Letter: Beacon Hill’s legislative process is broken

Al Blake, “Letter: Beacon Hill’s Legislative Process Is Broken,” Berkshire Eagle, August 6, 2014.

To the editor: Thank you for your Aug. 3 editorial “This is (still) no way to legislate.”

This session was a missed opportunity to make the commonwealth a climate leader. The Legislature’s inaction is a grave disappointment to anyone who cares about saving our planet.

This session was a chance to make serious progress slowing the expansion of our dirty and expensive methane gas system, but instead legislative leadership got tied up in political spats and chose not to extend the session and finish the job.

This comes after a year and a half of advocacy that included hundreds of meetings and thousands of calls and signatures to legislators. Many of the most popular policy proposals received vast majorities of legislative co-sponsors, yet House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka did not allow them to come for a vote.

Many policies “died in committee,” where politicians take secret votes that their constituents are not able to see. Many more died in the backroom process where amendments to bills were withdrawn before they had a chance to receive a vote.

The legislative process is broken, and undue influence from corporations routinely blocks popular and effective legislation in favor of utility and developer profits.

We can do better, and we must.

Al Blake, Becket

PM in the News: Frustration and the Ballot Box in WGBH

Katie Lannan, “Why frustrated activists can’t rely on the ballot box for change in Massachusetts,” WGBH, August 15, 2024.

Other observers and advocates, like Jonathan Cohn of the advocacy group Progressive Massachusetts, say the dynamic can fuel a sense of complacency on Beacon Hill. For one thing, Cohn said, most state legislators don’t need to worry about defending their record on the campaign trail.

“One of the problems is that for legislators, because of the fact that so few of them are ever really contested in elections, it flattens the sense of time so they can think, ‘Oh, well, we’ll just be back at it in January,’” he said. “Issues just lose a basic degree of urgency because it’s just one never-ending legislative session for them.”

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Democrats have supermajority control of both legislative branches on Beacon Hill, and Cohn said the red-versus-blue partisan framework through which many people view elections doesn’t really apply in deep-blue Massachusetts.

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“I also think that the Legislature’s history of long, late-night sessions that end with nothing also make it seem like an unattractive job,” said Progressive Mass.’ Cohn. “If you see a place where you look at it and you think, ‘I don’t even know that I could accomplish anything by being here,’ it’s understandable why somebody might not want want to run for that office or think that their that their talents, skills, etc., would be better used elsewhere — even though those people could be the best people for the jobs.”