POLITICS
CommonWealth Beacon takes the pulse of Massachusetts politics by examining the policies, personalities, and pressing issues shaping moves in local governance, on Beacon Hill, and among the state’s congressional delegation in Washington.
Healey and Minogue agree to fall debates, but not the same ones
In a June Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll of 500 Massachusetts registered voters, Minogue and Shortsleeve received 31 percent and 29 percent of support, respectively, to Healey’s 56 percent.
Healey sounds alarm on energy costs — but a legislative solution remains elusive for now
Healey’s decision to speak specifically on energy policy as the Legislature scrambled elsewhere in the State House to tackle other priorities is the latest sign of urgency from the governor to respond to Bay Staters’ angst around soaring utility bills — and of the political salience of the issue as the governor seeks reelection this fall.
On second thought: Late-moving legislative action injects ‘ambiguity’ into ballot questions
Legislative leaders opted not to engage in serious negotiations with initiative petition proponents earlier in the year, when a compromise might have averted measures going to the ballot. And now, they’re weighing last-minute action that could reshape or even upend a pair of decisions voters will make.
Political Notebook: House Speaker foretells Senate tax swerve
He was joking when he described “fortune-telling” as a preferred pastime, but House Speaker Ron Mariano still managed to divine the way electoral politics would affect a Senate tax cap proposal.
Senate ready to open access to legislative records, muddying outlook for ballot question
The Senate will take up a bill next week that would subject the governor’s office and Legislature to public records requirements, but huge questions still linger about how legislative action would affect a question on the November ballot seeking a similar goal.
Eleventh-hour Senate move could upend tax rebate ballot question
Democrats in the Senate appear to be coalescing around a late-term push to repeal the law known as Chapter 62F, in the process inviting incendiary anger from groups that want government to control its spending habits.
Marijuana question survives as all nine ballot questions get their numbers
It’s official: voters will face nine statewide ballot questions, tying the record last reached in 1994, and the list will include whether to undo recreational cannabis legalization.
The tricky calculus of designing a ballot with nine questions
While law sets clear patterns for most of the ballot, officials need to lean more on the skills used by magazine or newspaper layout editors when it comes to statewide questions.
Trump DOJ sues Mass. over immigrant tuition law
The Trump administration opened up another front in its campaign to crack down on immigrant communities by asking a federal judge to scrap a Massachusetts law that lets high school graduates without legal status attend public colleges and universities without paying higher, out-of-state tuition.
How the House’s sausage-making put transparency groups in a tough spot
A trio of good-government and transparency organizations backed the House’s proposal to craft a new public records framework for the Legislature, but they’re straining to avoid the riptide of the audit-the-Legislature debate that representatives tied to the same bill.
Mass. primary election overhaul eligible for November ballot, SJC rules
Should Massachusetts run its elections more like California? That question is cleared to appear on the ballot, according to the state’s highest court, possibly teeing up a major shift in our notoriously uncompetitive races.
SJC blocks high-stakes income tax cut question from the November ballot
In a blockbuster ruling just as ballot measure campaigns submit their final signatures, Massachusetts’s highest court cut the fuse of a revenue bomb that was set to blow $5 billion out of the state budget. An initiative aiming to cut income taxes is blocked from the ballot because of errors in the attorney general’s summary.
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