House, Senate pass internal reforms amid audit push
Photo | Courtesy of Chris Lisinski, State House News Service
Visitors enter the House gallery shortly before an informal session in May.
The Legislature made official its movement toward a new era Thursday, finalizing a package of internal reforms that will reshape the path bills take to the House and Senate floors, pull back the curtain on committee decisions, and alter deadlines that have been in place for decades.
For the first time in six years, the House and Senate agreed to a compromise package of so-called joint rules governing their work together (S 2545), which is filled with a suite of changes lawmakers say will make their work more efficient and transparent.
The House voted 147-2 and the Senate voted 40-0 to accept the new joint rules agreement roughly one-quarter of the way through the 2025-2026 term. Republican Reps. Nicholas Boldyga of Southwick and Marc Lombardo of Billerica voted no.
Many of the reforms -- some of which have been already embraced on a more informal basis in recent months -- are in part inspired by the chaotic end to last session as well as the heightened pressure on the House and Senate amid Auditor Diana DiZoglio's voter-backed campaign to probe their operations.
Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem, her chamber's lead negotiator on the final package, said the measure "is responsive to [the public's] desires for change."
"We wanted more transparency and we wanted cooperation between the chambers, and I know that this reflects that. This is clearly the choice of both the House and the Senate. We're both pleased and happy with this report," Creem said. "We may have had some disagreements, but we both shared a willingness to compromise and a strong commitment to address our constituents' call for change."
The new rules will overhaul the way bills move through the nearly three dozen House-Senate joint committees, panels with subject-matter expertise that are responsible for vetting virtually every bill filed and deciding which ones should move forward.
Each joint committee's membership has long voted as one unit on whether to advance or kill legislation, a dynamic that fuels tension between the two branches and at times gives additional power to the House because representatives outnumber their Senate counterparts.
Now, representatives and senators will essentially make their own branch-specific decisions at the committee level. While panels will still come together to hear testimony, representatives will vote only on bills filed in the House (or bill numbers that begin with "H") and senators will vote only on bills filed in the Senate (or bill numbers that begin with "S"), with a few exceptions.
All of those results will be published online, giving the press and public long-sought insight into how individual lawmakers vote. The Senate for years has supported making that information available, but until now has not been able to get the House on board.
"One of the concerns I think all of us have shared in this body for a very long time is fundamental to our republic, the fundamental [right] to say, 'How am I supposed to know how I'm represented if I don't know how my representative is voting?'" said Republican Sen. Ryan Fattman. "More often than we're voting here in our various chambers, we're voting in our committees and taking multiple votes that people have every right to know about."
Legislators will also face tighter timelines to make decisions about what legislation remains in the mix for consideration in the House and Senate. The new rules move the bill-reporting deadline known as Joint Rule 10 day about two months earlier, from the first Wednesday in February of the second year of the term to the first Wednesday in December of the first year.
Representatives on committees will typically need to act even sooner: A separate House rules measure requires the House side of a panel to act on any bill within 60 days of its public hearing, though extensions could be granted into March of the second year.
"It's a hope that we move these things through a little quicker and don't have the logjam that we have had in the past two legislative sessions on [July] 31st. And it puts a bunch of reforms in there that I think people have, both inside the building and outside the building, have longed for for a long time," said House Majority Leader Michael Moran, the lead representative on the conference committee. "We've not reformed rules this big in my time here, in a very long time. So it's going to be interesting how the process that we outline in these rules actually plays out in real time, see how -- see what the effects are."
Those earlier deadlines do not guarantee the Legislature will approve more bills. Many proposals each term win the support of a subject-matter committee, then languish without further action in either branch's Ways and Means Committee. That dynamic is likely to continue under the new rules.
The reforms formalize some changes that legislative leaders embraced on an ad-hoc basis last year, especially concerning the final months of the term.
For close to three decades, the Legislature has deemed any major or controversial business after July 31 in the term's second year -- the months heading into and immediately following the election for all 200 legislative seats -- out of bounds.
The rule was implemented in 1995, after lawmakers gave themselves a 55% pay raise following the election and then quietly approved a capital gains tax cut in what many saw as a quid pro quo with then-Gov. William Weld.
Last term, House and Senate Democrats failed to agree on many of their top priorities by that deadline. They kept conference committee talks going in the ensuing months, and suspended rules to convene formal sessions where the final accords won approval.
The new rules will change the significance of the even-year July 31 deadline. Lawmakers will explicitly be allowed to meet in formal sessions after that date to take up any report from a conference committee created by the traditional cutoff, a newly filed spending bill, or a governor's amendments or vetoes.
Essentially, the traditional end-of-July deadline now marks the date by which major proposals need to win initial House and Senate approval and head into private talks, and no longer represents the date by which a final agreement is supposed to emerge.
It's likely that many key decisions will continue to be made behind closed doors with only cursory deliberations visible to the public despite reforms. The conference committee that last week produced an accord on a surtax spending bill technically kept both of its meetings open to the public -- on paper even more transparent than the new joint rule requiring each conference committee's first meeting to be open.
But the first session of surtax negotiations ended after introductory remarks, and the second session opened with lawmakers signing their approval on a final deal. All of the actual decision-making and compromise occurred privately in between those two meetings.
In addition to reshaping key committee decisions, the reforms could also alter the way some of Beacon Hill's most frequent visitors approach lawmakers.
Lobbyists and activists interested in a specific bill might now focus their preliminary efforts only on a committee's representatives or senators, instead of needing to get broader buy-in from the full panel to build momentum, with the path through each panel now bifurcated.
And once a committee hosts a hearing on legislation, supporters and opponents could inundate representatives in the immediate aftermath because the House -- and not the Senate -- will start running a 60-day ticking clock for its committee members to issue reports.
The House and Senate in February each approved their own proposal for overhauling joint rules, and the conference committee tasked with resolving the differences unveiled its compromise Monday.
It's the first time the House and Senate have agreed on a final joint rules package since 2019. In each of the prior two terms, private talks failed to produce an agreement, leaving the 2019 rules in place on what was supposed to be a temporary basis.
Lawmakers regularly suspend their own rules when top Democrats want to operate differently, especially as deadlines approach. Sometimes, they shirk what the rules call for without facing any real criticism or consequences.
The Legislature has long been a target of criticism for its top-down leadership approach and its lack of transparency, especially as most lawmakers cruise to easy reelections with no challengers each term.
The pressure reached new heights last year, when voters overwhelmingly backed a new law explicitly authorizing the auditor's office to audit the House and Senate over their objections. DiZoglio, herself a former representative and senator, has been trying all year to probe the Legislature, but continued opposition from House and Senate Democrats over constitutional concerns has effectively blocked any action.
"There's a certain thing that happened in 2024 that I think is an elephant in the room that the voters suggested that we do with a vote that we need to look into and we need to participate more in," Fattman said of the voter-approved law Thursday. "But as I said, you don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You don't let good be the enemy of perfect. These are good rules."
Colin A. Young of State House News Service contributed reporting.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments