IT’S A STEAMY afternoon in late July, and you might expect the temperature to be rising even higher beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House. The state Senate is getting ready to vote on the biggest tax increase in state history, a $1.2 billion tax package designed to plug a gaping hole in the state budget. When Senate Minority Leader Brian Lees rises to speak on the matter, everyone knows what’s coming.
“Unbelievable,” thunders the Republican leader, one of the Legislature’s acknowledged kings of the floor-debate stemwinder. “The out and out arrogance of some members of the chamber. You are going to be so, so sorry when this comes home to roost,” he says, tearing into those supporting the tax increase.
Despite Lees’s effort to turn up the heat of the debate and inject some fear into his Democratic colleagues, Senate President Thomas Birmingham, sitting in the presiding officer’s chair, looks more bored than worried. With Democrats holding 34 of the 40 seats in the Senate, and 134 of 160 seats in the House, Lees and his tiny band of GOP compatriots–along with Jane Swift, a lame-duck acting governor from a nearly invisible minority party–hardly amount to a speed bump on the road to Democratic victory on this issue. Or any other, for that matter.
“I’d say this is the worst I’ve seen in my 25 years as a lobbyist,” says Barbara Anderson, the longtime executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. “In the past you could talk to people” outside of leadership who could make a difference. “Now there’s no one to talk to.” It’s not that there’s “no level playing field,” she says. “There’s no playing field at all. They’re just following the leadership.”
When Anderson and others refer to “the leadership,” everyone knows they don’t mean some inner circle of Beacon Hill honchos, but simply the two men who have been the force and face of legislative might for more than six years. Since their parallel rise to power in 1996, House Speaker Thomas Finneran and Senate President Thomas Birmingham have come to dominate Massachusetts government to a degree that is striking even in a state known for its powerful legislative leaders. Rank-and-file members, in turn, have been largely reduced to bit players–“extras on the state’s political stage, members of the chorus backing up the two Toms,” as a MetroWest Daily News editorial called them last winter.
But the curtain is coming down on this act of state government starring the “two Toms.” Birmingham is on his way out the door, having decided to give up his post in order to run for governor. The jockeying to succeed him is in full swing, and there are signs of a hankering among senators to play a larger role in the new regime.
And Finneran’s role, while still getting top billing, seems to be changing. Though very much in charge in the House, he has had to contend recently with flashpoints of trouble. A would-be challenge to his rule last December seemed to fade as fast as it appeared. But the rumble of discontent has lingered, and Finneran, who can be as nimble as he is blunt, seemed to alter his style this spring, winning over many of his most persistent House critics in the process of engineering unprecedented support for a politically unpalatable menu of tax hikes and spending cuts.
Meanwhile, regardless of who wins the governor’s race, the corner office will be home to the first chief executive since Weld who has won the post outright, rather than inherited it. That could mean the return of a stronger executive branch counterweight to legislative power, but it hardly ensures it.
Do these changes add up to a new day of democracy and power sharing dawning on Beacon Hill? Or spell new life for a Legislature that, for all its amassed power, is regularly derided as out of touch and out of kilter? Probably not. But there are plenty of reasons to hope they do.
The house that two Toms built
If the Legislature has become a body stuck in torpor, Finneran and Birmingham, in many respects, are unlikely figures to have presided over such a decline. The two leaders harbor a breadth and depth of intellectual capacity uncommon among State House pols, and they are each eloquent spokesmen for coherent–though often conflicting–visions of state government. Finneran is a furrowed-brow skeptic of unchecked state spending who has elevated his own ceremonial profile by delivering an annual “Speaker’s address to the Commonwealth,” an event symbolic of many observers’ assessment that he is more the governor than the governor is. Meanwhile, Birmingham, a Rhodes scholar whose progressive politics are delivered with an Oxford vocabulary and a Chelsea chip on the shoulder, has made a compelling case for state government as the great equalizer in a society where the cards are often dealt unfairly.
Finneran assemble a budget
The two leaders bring to their posts the type of brainpower and passion that one would wish for in every legislator, and certainly every legislative leader. But the Legislature they lead, in a bicameral division of labor, has degenerated on their shared watch in both form and substance.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the annual state budget debate, which has turned into a recurrent–and deeply personal–confrontation between the two legislative chieftains and their respective public philosophies. This clash played itself out on a level of public spectacle in 1999, when the two leaders spent summer and fall on the balcony outside Birmingham’s State House office, personally hashing out a $21 billion state spending plan, which they delivered five months late. The following year, an all-night April budget session in the House morphed into something resembling a booze-soaked frat party, with phantom votes being cast for lawmakers who were not present, while other representatives reportedly dozed off in their offices. The true scandal of what became known as the “Animal House” budget was not so much that legislators’ judgment may have been clouded by their late-night imbibition, but that their state of mind hardly mattered as they rubber-stamped spending decisions already made already by House leaders.
A year ago, budget talks again dragged on for months beyond the July start of the new fiscal year, with a spending plan dropped on lawmakers the day before Thanksgiving, giving them only hours to digest the 500-page document before casting an up-or-down vote. Finally, after agreeing last summer to more than $1 billion in tax increases and tax-cut reversals, Finneran’s House and Birmingham’s Senate could not settle on a common spending blueprint, leaving it to Gov. Swift–a lame-duck acting governor whose vetoes the Legislature could have overridden at will–to make the final $300 million in cuts.
And these fiscal follies are by no means the only symptoms of advanced legislative dysfunction:
- Legislative committees and their chairmen–once powerful centers of authority and expertise–have seen much of their clout vanish as Speaker and Senate president exercise near-total discretion over whether bills reach the floor.
- Budget riders, or “outside sections” to the annual state spending plan, have become the prime vehicle for the most important legislative initiatives, bypassing committee hearings, public testimony, and the due deliberation that educates lawmakers and the public alike on pending proposals. Criticized by the Swift administration and good-government watchdogs for excessive use of this legislative end-around, lawmakers cut down the volume of outside sections in the last two budgets. But these budget riders remain the legislative fast track for major leadership initiatives ranging from a revampaing of the state’s special education law to recent changes in Medicaid eligibility that could cut benefits to 50,000 people.
- With leadership-backed proposals sprung on them without warning, lawmakers say they sometimes don’t know what they’re voting on. At the hearing called in September to sort out, after the fact, the consequences of a Legislature-approved cut in prescription reimbursement rates that had chain and independent pharmacies threatening to pull out of the state Medicaid program, representatives and senators alike testified they had been in the dark when they cast their votes. “It’s clear to me that we had no idea what we were doing,” said state Rep. Daniel Bosley of North Adams. “Many of us were not fully informed about the some of things we were doing to balance the budget,” echoed Sen. Susan Fargo of Lincoln, a member of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee.
- Even the obligation to conduct routine business in a timely manner is regularly ignored. A longstanding rule requiring joint House-Senate committees to hold hearings on and report out all bills in the first six months of the Legislature’s two-year session is now repeatedly extended not only for particular bills, which might need further review, but all bills. In the 2001-02 sitting of the Legislature, the bill-reporting deadline was pushed past the end of formal sessions on July 31.
- Indeed, for this two-year session of the Legislature, the two houses never did get around to adopting rules that govern their joint operation, a matter of legislative protocol usually disposed of in the opening days.
None of these failings and foibles is by itself a scandal. But taken together, they form a disturbing pattern of legislative malaise. “It’s all slight changes here and there that are not noteworthy singly,” says John McDonough, a former Boston state representative. “Collectively, they have added up to a diminishing of the role of committees, of rank-and-file members, and the public.”
And as the role of individual legislators has diminished, so has interest in running for these posts. This year’s legislative races feature among the fewest number of contested seats in the 24 years since the House was reduced in size from 240 to 160 members. In just 49 seats in the House and only 12 Senate seats will there be two major-party candidates on the ballot in November.
As the Democratic ranks have continued to swell, what’s been lost is not only Republican leverage but also sufficient opposition, loyal or not, to maintain even a semblance of debate. In the House, where four GOP members are not seeking re-election this fall, state Rep. Bradley Jones, the assistant minority leader, says his biggest concern is that Republican ranks, which now stand at just 22, could fall below 20, the number needed to force a roll call vote. During House debates these days, says Jones, “We have to worry about people leaving to go the bathroom.”
The mouse that didn’t roar
Without the push and pull of vigorous two-party competition, the axis of tension in the House, such as it is, has been between legislative leadership and disenchanted members. For the most part, it hasn’t been much of a match. Indeed, the political muscles of House backbenchers have so atrophied that they can’t even mount a decent revolt.
Although his dominating presence made him a lightning rod for criticism outside the building almost since the day he took power in 1996, within the House Finneran faced little challenge beyond the grumblings of a small band of diehard liberals he once dismissed as “cranks.” That is, until last winter. Fresh from the Thanksgiving eve budget debacle, a group of House members that had been meeting to discuss their growing discontent with Finneran’s rule went so far as to raise the idea of a Beacon Hill palace coup.
The Boston Globe caught wind of the confabs in mid-December and made them front-page news, with the paper reporting breathlessly of a challenge to Finneran “that could include a motion to oust him from office.” But the would-be revolt proved to be more a belch of rank-and-file indigestion than the mustering of a well-ordered militia. “I think mini-rebellion overstates the case,” says Rep. Jay Kaufman, a Lexington Democrat who was part of the group. “What there was was a collection of frustrated and angry people, but no clear direction or leadership.”
There clearly was no stomach–or plan–for a confrontation along the lines of the mid-1980s overthrow of Speaker Thomas McGee, in which House dissidents (including rank-and-filer Tom Finneran) used a coming election cycle to recruit candidates pledged to a leadership change. Indeed, the House dissidents tapped an unlikely general to lead an anti-Finneran charge: Rep. Daniel Bosley, a 16-year House veteran who serves as House chairman of the joint Government Regulations Committee. And Bosley says now that a full-blown leadership challenge was never in the cards.
“We didn’t start a little cabal to overthrow the Speaker,” says Bosley, suggesting that the conspirators’ main objective was changing House rules to open up the legislative process. But with no specific demands even put forward, the revolt-that-wasn’t seemed to suffer from the same rank-and-file listlessness that keeps Finneran unquestionably the man in charge.
“I could not have envisioned something as staggeringly weak,” says long-time liberal activist Jim Braude, a veteran of many Beacon Hill battles.
As weak as it was, the abortive revolt revealed that a measure of discontent had spread beyond liberals alienated by Finneran’s politics to members more in the House mainstream.
Members like Charley Murphy, who would be nobody’s idea of a bomb-throwing House rebel. A 36-year-old ex-Marine who represents the blue-collar Boston suburb of Burlington, Murphy is a centrist Democrat whose views on fiscal matters aren’t out of step with those of the Speaker himself. But after two terms as a loyal foot soldier, following the leadership lead on everything from procedural votes to budget decisions, Murphy simply grew weary of what he calls the “go along to get along” mindset that permeates the House.
Murphy says he’s had four different committee chairmen tell him, when he’s asked about particular bills, that they’re waiting for word from Finneran on whether to move the legislation forward. “So now, that’s a chairman of a committee,” says Murphy. “I mean, do you think people on that committee are going to feel like, hey, let’s dig in, roll up our sleeves and get some work done?”
In January, Murphy took his criticisms public, co-authoring an op-ed column in the Globe with fellow representative Barry Finegold, an Andover Democrat. “The House has ceded its authority to leadership to such an extent that debate is rare and the participation of the membership in substantive policy making is more so,” wrote the two lawmakers. “We have allowed this to happen. It must stop.”
If the spread of disenchantment has Finneran shaking in his boots, he hides it well. Asked his reaction to the Bosley-led uprising and Murphy’s op-ed chafing, Finneran pauses for a moment before answering. When he does, he sounds less like a chastened autocrat than a parent whose teenager has committed some foolish stunt. “Disappointed,” says Finneran. “Disappointed would be the word.”
But the Speaker’s father-still-knows-best demeanor masks a willingness to shift course in the face of a strong headwind. Following last year’s budget mess and the aborted coup attempt, Finneran’s Monday morning meetings with his top lieutenants involved some uncharacteristic introspection–and some blunt talk. “It did come to a head,” says Rep. Kevin Fitzgerald, a member of Finneran’s leadership team. “People were critical of him. I think we all came to the realization that we could do a better job.”
That realization could not have come at a better time.
Changing his tune
If there is a moment in state history that has informed Tom Finneran’s approach to leadership, it is without question the fiscal crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when state finances were in shambles and a rudderless House seemed to be careening out of control. “It remains a moment of definition,” Finneran says. “All I try to do is kind of apply the lesson of–what was it Santayana said? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
As the bottom fell out of state revenues last winter, Finneran determined that his stewardship of the state’s mounting fiscal crisis would bear no resemblance to the handling of the last budget meltdown. The approach he came up with is referred to in the Speaker’s office as simply “the campaign.”
The Speaker’s truth-and-taxes campaign also extended to his members, with a result that not only accomplished his budget-management goal but also helped tamp down the chorus of discontent. Finneran moved in unprecedented ways to draw members into the fold, forming “working groups” open to all lawmakers to examine Medicaid, long-term debt, and other problem areas in state spending. Liberal lawmakers, including his most persistent critics, cheered Finneran’s willingness to lead the charge on taxes, while moderates were brought along by his release of an austerity budget that the state would be forced to live with without new revenue, one in which local aid, a priority for nearly all members, would face huge reductions. (No doubt also helping Finneran’s cause were reassuring poll numbers showing public acceptance of new taxes.) And when it came to putting some meat on that bare-bones spending plan, it was done in a remarkably inclusive, if not exactly public, fashion, with most budget amendments hashed out in caucuses open to all Democratic members.
“I told him I thought it was probably the high point of his speakership,” says Rep. Paul Demakis, a Boston Democrat and frequent Finneran critic. “He gave the body an opportunity to work and to get involved,” says Finneran lieutenant Fitzgerald. “And it made all the difference in terms of the outcome.”
Judy Meredith, a veteran human services lobbyist, saw nothing surprising in Finneran’s change of course. The art of legislative leadership, says Meredith, is “very practical, it’s always responsive.” The Speaker was faced with a budget challenge and a leadership challenge very different than he had faced in the past, she says, “so he changed his style.”
What’s striking about Finneran’s new leadership look is that it seemed to solve both his problems–with the budget and with his members–in one stroke. With members suddenly “getting briefed out the kazoo,” says Meredith, “there was nothing to complain about.”
Still, even with all the working groups and briefings and caucuses, leadership continued to pull some fast ones, says Murphy. He points to an outside section assessing a $3,300-per-year charge on private-paying nursing home beds, a fee that, if passed on to patients, Murphy worries would impose an undue burden on residents who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but not rich either. What really riles him, however, was the provision’s appearance as an amendment to the budget on the House floor. Murphy forced a debate on the fee, but knew that, with leadership behind the proposal, it was a losing cause.
“The time for that debate should have been the week before, during the tax debate and vote,” says Murphy. “Why didn’t we discuss this back then?” Finneran insists that the only obstacle to legislators’ involvement is their own unwillingness to step forward, particularly when tough choices must be made. “I’m not preoccupied with order; I’m preoccupied with responsibility,” says Finneran. “I don’t have a problem with the mess of democracy.”
Senate shares symptoms
In the state Senate, the mess of democracy is conducted with an air of decorum. The intimate, 40-member body places a premium on collegiality, and has no need for the elaborate pecking order that characterizes the 160-member House. Every Democratic member–all 34 of them–has either a leadership post or a committee chairmanship or vice chairmanship; even among the Republicans, four of the six have minority leadership titles. Like the children of Lake Wobegon, every senator is above average.
But don’t confuse the Senate’s debating-society image with freewheeling democracy. That’s what some senators say, along with a variety of outside observers–including the man who most often suffers from unflattering comparisons between the two legislative bodies.
“The contrast, quite frankly, between my style of leadership and the scripted routines of the Senate is remarkable,” says Finneran. The notion of the Senate as deliberative body of equals he calls “a colossal joke.”
Finneran’s comments may have had a little extra edge that mid-August morning because Senate President Birmingham, then in the thick of his bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, had just unleashed a new television campaign ad designed to exploit the Finneran-as-bogeyman theme running through state politics this year. The ad touted Birmingham’s pivotal role in increasing the state minimum wage, boasting that he “took on” Finneran and the state’s the business lobby to do so.
Birmingham–and the Senate under his leadership–has without a doubt provided a progressive counterweight to Finneran’s conservative leanings on a range of issues, from funding for education and housing to support for the Clean Elections law, prescription drugs for seniors, and domestic partner benefits for state workers. But with Finneran’s “bogeyman” image conflating his conservative politics and his controlling leadership style, some say Birmingham’s liberalism gets him off the hook for exercising power over the Senate that rivals Finneran’s hold on the House.
“Tommy Finneran gets the [bad] press because he’s a social and fiscal conservative,” says former Senate president Kevin Harrington. “The reality, if one wants to look at it, is the Senate is under as tight if not tighter control.” Some of that tight control may be borne of an institutional orientation that Harrington had a big hand in. Following on the loose leadership style of Holyoke’s Maurice Donahue, Harrington took power in 1971 and brought more centralized control to the Senate, a trend his successor, William Bulger, continued in legendary fashion.
Birmingham took the reins of power pledging a more inclusive style. “Each of us can play a central role in shaping the policy of the Commonwealth,” he declared on the day he took the gavel from Bulger, his predecessor and mentor.
But things haven’t exactly turned out that way. One reason may be the need to match Finneran pound for pound in the don’t-give-an-inch clash of House and Senate priorities. Pointing to Birmingham’s many victories in education, housing, and human services, Sen. David Magnani, a liberal Framingham Democrat, says, “That’s no small achievement when you’ve got a conservative Republican governor and a conservative Democrat leading the other body.”
For whatever reason, Birmingham has run the Senate as a tight ship, with no question about who’s at the helm. (Despite numerous requests for an interview, before and after the September 17 primary election, Birmingham was not available to discuss his Senate presidency.) Indeed, some say Birmingham’s control of the Senate agenda exceeds that of his storied predecessor, who enforced discipline on only a short list of pet causes (and personal grudges). Birmingham, in contrast, has passionate views on almost every issue in state government. More often than not, his personal view becomes the Senate’s stance.
As a result, the Senate runs in much the same way as the ostensibly autocratic House. Virtually every Democrat may be a committee chair, for instance, but that doesn’t make them masters of their own domains. “Birmingham hasn’t tried to influence what we hear or what we report out,” says one committee chair. “But that’s only half of the story, because whatŠgoes to the floor all comes from the leadership.”
That’s in part because in the Senate, as in the House, many bills, even if only tangentially related to state spending, go from the committee where they’re heard to the Senate Ways and Means Committee, which serves as a leadership-controlled gatekeeper. “By running everything through Ways and Means, I don’t think we encourage members to take full responsibility for what goes on in their committees,” says Sen. Richard Moore, Senate chairman of the health care committee.
Order of succession
Perhaps the best evidence of Birmingham’s firm hand can be seen in the wide-open battle to succeed him now underway. At this writing, a half-dozen Senate Democrats are vying for the post–itself an unusual circumstance. “This is the first time in living memory that there hasn’t been a two-person fight,” says Harrington, the former Senate president. Some say that’s because of the difficulty senators have had getting air in a chamber where an outsized president sucks up all the oxygen. One of the contenders, current Assistant Majority Leader Stanley Rosenberg of Amherst, says no one has “emerged as the natural leader and successor because there [has been] no opportunity to lead.”
Whether desperate for change or simply making the most of their leverage, the members are talking about opening up the Senate. “Members have almost universally talked about the importance of a less centralized Senate, a more inclusive Senate, a Senate in which the committee chairs are empowered,” says Sen. Andrea Nuciforo Jr., a Pittsfield Democrat.
And so are their prospective leaders, who in addition to Rosenberg include Majority Leader Linda Melconian of Springfield, Majority Whip Robert Travaglini of Boston, Ways and Means Chairman Mark Montigny of New Bedford, and senators Moore of Uxbridge and Marian Walsh of Boston. Walsh, for instance, says she wants to preside over a Senate where “each member has a voice, each chair helps govern, helps determine what the agenda will be, what the order of priorities will be.” Asked how far the current Senate is from that ideal, Walsh turns circumspect, saying only, “I think that most members feel that we can improve upon that.”
But it’s Moore, although seen by State House insiders as a long shot to take the presidency, who has made the strongest connection between democracy in the Senate and what’s come to be called, in this year’s governor’s race, “the mess on Beacon Hill.” In early September, the understated Democratic moderate distributed a packet of proposals for Senate reform to his colleagues. On the cover was a photocopy collage of newspaper editorials about the Legislature from around the state with headlines like CHAOS REIGNS and POLS LEAVE A MESS, WARPED PRIORITIES. In a three-page letter that reads like a bill of indictment, Moore ran down a litany of woes he’d like to correct, including missed budget deadlines, closed-door conference committees, and major legislative initiatives launched “with little or no input from relevant committee chairs.”
“We ought to find ways [to conduct business] so we’re not the butt of cartoon jokes,” says Moore. “I think the only way we do that is to find ways for members to be more part of the process.”
Whether committed to reform or not, the next Senate president may be forced into a form of power sharing just to take power. As of Labor Day, no candidate was believed to have more than six or seven solid votes. “This is not pick A or pick B,” says Nuciforo. “This is an exercise in coalition building. We’ve got to put several blocs of votes together to get to 21. That person is going to have to be inclusive.”
Harrington says that coalition support will make for a weak Senate president. But that “may turn out to be good,” he adds, since it could mean “more small “d’ democracy.”
Even those who want more democracy in the upper house, however, worry about making the next president too weak in Beacon Hill standoffs. Rosenberg says it will be a challenge for him or her to yield power to members while also being a forceful advocate for the Senate’s agenda.
“Given that you are competing with two other centers of power,” says Rosenberg, referring to the House and the executive branch, “if they’re got their act together and you don’t have your act together, you can lose every time.”
Profiles in courage?
The coming months will usher in as much change in state government as Massachusetts has witnessed in a dozen years. What that will mean for a Legislature that has grown in clout but withered in vitality is less clear.
As for the new governor, Republican Mitt Romney, should he carry the day in November, is sure to claim a mandate for cleaning up the “mess on Beacon Hill.” But doing so will be harder than heaving debris into a garbage truck in front of the Golden Dome, as he did in a campaign TV ad. In contrast to the Weld takeover 12 years ago, Romney would enter office with no surge in Republican legislative ranks and little of the public anger at state government that Weld leveraged. With no way for Romney to gain the upper hand on a Legislature that has grown accustomed to having its way, Finneran could well remain the top dog in state government, leaving the GOP governor grateful for the conservative Speaker’s help in restraining the fiscal appetites of his Democratic colleagues, but helpless in the face of legislative resistance to his own agenda.
“Finneran would love Romney,” says political analyst Lou DiNatale, notwithstanding the Speaker’s stated support for Democrat Shannon O’Brien.
Ironically, it might be a Democratic victory in the governor’s race, returning state government to one-party rule, that would tip the Beacon Hill balance of power. After all, in the absence of true two-party competition, schisms in the state’s dominant party, played out through shifting coalitions and alliances, may be the next best thing for democratic debate. Legislative leaders would be less likely to declare a Democratic governor’s agenda dead on arrival, and if they do, dissident lawmakers might be able to make common cause with the administration to turn the tables on them. Thus Gov. O’Brien could become the vehicle for both restoring executive power and empowering the legislative rank-and-file.
But none of that will matter if our elected lawmakers remain content to march in line. What is most remarkable about the dysfunction that has set in on Beacon Hill is just how unremarkable it has become. There is little expectation that budgets will be completed on time or that lawmakers will have significant roles in writing them. Members meekly approve major policy changes through outside sections tacked onto the budget, despite misgivings over their implications. Committee chairs stand idly by as the flow and content of legislation is controlled from above.
“Tom Finneran can only do what he does when a majority of my colleagues allow him to,” says Rep. James Marzilli, an Arlington Democrat who frequently tangles with him. “That’s why I don’t take any of the fighting with the Speaker personally. It’s not just about Tom Finneran. It’s about people all saying it’s OK to have the state budget come out five months late, or not have debate over major bills.”
Plenty of lawmakers, focused mainly on district concerns, seem content with the current state of affairs. Meanwhile, those who voice disgust at the status quo bring to mind the old saw about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything.
One former governor who cut his teeth as a rabble-rousing young state representative, shaking things up in the 1960s with other rank-and-file reformers, says he can’t figure out why they don’t. “We organized ourselves into a Democratic study group,” says Michael Dukakis. “We had an agenda. We worked with our colleagues. You can, with persistence, with effective use of the media, with some effective planning and so on, you can do a lot of things. People for better or worse got to know us. I don’t quite understand why more of the folks who may not be happy with the Legislature don’t do that. Not only that, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”
State Rep. Peter Larkin sounds a similar theme. Larkin, a Pittsfield Democrat who serves as House chairman of the education committee, says frustrated lawmakers should stop whining on the sidelines and jump into the fray. “It’s not a conveyor belt,” he says of the legislative process. “There’s too many people sitting on the back bench waiting for something to be done.”
As they do, the quality of democratic debate deteriorates. “The lack of any new vision or ideas coming out of the Legislature was just frightening to me,” says Lees, the Senate minority leader, reflecting on this session. “Bill Weld and even Mike Dukakis, as much as I hate to say the guy’s name, both tried bold ideas.”
In both ideas and action, a little boldness seems to be in order. But also a little looser hand on the wheel. The citizenry has a right to expect more gumption from those who represent us. At the same time, we could use a lot less of the short-circuiting of parliamentary process that leaves members on the sidelines while leaders, who should be setting a tone and tempo for legislative action, end up writing the whole score. By happy coincidence, more of the former could lead to less of the latter.