Adam Reilly, “Why does the Massachusetts Legislature wait so long to do so much?,” WGBH, August 2, 2024.
“Jonathan Cohn, the political directorof the group Progressive Massachusetts, argues that this dynamic creates a structural problem that naturally leads to a slowed-down pace.
“In any system … if you have too few people in charge of too many decisions, you get a bottleneck effect,” Cohn said. “And you have that with the Legislature, where you know that the decision making is ultimately Ron Mariano’s decision about what’s in the bill, Karen Spilka’s decision about what’s in the bill … If it’s all just coming through one person, that just slows everything down even more.”
But Cohn also believes there’s a tactical consideration at play. By finalizing key legislation at the last minute, he says — and packing individual bills with a sprawling array of provisions on a particular topic — the House and Senate pave the way for marathon negotiating sessions just prior to the session’s end, in which each side defers to its counterpart in some areas and has the favor returned in others.
“Almost to a person, they’ll just all be back in January,” Cohn, of Progressive Mass, said of state lawmakers. “A handful of retirements. Maybe somebody might lose a seat in a primary or general. But they’ll all be back. And there’s often a way in which they just see it as, ‘Well, we didn’t finish now. We’ll come back in a few months and maybe we’ll pass it then.’ … It flattens the sense of time, because if it happens now, if it happens next year, it’s all the same.”
