Chris Van Buskirk, “Does the legislative clock and calendar matter on Beacon Hill?,” Boston Herald, September 22, 2024.
“With five high-profile bills still locked up in secretive talks heading this session, Progressive Massachusetts Policy Director Jonathan Cohn said the fall dealmaking proves “all of their self-imposed deadlines are fake.”
The proposals cover a wide range of issues including prescription drugs, hospital oversight, clean energy, and economic development. But Cohn argued breakthroughs on major bills could have happened earlier.
“If you push off everything to the end of the session, and then you have all the conference committees at the same time and you have people who are in multiple of them, they simply won’t get things done,” he said. “The way in which they slowly finished things after (July 31) speaks to how it would have been a perfectly functional way to operate if they just started everything early.””
