When the new legislative session kicked off on January 1, Sen. President Karen Spilka (D-Ashland) expressed interest in taking up a suite of transparency reforms to “build upon the Senate’s commitment to an open and transparent process of legislating.”

The talk about transparency and legislative process reform from both Spilka and Speaker Ron Mariano seemed to be a result of the overwhelming public support for Question 1 last year (i.e., the Auditor’s ballot question about auditing the Legislature) and of the negative press the Legislature got for not finishing on time. In response, a group of 30 organizations called on the House and Senate to adopt a robust package of pro-transparency, pro-democracy, pro-participation reforms.

Yesterday (Thursday, February 6), the Senate released its rules proposals for the 2025-2026 session. These rules both include and build upon past proposals from the Senate.

The Senate, for example, has supported making committee votes and testimony public since 2019. Following the 2016 update to the public records law, the House and Senate established a commission studying whether the Legislature and Governor should remain fully exempt from public records law. The commission dissolved with no agreement, but the Senate members of the commission released their own proposals, including these measures.

However, the new rules attempt to bypass the intransigence from the House by requiring that the votes Senators take in joint committees, such as whether or not to advance a bill out of committee, be posted online. The Senate already does this for Senate-only committees. The Senate’s proposed rules would also require that written or in-person testimony received by Senate members of a joint committee be provided publicly online, with an email or online portal established to facilitate this.

The Senate’s proposed rules would also direct the Senate Ways and Means Committee to make bill summaries available online for legislation reported favorably out of the committee. This makes a useful resource already available to all senators available to everyone. Legislative language is often inscrutable given the jargon involved with changing the Massachusetts General Laws, and bill summaries help regular people get a better sense of what is happening in the legislative process.

The Senate also proposed several changes to the joint rules (i.e., the rules that govern House-Senate committees):

• Joint Hearings But Not Joint Votes: There has been buzz in recent weeks about whether or not joint committees would end up splitting into separate House and Senate committees with separate hearings, etc. The Senate’s proposal keeps joint hearings (saving advocates and the public the labor of having to attend twice as many hearings) but allows for Senate members to vote on Senate bills and House members to vote on House bills. As the House outnumbers the Senate in joint committees, House opposition can lead to committee stalemates or otherwise slow bills that Senators wish to advance.
• Increased Hearing Notice: The Senate’s proposed joint rules would guarantee five days (one business week) of notice before a hearing as opposed to the current 72 hours. We have advocated for a two-week notice (given how many people need that much lead time to take time off work), but this is still an improvement and is something the Senate has advocated for in the past.
• An Earlier Reporting Deadline: The Senate’s proposed joint rules would require joint committees to report bills out by the first Wednesday in December of the first year of a session as opposed to the current February. This would allow for year one to focus on hearing bills and year two to focus on passing them, pushing back on backlogs and bottlenecks.
• Open Conference Committee Meetings: The Senate’s proposed joint rules would require the full first meeting of a conference committee to be open to the public and the media. This would bring more transparency to the process and create a better sense of what each chamber is fighting for, although all of the meetings should be public — not just the first.
• Conference Committee Report Time: The Senate’s proposed joint rules would require a full calendar day between when a conference committee report is filed and when the report is acted upon to allow legislators and members of the public more time to review legislation before votes are taken. Currently, they can vote just a few hours after text is released, all but guaranteeing that few people will have read it.
• Bill Summaries in Joint Committees: The Senate’s proposed joint rules would require bill sponsors to submit comprehensive bill summaries to the joint committees holding hearings on the legislation, to be made publicly available with the bill. This helps members of the public, the press, and the rank-and-file better understand what proposed bills would do.

These changes would all make a more transparent, inclusive, and informed legislative process. However, one other change would normalize recent bad habits. The Senate’s proposed joint rules would allow for conference reports (the compromise text negotiated by the House and Senate when they differ on a bill) to be filed and debated after the July 31st deadline for formal session. This allows for more work to be pushed after election season and after legislators are regularly meeting, meaning less input and less accountability.