NEW LEGISLATIVE RULES were supposed to ease the end-of-session pileup as lawmakers rushed to finish major bills in the summertime before downshifting to maintenance mode before and after Election Day. If negotiations could continue past the traditional July 31 deadline, the thinking went, the House and Senate could be more productive and their closing business could be less frantic than years past.
Now, a top Democrat who first suggested the change has issued a sharp rebuke of how the updated timeline actually unfolded.
In a statement provided exclusively to CommonWealth Beacon, Senate President Karen Spilka called the months-long lack of movement on the massive pile of unfinished legislation “unacceptable.” She also signaled that she might want to backtrack from the altered timeline in the next two-year term.
“Prolonged inaction on many of the major bills currently in conference as residents face rising energy bills and an ongoing housing crisis is unacceptable,” Spilka said. “Unless we see movement soon, I cannot support extending the time for conference negotiations again in our joint rules next session.”
The Senate, she said, “stands ready to reach a resolution on the many conference reports still pending.”
Spilka issued her statement in response to a CommonWealth Beacon inquiry about the state of play on Beacon Hill for the eight remaining weeks of the term. We asked how she plans to manage more than 40 discrete policy decisions that are still pending across a dozen conference committees, and if she views the current dynamic as an improvement on the chaotic past two terms.
“If the recent midterms taught us anything, it’s that voters expect their elected officials to take meaningful action to reduce costs and improve lives. I agree,” Spilka said. “The Legislature must act with a sense of urgency to lower energy costs, make primary care more accessible, make schools cell phone free and increase transparency in government, among other things.”
It’s a public escalation of discontent, especially in contrast to the tone taken by the other end of the negotiating table. Asked the same question about the legislative outlook, House Speaker Ron Mariano instead offered plenty of praise for the new system.
“It’s important to understand that these are complex policy decisions that take time, and often many conversations and meetings to resolve,” he said in a statement Friday. “That being said, the new rules have allowed the Legislature 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.”
Mariano’s office did not immediately respond to a CommonWealth Beacon inquiry Monday morning about Spilka’s newly expressed dissatisfaction.
This is the first term in which lawmakers granted themselves codified authority to continue their talks over significant proposals this late in the cycle.
For more than 30 years, legislative rules held that no formal sessions could take place after July 31 in the second year of the two-year term, meaning the only bills that could be touched in those five-plus months were uncontroversial measures that had unanimous support.
But lawmakers are prone to procrastination, and even though Democrats dominate both chambers, the House and Senate often struggle to get on the same page. This time around, legislative leaders agreed to a new approach: As long as both chambers each approved their version of a bill by July 31, they can reconvene in a formal session to approve a final compromise any time before the term ends on January 5, 2027.
House and Senate Democrats both endorsed codifying the idea early last year after using an ad-hoc version of it in the 2023-2024 term. In fact, Spilka herself used her inaugural speech on the first day of the current term to float it, saying the Legislature should “allow conference committee votes to continue through the full two-year session.”
“The bills that emerge from conference committees contain provisions that have been vetted by one or both branches and have been reported upon — sometimes extensively,” she said.
When the final gavel rang out on July 31, a dozen conference committees were in place to negotiate the fate of packages dealing with energy affordability, economic development, cell phone use in K-12 schools, and more. Nearly three and a half months later, none of those panels have reached consensus, leaving every single matter that was pending on August 1 still unresolved heading into an eight-week lame-duck sprint after the election.
House and Senate Democrats might dig their heels in on policy differences if they feel the chambers are at odds. At times, tensions on one front — or at the top of the leadership hierarchy — have rippled out to complicate work on other conference committees.
In 2024, reporters asked Mariano about a Senate vote to authorize supervised drug injection sites days before the end of formal business. “It sort of tells me you’re not really serious about passing the bill to begin with,” he said.
The next day, when reporters pressed Spilka on a House-supported proposal to temporarily rebalance Boston’s property tax formula, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and read from it.
“It sort of tells you,” she said, repeating Mariano’s words, “that they’re not really serious about passing the bill to begin with.”
