CBS:
Massachusetts lawmakers have voted to override Gov. Deval Patrick’s veto of a transportation financing bill.
Patrick vetoed the bill after lawmakers rejected his demand to add a provision allowing for a gas tax increase if tolls on the western portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike come down as scheduled in 2017.
The House voted 123-33 to override Patrick’s veto. The Senate followed a short time later, voting 35-5 to override.
This was a multi-billion dollar missed opportunity for the Commonwealth, and will likely cost the state tens of billions of dollars in lost business over the medium term. As the Ant knew, prudent creatures invest for the future. Foolish ones, like most Republicans and, now, the Massachusetts House, sing all day and hope someone saves them when times get tough. As anyone who has traveled to northern Europe or developed Asia in the past decade knows, the U.S. has already fallen well behind its competitors on infrastructure from trains, airports and roads to mobile telephone technology and Internet access. Massachusetts is better than many states, which is an important reason for our relative domestic wealth, but compared to places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and even Shanghai we are falling well behind in both relative and absolute terms. Maintaining even the status quo requires investment of the kind that gave us one of the world’s first subway systems, limited-access highways, shopping centers, and even helped create the Internet (it also requires other things, like privatized government-controlled subway companies listed on the stock exchange in the case of Hong Kong and Singapore, and real competition for ISPs in the case of Korea, but I digress). As the legislature established today, we are unlikely to make any improvements of comparable significance for the commonwealth for the foreseeable future.
Progressives are especially to blame because they typically run for office as advocates for enlightened self-interest and assert the values of community and investment for the future. Yet in this case the caucus did about as much good for the Commonwealth as your standard issue hack who just wants to keep their $61,133 a year job (plus per diems!). In other words, in this case: followers, not leaders. I count 43 names on the list of Progressive Caucus members posted by ProgressiveMass. That is a big enough block to have likely KO’d the overrride. In fact, it might be a big enough block, if properly allied with the governor, to replace the existing House leadership with one of their own, given fortitude and discipline. We need some leaders.
The House has bent backwards to compromise with Republican governors over the years, passing Republican health care bills and Republican ed reform bills and who knows what else, yet from the very moment treated Governor Patrick as if he were on some rival football team and he couldn’t be allowed a first down. This is not a game!
Did Governor Patrick ask for any extreme measure here? No. He asked to make sure that we don’t leave a loophole in that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars starting a few years from now because of what very well may have been an oversight on the House’s part (I’d hate to think anyone intentionally accounted for money that wouldn’t exist 3 years from now).
There’s a lot of smart people in the legislature. I know they mean well, but have got caught up in the personality games and the political squabbles. They should know better — those games aren’t important to anyone outside the confined halls of the State House and getting trapped in them harms the people of this Commonwealth. We need our legislature to get its eyes back on the prize — acting boldly to make our state a better place. Barely maintaining the status quo is not an accomplishment.
These games needs to stop. The Governor is popularly elected to serve over 6 million people. This is a legislative area where most of them could have bent, especially given how very far the overall package was from what he wanted to begin with. He already bent like a pretzel already and just asked for one small thing in return.
Somehow, I don’t think this will help most legislators when they go back home.
The saddest part? If the legislature ever decided to work with the Governor from the beginning, instead of against him, I can’t imagine the good we would have been able to accomplish. That’s not to say they should have rolled right over, but they could have earnestly met him and had real dialog over the direction to take our state in.
We’re resting on our laurel here, on the unique advantages Massachusetts innately has that has kept us above the fray these years. They won’t last forever — and when they fail, there may never be a way to recover. Twenty years from now, we could be the next Detroit.
This is so much more important than this one bill, but the bill symbolizes everything that’s wrong with politics in our state. I hope a few legislators are reading this and will start asking themselves just who they’re representing in moments like this, and if they’re really doing what the people of their districts elected them to do. It is never too late, until we have Charlie Baker in the Corner Office and any chance for bold action is off the table indefinitely.
I’m not aware of any local approval polls comparable to the national ones that routinely show Congress is viewed with disappointment, or even disdain, by many, or most, voters. I suspect, however, that our electorate has a similarly low opinion of the General Court and that with the past three Speakers convicted criminals (Flaherty: Resigned – pleaded guilty to tax evasion; Finneran: Resigned due to allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice; DiMasi: Resigned – convicted of conspiracy, honest services fraud, and extortion … good times) this judgment carries over to the local Democratic Party in many cases. Nature abhors a vacuum, and insofar as the progressive caucus has created one on the left, this general dysfunction is also a big opportunity for Massachusetts Republicans. Fortunately, they have set their own truly revelatory standard of incompetence in recent years but “the other side is even more corrupt and incompetent” is not a winning long-term strategy.
From the State House News via Mass Live
that you’re trying to get across. Are you trying to suggest that the fact that they voted for any revenue at all is some bold measure? Even if that revenue won’t maintain the status quo on transportation after the tolls go down as scheduled?
In any event, a Kristin Hughes press release doesn’t make the Democrats in these seats anymore vulnerable than the hundreds of other times Republican chairpersons have sent out press releases playing up the vulnerability of Democrats on Beacon Hill.
I’m not sure if you’ve realized it, but those angry state GOP letters haven’t amounted to much in the past, oh… say… 60 or so years, when it comes to legislative seats.
Moreover, I’m sure there are dozens or hundreds of other votes Kristen Hughes would have used to talk about how “angry” voters were and how many people were frantic to pull a GOP banner to run against XYZ Democrats, were this vote not to have existed. After all, that’s kind of her job.
The bottom line: Democratic legislators are far more worried about being back-benched than another angry worded press release from Kristen Hughes (or, sadly, passing legislation that only accounts for money that we can be reasonably sure will actually exist).
and I’d also note that I’m getting a little tired of hearing in the press how Republicans “double[d] their numbers” in 2010. Let’s get this straight. In a huge Republican year, they “double[d] their numbers” from 10 percent of the House to 20 percent.
No Republican has defeated a Democratic incumbent in Massachusetts since. In 2012, they lost a few seats. They now hold 18 percent of the seats in the House, 10 percent of the seats in the Senate. This means that they could “double their numbers” yet again and still have a smaller percentage of seats than the Democrats do in Wisconsin or North Carolina, where the GOP is doing whatever the hell it pleases with no hand-wringing whatsoever.
I’ve never seen such deference to the agenda of a party with under 20 percent in each House. This is purely on the Democratic “leaders” in the legislature. As I’ve said before, I’d like to see some of those seats go Republican, because it would remove the leadership’s excuse in constantly providing cover to “Democratic” members who vote regularly for conservative positions.
On this particular bill, I don’t see any vulnerability anyway. They can go back to Westford or Attleboro and say, “Hey, I voted against it but it passed anyway. Then the Governor wanted more and tried to reopen the legislative process to get it. By overriding the veto I nipped that in the bud.”
but those particular seats are pretty vulnerable from the right.
Our current crop of “Democrats” has just torpedoed the best chance we had in DECADES of putting our collective infrastructure in order. We now face more years of decline, cutbacks, and decay.
The Longfellow bridge will now be closed for something on the order of three years because we did nothing while it fell apart. Looking now in retrospect, which approach would have been better: (a) a small increase in taxes in, say, the mid-1990s to do needed maintenance then or (b) what we did, which is to wait until it is literally falling down — close it for three years — and pay for the repairs with borrowed money.
What our “Democratic” legislature has done and is doing is fiscal insanity and terrible governance. The GOP is dead because its “alternatives” are even worse.
In Massachusetts state races, attempting to raise the specter of a resurgent GOP is more chaff than substance. The reality is that too many of our legislators are significantly to the right of Democratic voters in Massachusetts.
I am doing and will do all in my power to make “those seats” very vulnerable from the left.
We can get more done with a 65% majority that doesn’t cater to its caucus’s dead weight.
I think many of our quasi-Democratic legislators have convinced themselves that Democrats want them in office so that they can be re-elected, not in order to implement Democratic policies.
The CBS quote refers to them coming down by 2017, but there were already down as of several years ago now. I still would have prefered jacking up income rather than gas taxes, but as part of a package I guess not a deal breaker.
When you or I read “tolls on the western portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike”, we probably think “west of I-91” or something like that.
But the plan apparently was “west of I-95“.
I’ve heard some call anything outside 495 west, but even outside 128? Basically that just leaves the “Turnpike Extension” tolled.
that any of the legislators in the “Progressive Bloc” seriously considered voting to sustain the governor’s veto here. Out of 38 “no” votes in the legislature, 33 were Republicans and at least another 3 conservative Democrats opposed to taxes.
Sen. Mark Montigny of New Bedford, who wanted a bill that did more for South Coast rail extension, is the only one I’ve identified who voted “no” from anything approximating a pro-revenue position.
Back in the Governor’s first campaign, he asked us to put down our cynicism and work toward a more positive vision of government. My cynicism meter has once again red-lined and I would not be surprised if the Governor himself feels it a bit now that he has lived through the power games as described by Ryan above (Ryan deserves Comment of the Day for that).
The next chance for progressives to demonstrate some principle will be the vote on the sales tax holiday coming up next week. This is a two-day weekend in August in which the state suspends the sales tax, for no apparent reason other than to endorse the Norquistian notion that taxation
is evil (as is government, for that matter). If our Governor, who has said that the holiday is popular but not prudent (more in this post), would veto it, maybe progressive legislators could have a chance at a do-over.
The sales tax exemption is a marketing ploy of little long term significance. A major infrastructure program can create billions of dollars for the commonwealth.
So it’s not worth fighting for?
but when policymakers justify their legislation on these grounds: “yes, we know it’s stupid, but it’s popular,” I think we’re in trouble.
instead of buying about $1000 worth of hardware store and linens store stuff this weekend, I’m waiting 2 weeks. Why not keep another $62.50 in my pocket?
I want us all to pay more taxes, but as a red blooded American I’m not going to pay more than my obligation. So when that sales tax holiday shows people are buy buy buy!-ing, just consider how sales likely fall in the few weeks before and after the weekend too.
P.S. Live near Boston and want to sell me your power and/or hand tools? Let’s chat. I’m in the market…
From a study by the Tax Foundation:
but check out Harbor Freight for basic tools. GREAT bargains, and coupons for 20% off are available at their website.