FOR YEARS, reporters on Beacon Hill have reported that legislation can be blocked during informal sessions if just one lawmaker objects.
This week we learned it ain’t necessarily so.
In a history-making move, the House and Senate passed a $3.1 billion spending bill over the objections of many Republican lawmakers. The branches pulled it off by bringing in enough legislators to establish a quorum – 81 in the House and 21 in the Senate.
It was so easy that one wonders if “quorum sessions” will become more frequent in the future, a way to extend legislative deadlines beyond the current cutoff dates.
Under current legislative rules, all “formal business” during the first year of a legislative session is supposed to end on the third Wednesday in November, which was the 15th this year. During the second and final year of the session, July 31 is the end date.
The Legislature remains in session after those dates, but operates informally, when few lawmakers are in attendance and typically only routine, noncontroversial items are taken up.
The spending bill was filed by Gov. Maura Healey on September 13. The House waited until November 8 to act on it, and the Senate followed on November 14. The House and Senate versions included provisions that had to pass to close out the books on fiscal 2023 as well as several other more controversial items, including how $250 million for the overwhelmed emergency shelter system should be spent and whether zoning in Everett should be changed to accommodate a new soccer stadium for the New England Revolution.
House and Senate negotiators failed to reach a deal on what should be in the final bill by November 15, which meant passage would have to come during informal sessions.
Once House and Senate negotiators reached a deal on November 30, the bill was taken up in the House but was blocked by a lone Republican who doubted the presence of a quorum. House Democrats tried to pass it again on December 1 and December 2, but each time a Republican successfully questioned the presence of a quorum.
On Monday, however, Democrats flocked to Beacon Hill, established a quorum in both chambers, and approved the spending bill in the House and Senate with no debate and using standing votes where the positions of those voting were not recorded.
Brad Jones, the House Republican leader, said he had never witnessed a vote like that before in an informal session. House Speaker Ron Mariano said he couldn’t recall one either.
Democrats blamed the Republicans for needlessly holding up the bill for four days. Republicans sought to draw attention to the irresponsibility of Democrats in waiting so long to strike a deal on the bill.
Mariano said he wasn’t willing to throw the House and Senate negotiators under the bus. “There were reasons why we didn’t agree and it took time to resolve those disagreements,” the speaker said. “I think that gets missed in this whole debate about deadlines and time. You can’t always control those things.”
The heavily outnumbered Republicans on Beacon Hill had urged the Democrats to vote to come back into formal session to deal with the spending bill. There would have been no opportunity to amend the final bill, but there would have been a debate and a roll call.
The quorum session demonstrated the Democrats could pass a controversial bill in an informal session with no debate and no roll call. And it suggested that legislative deadlines are no longer fixed in stone, that the Legislature can keep passing bills after formal sessions are concluded, perhaps even right up to the end of 2024.
“It’s a very, very dangerous thing,” Jones said.
State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, who is pursuing a ballot question that would give her office the power to audit the Legislature, issued a statement critical of the legislative process on the close-out spending bill.
“The recent supplemental budget shows the many shortcomings of closed-door government,” she said. “Billions of tax dollars spent, late, poorly understood, and without any of the process that could unite the people behind important priorities. Funding critical investments is not the only consideration. Government should not be done TO people, it must be ‘of, for, and by the people.’”
Rush is on for ballot measure verification
State election officials face a longer-than usual slog through potential ballot measures this month, sorting through tens of thousands of pages of signatures for 11 initiatives – including one that didn’t meet the signature threshold – before they have to hand them over to the Legislature in the first week of January.
Half of the ballot initiatives that met the roughly 75,000-signature threshold are versions of an Uber- and Lyft-backed ballot campaign to reclassify app-based drivers as independent contractors. Conor Yunits, spokesperson for the coalition behind the effort, said they “heard loud and clear that the SJC had concerns about relatedness,” after two measures were blocked from the ballot by the state’s highest court last cycle for trying to include too many unconnected elements.
The attorney general’s office certified nine different variations of the question earlier this year. Expecting to face legal challenge from opponents, the ballot initiative’s backers sent five versions with varying levels of simplicity along to Secretary of State Bill Galvin, with plans to narrow further when the courts or the Legislature become involved.
The secretary’s office usually considers around four or five ballot measures that have cleared local certification. Staffers don’t have to check off every name all over again, but they do have to look at the front and back of every signature page by hand. They check to make sure there are no markings to alter the petition document in any way – a technicality that almost tripped up the ballot measure to legalize the use of plant-based psychedelics in the state – or else the signature page is disqualified.
Initiatives on psychedelics, allowing the state auditor to audit the Legislature, eliminating the 10th grade MCAS test as a graduation requirement, allowing ride-share drivers to unionize, and establishing a minimum wage for tipped workers all submitted petitions to the state with enough certified signatures to be sent to the Legislature for consideration. Though an effort to require voters to show photo ID or legally attest to their identity before casting a ballot fell some 30,000 signatures short, it still submitted the signatures to the state.
Galvin’s office said it will take more time than the usual three weeks to review signature pages, given twice as many petitions as usual need checking. But January looms, and state lawmakers must receive the petitions by the first legislative day of the year.
