Gabrielle Gurley, “Maura Healey Looks to Have a Lock on the Massachusetts Governorship, But …,” The American Prospect, September 15, 2022, https://prospect.org/politics/maura-healey-looks-to-have-a-lock-on-the-massachusetts-governorship/.

“The way I describe the Massachusetts legislature’s evolution over the past decade is that they have gone from doing things that are actively harmful to things that are woefully insufficient,” says Jonathan Cohn, policy director for Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide political advocacy group. “There is a certain type of conservatism bred out of inertia, risk avoidance, lack of engagement on policy on an individual level and the fact that the most powerful interests militate in favor of the status quo. Not an outright ‘big C’ conservativism like a Republican legislature, but a status quo bias in operation.”

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“Under a Republican governor power resides within the legislature, they set the agenda: They can ignore whatever the governor asks them to do because, at the end of the day, they can pull together the votes for what they want to do regardless,” says Cohn. “[A] Democratic governor assumes that the legislature should pass the Democratic governor’s priorities, which takes power away from the Speaker and away from the Senate president.”