We can’t have a successful recovery from COVID-19 without putting equity first.
Continue readingDemand that Charlie Baker Prioritize Equity in Vaccine Rollout
PM in the News: What’s the Matter with Mass?
Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn was quoted in a recent article in The New Republic on the state of the Massachusetts Democratic Party:
Jonathan Cohn, an organizer with Progressive Mass and dedicated chronicler of the state party, tells The New Republic that in order to understand why it’s so difficult for progressives to build power in the Bay State, one must first come to grips with Massachusetts’s underlying political ideology. “People think Massachusetts isn’t a terrain of conflict or struggle because they conceptualize conflict only through nationalized fights of Democrats versus Republicans, and we don’t have those kinds of fights because we have a nonexistent Republican Party and plenty of Democrats in our legislative supermajority whose voting records align with moderate Republicans,” he says.
…“You don’t have big donors or outside progressive groups mobilizing electorally here, because everyone’s under the impression that we’re all just living happily in this liberal utopia,” Cohn says.
“Then you also have Charlie Baker, who nobody is willing to attack outright,” he says. “Whether for his vetoes, or for his regressive stance on basic social welfare policies, everybody in the state is terrified of his approval rating, and so it keeps growing even as he continues to attack progressive policies and voices.”
…..
“If you are a wealthy, educated, socially liberal person, you align with the Democratic Party in most places, but Baker is a great asset for your fiscal conservatism,” Cohn says. “This is the kind of person that really defines the voice of The Boston Globe editorial board: They represent the mindset of white, upper-middle-class, inner-ring suburbia—socially liberal but into the idea that a friendly Republican governor is a check on a runaway Democratic legislative branch.”
Don’t Let Governor Baker Weaken the Climate Bill
Charlie Baker isn’t taking the climate crisis seriously. Your state legislators shouldn’t listen.
Continue readingProgressive Mass on Governor Baker’s State of the Commonwealth
The ‘good management’ skills Baker touts have been nowhere on display during COVID, but management skills were never enough. We need good management and good values.
Continue readingCharlie Baker Shows His True Colors by Vetoing Climate Legislation, Tenant Protections
Your legislators shouldn’t let Charlie Baker set the limits of their ambitions.
Continue readingTell Baker to Sign These Bills
The Legislature ended the session with a flurry of bills. Baker needs to sign them.
Continue readingVictory! House and Senate Override Baker on ROE Act Language
Last week — on Christmas Eve to be exact — Governor Charlie Baker vetoed a bill from the Legislature to expand equitable access to abortion in Massachusetts.
Fortunately, the House and Senate had veto-proof majorities in support of the bill to override Baker this week.
The bill, which contains many of the provisions of the ROE Act, was a milestone in advancing reproductive freedom in the commonwealth. Patients seeking an abortion later in pregnancy will no longer be forced to leave the state, far from their families and support systems, in order to access care, and 16 and 17 year olds will no longer be forced to obtain a parent’s permission or endure a shame-inducing court process to receive abortion care. It’s simple: abortion is health care, and health care is a human right (two things our governor doesn’t understand).
On Monday, the House voted 107 to 46.
And then yesterday, the Senate voted 32 to 8.
Like how your legislators voted? Thank them here.
Seeking Baker’s Approval, The Legislature Narrows Police Reform Bill
This weekend saw renewed attention to the lawlessness far too common among law enforcement, with the release of video footage of cops bragging about brutalizing protesters earlier this summer and a Globe story about how police officers are able to commit crimes off duty with impunity.
Unfortunately, while the news was underscoring why we need to be going further in imposing public accountability of policing and shifting our definition of (and resources for) public safety away from policing, the MA Legislature was narrowing the ambition of its police reform bill.
Rather than signing the MA House and Senate’s consensus police reform bill, Republican Governor Charlie Baker showed his true colors again by threatening to veto it unless the Legislature watered it down.
The Senate, to its credit, had passed both its own bill in July and the more recent consensus bill with veto-proof majorities (30 to 7 and then 28 to 12). If they were the sole chamber, they could have passed the stronger bill from earlier this month (which, itself, was a compromise).
But despite Democrats’ 80% majority in the House, the House never came close to a super-majority in support of the bill. They passed the consensus bill by only 92 to 67, a remarkably close vote by House standards and well shy of the 106 needed for an override. One wonders how committed House Leadership really was to their own bill, given how easily they can whip support when they want.
The Senate thus chose to weaken the bill to secure the Governor’s support, adopting most (but not all) of his proposed amendments to the bill. The Senate voted 31 to 9 to pass the new bill, gaining the support of three no votes from earlier this month (Diana DiZoglio, Marc Pacheco, and Bruce Tarr).
So About the New Bill?
Although the broad contours of the bill remain the same, and many parts of it are worth praise, the redraft of the bill is weaker in a few notable ways:
- Police in Charge of Setting Their Own Training: The new bill keeps the all-law-enforcement municipal police training committee under the administration’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (a well-documented bad actor when it comes to oversight) instead of transferring ts duties to a new majority-civilian POST commission. The idea that police should be counted on to properly police themselves is not borne out by any evidence.
- Weaker Use of Force Standards: The POST commission would still maintain some approval authority over use of force standards (unlike Baker’s request), but the bill eliminates definitions for “imminent harm,” “necessary,” and “totality of circumstances” related to the use of force.
- Weaker Facial Surveillance Regulations: The bill also replaces the full ban on racist, dangerous facial surveillance technology with more modest regulations on it (Baker had wanted no regulations at all) and the creation of a commission to explore future regulations.
- Additional Changes: The bill also creates additional loopholes in the definition of “bias-free policing” and the regulation of no-knock warrants. Although presented as fixing technicalities, the new language could open the door to police abuse.
The dilution of the bill did not stop conservatives from both parties in the Senate from trying to weaken it further.
Because there was a roll call, you can see which Senators, including Democrats, voted for an amendment from Senator Minority Leader Bruce Tarr to weaken the bill by eliminating the civilian majority on the POST commission.
12/23 Update: And then on to the House Today
Last night, the House voice-voted to accept the redrafted bill, leaving no record of the vote. But they did have a recorded vote on the enactment of the bill earlier today.
The weaker redraft passed the House 107-51.
The Democrats who voted NO earlier this month who voted YES after Baker made the Legislature weaken the bill were Cahill, Capano, Fiola, Haggerty, Kearney, Markey, Pignatelli, Scmid, and Zlotnik. They were joined by Republicans Jones, Poirier, Hunt, Orrall, Whelan, and Wong and the unaffiliated Whipps.
Governor Baker Needs to Stop Trying to Dilute Police Reform
In July, both the MA House and the MA Senate passed police reform bills that, although not as strong as they need to be, had a number of vital reforms. Two and a half weeks ago, the Legislature succeeded at hashing out a consensus version of their bills and sent them to the Governor to sign.
Instead of listening to the broad and diverse coalition calling on him to sign the bill, Governor Baker bowed to the pressure of police unions and sent the bill back to the Legislature with harmful amendments.
Baker’s amendments curtail key powers to establish training curricula by a civilian board, allow broad use of the notoriously racist facial recognition software, and severely weaken the definitions and independent oversight for use of force by police.
Crucial negotiations are happening over the next few days, and your voice matters.
Can you email Baker today to urge him to stop trying to water down the Legislature’s bill?
To quote State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, “The bill that emerged from conference committee was already a compromise package. It’s time to stop asking over-policed communities to give up more and more of the justice they’ve so long been fighting for.”
The Legislature Stood Up to Baker. They Can Do It Again.
This week, the MA House and Senate did something that they so rarely do: they stood up to Governor Charlie Baker.
Rather than signing the budget passed by the Legislature, Baker — who only pretends to be pro-choice — sent back amendments to fully undermine the Legislature’s efforts to create more equitable abortion access. Thankfully, they rejected his amendments by wide margins. You can see the votes below.
But they need to stand up to him again.
They need to stand up to him again by rejecting his harmful amendments to the police reform bill.
And they need to stand up to him by rejecting his effort to strike vital oversight language in the budget to ensure that prisons and jails meet public health standards.
Email your legislators in support of key language on police reform and prison oversight.
The House Rejected Baker’s Anti-Choice Amendment. But There’s Still Work to Do.
Last month, the House and Senate finally took action to strengthen reproductive rights here in MA by passing a slimmed down version of the ROE Act that, although it didn’t go as far as the ROE Act would have, contained important measures to protect and expand equitable access to abortion.
Rather than signing the measures into law, Republican Governor Charlie Baker sent back an amendment to nearly gut them entirely.
Fortunately, the House refused to go along.
Yesterday, they voted down his amendment 107 to 49.
Republican Marc Lombardo (R-Billerica) put forth another amendment that would promote disinformation and stigmatize individuals seeking abortion care. That amendment also went down, by an even wider margin of 120 to 34.
It now goes to the Senate, which plans to vote tomorrow.
But there’s more work to do.
Rather than signing the Legislature’s compromise police reform bill, Baker proposed amendments that would harm the progress made by weakening regulations on the use of force and of harmful facial surveillance technology; weakening the oversight powers of the POST Commission; and delaying the implementation of reforms that we needed yesterday.
Even more, while the COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading rapidly in state prisons, Baker struck vital oversight language to ensure that prisons and jails meet public health standards.