the Legislature. So, despite residents voting in support of this audit, now taxpayers will be funding a legal battle against an audit. What's going on?
Yeah, potentially. The House has gone out and retained outside counsel in case this ends up in litigation. House Speaker Ron Mariano told [SHNS] he doesn't want to tie up the House's legal staff to prepare in case this ends up in court, or to defend against the volleys of requests for information from DiZoglio’s office. So, they're going to hire Tom Kiley, a former First Assistant Attorney General, and he'll really be the House's point person on this. But you're right, it is taxpayer money. So, this is an additional expense for the House.
Speaking of money, state Senator John Velis told me last week that funding the state's emergency shelter system for $1 billion a year was the reason that he broke with Senate Democrats and voted against the measure. He talked about that single pot of state money that will be used to fund ‘all the programs.’ Does that view from that Westfield Democrat resonate with other lawmakers?
You know, that wasn't a huge part of the debate on the shelter money, but that idea is something that lawmakers are voicing a little bit more frequently on Beacon Hill.
Between the slowdown in state revenues, the threat of a slowdown or a freeze of money from the federal government …definitely has lawmakers a little bit on edge where they've been starting to signal that, unlike in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, this time around, the state probably won't be able to step in and fill the gap on anything that the feds may be stopped funding or anything that has a shortfall because of the slowdown in state revenue coming in.
And do you get any sense that the upcoming revenue and budget conversations will be more difficult this year than in the past? I mean, look how long it's taken the Legislature to even get some sort of accord on that emergency shelter funding.
Yeah, right. This could sort of go one of two ways. It could either be dragged out like we saw with the shelter money and like we've seen with the budgets going back a number of years now, where Democrats really just can't get on the same page and strike an agreement.
Or it could be a situation where because resources are fairly limited, maybe so too, are the decisions that lawmakers have to make. So maybe there's actually less on their plate, and there's a potential universe in which that actually speeds up their action.
Finally, it looks like Governor Maura Healey will be running for reelection next year. She says she's ‘really proud’ of her administration's record so far, and we should note that there are no declared challengers yet. Does this announcement have any impact on what's going on with governing or with her relationship with the legislature?
Absolutely. Whether it changes how the governor acts or not, it's going to change how everyone views how she acts. It was interesting to me that she announced this, while the topic of the shelter crisis is so front and center.
There's a long time before the November 2026 election, so everything that happens between now and then is going to be either used on Maura Healey's behalf in her reelection campaign or used against her in someone else's campaign to try to unseat her.
