THERE’S NO PLACE like the State House for the holidays.

It’s easy to forget amid all the hubbub of a national blue wave and a nine-question state ballot, but with the election now past, the Legislature has a long list of business left to accomplish in the eight holiday-punctuated weeks remaining before the 2025-2026 term draws to a close.

“Long” might actually be an understatement. There are 12 House-Senate negotiating panels still working to finalize compromise bills, plus a late-moving spending proposal needed to close the state’s financial books. But because legislative leaders prefer to cram multiple topics into each omnibus package, the number of discrete policy decisions still in play reaches into the dozens.

By our count, there are more than 40 significant policy choices the Democrats who control Beacon Hill need to make before the final gavel rings out on January 5, 2027, ranging from whether to upzone the entire state for duplex development to whether to ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits in pet stores. Any bill left unfinished by the term’s end will expire, and lawmakers will need to start the process from scratch after they’re sworn in for the 2027-2028 session.

Our tally may be exhausting, but it is not exhaustive. We did not include every one of the discrepancies in spending between House and Senate legislation, which are more granular.

It’s a lot to track, even for professional Beacon Hill-watchers.

Because almost everything is now in the hands of conference committees, the actual policy decisions will essentially be made behind closed doors by only a handful of Democrats. Each panel is working to iron out differences between the underlying House and Senate versions of a bill; once its members reach agreement, the rest of the Legislature will only get a chance to vote up or down on the final accord — usually with no more than a day or two’s notice on the actual substance — without making any further changes.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said Friday that the negotiating teams are ” making progress and working hard.”

“It’s important to understand that these are complex policy decisions that take time, and often many conversations and meetings to resolve,” Mariano said in a statement to CommonWealth Beacon. Stretching the timeline, he added, gives lawmakers “more time to work diligently to reach the best possible policy outcomes — understanding that the content of the final product is far more important than reaching an agreement quickly solely for the sake of doing so.”

It’s a new phenomenon for the Legislature to have this much unfinished business this close to the end of the two-year session. For decades, lawmakers set themselves an earlier deadline, writing into their internal rules that no formal sessions can take place after July 31 in the second year of the term. Roll call votes can only happen in a formal session, so the rule effectively meant the only lawmaking that could occur after the cutoff date needed to be uncontroversial enough to win unanimous support.

Prior generations of lawmakers created the deadline almost immediately after a stinging controversy about lame-duck session shenanigans. Weeks after the 1994 election, with only a bit more than a month left in the legislative term, Republican Gov. Bill Weld suddenly filed legislation authorizing a 55 percent pay raise for lawmakers even though, as CommonWealth’s Dave Denison put it, he was previously “on record as being cool to the idea.” The Legislature quickly approved the measure, and days later, they also advanced a tax cut bill that had been quietly amended to include a capital gains tax cut — a Weld priority that had long failed to gain traction.

After drawing intense criticism for what struck many as a quid pro quo exchange, lawmakers the following year codified a new rule: Formal sessions, and therefore major business of any kind, must end by July 31 in the term’s second year. Republican Rep. David Peters of Charlton, who self-identified as “one of the loudest critics of the system,” at the time called the new deadline “one of the most significant reforms I’ve seen since I’ve been in the building,” according to a 1995 State House News Service report.

Three decades later, the current crop of legislative leaders decided the rule was worth tweaking after a pair of especially chaotic sprints to the finish line. In both 2022 and 2024, the House and Senate headed into July 31 with several major bills stuck in conference committee. Still hoping to strike deals, lawmakers kept the sessions going well past sunrise on August 1, then adjourned with some matters still unresolved.

This term, lawmakers agreed to a different approach. The Legislature’s new rules still require major bills to get an initial round of approval in both the House and Senate by July 31, but as long as conference committee negotiations started by that date, lawmakers can reconvene in a formal session any time before the term ends to greenlight a final compromise version.

Lawmakers sent 12 different matters into conference committees by the deadline this term. None produced any agreements by Election Day, leaving essentially the entire pile of business that was unfinished on August 1 to be decided in lame-duck sessions — including a potential rewrite of a public records ballot question voters just approved in a landslide.

“The whole point behind the July 31 extension for conferences was to take the pressure off the last couple of weeks and say, ‘We’re close here, if we meet a few more times on this, we can wrap this up before the end,’” Mariano said in the summer.

It’s safe to say the pressure is back on.