Mass. Senate agrees to operational changes

The Massachusetts Legislature would become more bifurcated under rules adopted Thursday by the Senate, with the traditional bicameral work of joint committees more formally ending at the bill-hearing stage.

Bristling at media coverage of the Legislature's productivity last session, Senate President Karen Spilka vowed on the first day of this session to introduce reforms to make Beacon Hill more transparent and to help the public better understand the work underway in the Legislature. Senate Republicans also viewed the debate around the rules package as an opportunity to advance their priorities for how the Legislature should operate.

The rules dictate how the individual branches are run but also how the House and Senate interact and work jointly as one General Court. But despite talk from in and outside the building about transparency-focused reforms, legislative Democrats have been unable since 2019 to agree to a new set of joint rules and the calls for a greater openness have grown to the point that more than 70% of voters last year gave the state auditor the power to dig into House and Senate operations, an audit lawmakers have resisted every step of the way.

Sen. Joan Lovely of Salem, the Senate Rules Committee chair of recent sessions, said the package "aims to create a transparent and efficient Legislature that meets our current moment."

"We want to create a framework for increased productivity during legislative sessions," Lovely said while introducing the bill Wednesday, before senators put it aside to focus on a shelter funding bill first. "These changes would provide more opportunity for residents to participate in the Legislature's work."

Senators voted 39-0 in favor of the joint rules reforms.

The Senate on Thursday also unanimously approved a package of rules applying only to Senate business (S 14), which contain modest reforms.

Senators adopted a few changes over the course of debate, including one that sets a default amendment deadline of 2:30 p.m. Monday for any bill the Senate Ways and Means Committee reports on a Thursday to be teed up for the following Thursday.

But they also rejected others that would have more dramatically reformed the way the chamber operates.

Senators voted 5-32 to reject a Sen. John Keenan of Quincy plan that would have set in-person voting during formal sessions as the default, with exceptions allowed in cases of illness or family care. In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, some senators have continued to participate in debate and cast votes remotely.

Keenan said during the prior two-year term, the Senate only had 45 days that involved roll call votes, suggesting that is a load his colleagues should be able to manage in person.

Fellow Democrats defended the status quo, arguing that it works well and gives flexibility to lawmakers who live further away from Beacon Hill.

Republican Sen. Ryan Fattman later proposed adding a disclaimer to roll call vote records that would indicate whether a senator cast that vote in the chamber or remotely. He suggested the "public has a right to know" their lawmaker's method of voting.

Democrats again disagreed, arguing that constituents could review archived livestreams of Senate sessions — which often stretch for several hours — to determine the means a senator used to vote. They rejected the amendment 6-31.

If the House goes along with the Senate joint rules package (S 15), the joint committee structure that the Senate clerk has traced to back at least 1807 would remain, but the process for advancing legislation through it would change. Joint panels of 11 representatives and six senators (or in some cases 13 reps and seven senators) would continue to take testimony on bills during joint hearings, but only senators would vote on Senate bills (those filed by senators or in the Senate, given bill numbers that begin with S) and only representatives would vote on House bills.

The change is intended to give senators, who are less influential on joint committees due to their numbers, more power to move priority Senate bills out of committees and to the full Senate for consideration. Letting senators freely move Senate bills (and representatives move House bills) would eliminate situations in which disagreement between the House and Senate co-chairs leaves legislation in limbo.

Senate leadership did not include in its original proposal any directions for how joint committees should vote on bills that weren't filed by a representative or senator. The "corrective" amendment that was adopted Thursday inserted new language to make clear that bills filed by anyone other than a member of the House or Senate, like the governor, "shall have a hearing and a vote scheduled upon agreement of the co-chairs of the committee" and that a majority vote of the joint committee is sufficient to refer a bill back "to the branch in which the matter was originally introduced except that reports on money bills shall be made to the House."

The Senate rules package would also tighten the timeline for committees to take action on legislation, require lawmakers to submit comprehensive and public summaries of the legislation they file, and carve out a new exemption from Beacon Hill's biennial end-of-July deadline to allow formal votes to continue on controversial matters into autumn of election years.

The Senate proposal also calls for the Legislature to move up the date for joint committees to report out legislation — from the current deadline of the first Wednesday in February of the second year of the session to the first Wednesday in December of the first year of the two-year session.

Changing so-called Joint Rule 10 Day had support among Senate Republicans, though that caucus pitched the third Wednesday in October of the first year. Lovely has said changing the deadline — at which committees must choose to favorably or unfavorably report out a bill, seek an extension order or send it to study — would "help guard against a backlog of bills in the second year of a session."

Senate Democrats are seeking some flexibility from the July 31 deadline to wrap up formal lawmaking, following two sessions in which Democrats have failed to finish their priority legislation by the deadline. The Senate plan, similar to a temporary allowance they gave themselves in the fall, would allow conference committee reports to be filed and debated "at any time throughout the two-year legislative session."

The usual July 31 deadline would remain intact for bills that have not already cleared both the House and Senate to make it to the conference committee stage by that point.

Lawmakers last session circumvented the rules as they have existed since the mid-1990s that call for only informal sessions after July 31 in even years, as they tackled major conference committee accords on health care, economic development and clean energy well into the fall, including after Election Day when all 200 legislative seats were on the ballot.

Once conference committee agreements are reached, the joint rules proposed by the Senate would require lawmakers to wait a full calendar day before taking action, though similar rules in place now are routinely cast aside. Senate Democrats said the change would give lawmakers and the public more time to read through the reports, which currently must be filed at 8 p.m. before lawmakers tackle them after 1 p.m. the next day.

Legislators over the years have routinely suspended their rules to accomplish their goals.