The golden dome of the State House. (Andy Metzger/CommonWealth Beacon)

EVEN-NUMBERED YEARS are always memorable on Beacon Hill, with a flurry of activity to get bills over the legislative finish line. As I write this, conference committees are working to deliver major bills to the governor’s desk before the end of the 2025-26 legislative session.

As attention turns to the big pieces of legislation awaiting final action, an accompanying narrative invariably gets a good airing: Massachusetts has the least productive legislature in the country, with lawmakers who pass few bills across the state’s two-year legislative session.

It is easy to see how that storyline can spark the ire of voters and the scorn of opinion writers. But it is a fundamentally flawed reading of legislative productivity for reasons that are virtually never acknowledged amid the easy targeting of lawmakers.

As counsel to the Massachusetts Senate, I’m constantly reminded of the flaw in those attacks by reflecting on my experience at the end of a legislative session in a very different state. More than 20 years ago, during my third year of law school at the University of Virginia, I was a legal fellow in the Virginia governor’s office. On the final days of the Virginia legislative session in Richmond, I marveled at the stacks and stacks of approved bills that were delivered to the governor’s desk. The volume of bills was rather breathtaking, but the scope of each bill was sometimes painfully narrow.

That’s because Virginia is one of 43 states that have constitutions that limit all or most legislation to a single subject, a limitation known as the “single subject” rule.

The situation in Massachusetts is markedly different. The Bay State is one of only seven states—along with Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and North Carolina—that have no such limitations. Similar to Congress, which has no single-subject limitations, the Massachusetts Legislature is allowed to pass a bill touching as many topics as it wants. There are no single-subject limitations in the Commonwealth’s constitution, statutes, or legislative rules.

It’s precisely because of that distinction between Massachusetts and most other states that I bristle at the disingenuous but persistent claim that Massachusetts has the least productive, least effective state legislature in the country.

That bold claim has become a popular soundbite across a range of media, including The Boston Globe and CommonWealth Beacon. For support, the Legislature’s critics usually cite a 2021 report by the Washington-based information company FiscalNote, which listed the Massachusetts Legislature last among the 50 state legislatures for the percentage of bills passed relative to the number introduced.

It’s worth noting right off the bat that claims related to “effectiveness” and “productivity” are highly subjective. By what metric can such things be measured in a legislative context? Is productivity judged by the raw number of bills passed in a legislative session, or by the breadth and potency of the policies enacted?

On a purely factual basis, however, any discussion of legislative productivity that ignores the single-subject rule is highly unsound. Failure to consider the single-subject rule in such a discussion leaves one with an incomplete picture—even a falsity—when the quantity of bills filed and passed is the ultimate metric.

When I hear the Legislature’s critics cling to the claim of legislative ineffectiveness while ignoring the single-subject rule, I’m reminded of the Republican congressman in 1974 who, when confronted with the mounting evidence of President Richard Nixon’s alleged misdeeds, stated unabashedly: “Don’t confuse me with the facts…I will not vote for impeachment.”

So let’s look at that frequently cited 2021 report by FiscalNote. With respect to enacting bills, the top four states in that report—each of which enacted between 2,000 and 4,000 bills in the 2021 legislative session—are all single-subject states (Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, and New York).

Only two of the top 30 legislatures for enacting legislation in 2021 were not single-subject jurisdictions (Rhode Island and Maine). The other five states without a single-subject rule (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and North Carolina) were in the bottom tier. While FiscalNote updates its rankings annually, there has been little movement in the top — or bottom — states year-over-year.

Those who understand the single-subject rule do not find FiscalNote’s data surprising. Typically, in a single-subject state, the legislature will pass a great many bills in any given legislative session, as it really has no other option but to pass lots of bills when no bill can contain more than one subject. There’s no such thing as an omnibus bill in those states.

Compare that to Massachusetts, where a single bill in the Legislature could—and often does—contain many discrete subjects.  One need only look at one of Beacon Hill’s recently passed budget bills – with lots of policy riders — or economic development bills to see how many separate policies and topics can be effectively addressed in a single piece of legislation here.

Now it’s fine if you don’t like omnibus bills, but facts matter. Comparing the productivity of the Massachusetts Legislature to that of any of the 43 state legislatures that are bound by the single-subject rule is neither fair nor reasonable. And when you also factor in that most states have separate legislative sessions each calendar year rather than a continuous two-year legislative session like Massachusetts—well, the annual state-to-state comparison attempted by FiscalNote starts to feel downright absurd.

To be clear, it’s not my job as Senate counsel to defend senators from criticism of their productivity. But it is my job to know the Constitution and to advise senators accordingly. Knowing the crucial difference between states that are bound by a single-subject rule and those — like Massachusetts — that are not, I have been shocked by the absence of reporting on this key legal distinction.

I’ve never seen even one article mention the single-subject rule in a discussion comparing the Massachusetts Legislature’s productivity and effectiveness to other state legislatures. The oversight is equivalent to saying that US presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have all failed to win third terms, but neglecting to mention that the 22nd Amendment barred them from doing so.

Detractors are entitled to their opinions about the Massachusetts Legislature, and they are free to criticize it as they want. But it’s their responsibility to not disseminate incomplete narratives devoid of the relevant legal context.

It’s time for the Legislature’s critics to start getting a little more confused by the facts.

James DiTullio is counsel to the Massachusetts Senate.