So here we go yet again. Another Speaker of the Massachusetts House imminently and ignominiously likely to exit. Has the media used the “embattled” term yet to describe Sal DiMasi? Stay tuned.
Benighted, indicted, convicted. Tommy Finneran, Charlie Flaherty, Tommy McGee, Johnny Thompson. But let’s try to be positive here. Who were the good Speakers of the last 50 years? I tried to make three, but Robert Quinn served only a year before moving to Attorney General. So here’s two.
David Bartley was Speaker from 1969 to 1975. A sort of Rahm Emmanuel of his day, he shook things up. He sided with the lifers in opposing a reduced the size of the House, THE major issue of the time, and had a mixed-positive bag of legislative accomplishments. Perhaps daunted by the fact that the last Speaker to become governor was Republican Frank Allen in 1928, Bartley escaped into the state college system as president of Holyoke Community College. It was a clean getaway.
It’s hard not to like George Keverian, Speaker from 1985 to 1991. Keverian encouraged the diverse Massachusetts House Democrats to make deals and alliances, which he helped craft into wining coalitions. Yes, it was frequently messy. He wore the mantle of the big guy from Everett authentically. None of the Billy Bulger posturing or the Tommy McGee bully here. Keverian was looked down upon by the Dukakis policy wonks, but this is a badge of honor rather than a failing. They named a school in Everett after him. That won’t happen to his successors.
The pathology of the Massachusetts speakership is a serious issue. What to do? Rotating terms? Short term limits? Secret ballot election? More Keverian types? I know, a part of the problem is one-party rule. But that’s not the whole answer. The last Republican Speaker, Charlie Gibbons, was indicted along with his successor, the aforementioned John Thompson. Some bipartisanship that was.
And look what the future holds. John Rogers? Already on the slippery slope of scandal. Bob DeLeo? Accomplishments?…give me a few minutes, I’ll think of something. Dark horse David “slots”Flynn? OMG. I’m so not looking forward to this.
There’s something about this that smells, my reservations about DiMasi notwithstanding.
Elect the speaker and the senate president statewide, or make them subject to statewide recall/removal. I know it’s over-the-top, unworkable, and destructive.
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p>But, these jobs invariably go to insider lifers elected by other insider lifers. With no viable second or third party emerging in the foreseeable future to challenge the Dem’s hold on the Legislature, the lifers will just keep popping the next lifer in line into the job.
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p>We need a way to make the legislature accountable to the entire state, rather than wait for indictments to clean house. Accountability to some force other than the insiders might actually make the leadership, I don’t know – more accountable?
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p>Power corrupts …. We need a democratic workable way to insure accountability in the legislative leadership to all of us; not just each other.
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p>That’s my dumb idea for the day.
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Maybe what we need is a parliamentary system. Why have a governor when we can have a prime minister?
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p>That might make the legislature and its leadership appropriately accountable.
… Scratching the surface of your question I find the deeper question:
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p>Is the present constitution no longer workable? Having it online is good, since reading it is a valuable experience in cognitive dissonance: it is a patchwork of amendments, political ameliorations, gross dependencies and encumberances. The question is: is it corrupted past it’s usefulness? (corrupted in the sense that it is unrecognizably bent out of it’s original state, not particularly good and not particularly bad, just no longer fitting in any useful way…)
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p>I have no direct experience with a parliamentary system. And, so, I can’t evaluate whether it will be a better system. I don’t think, per se, that a legislature or governor is a position or body inherently a corruption, as the question might lead one to think.
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p>I think we’ve lost our moorings. I don’t think our moorings were all that bad to begin with. To extend the metaphor, maybe a new mooring is needed. It might be quite serviceable with a basic shape and design quite similar to the old, just updated for the present day. Or we might need something radically different.
The hallmark of most Westminster systems is a party discipline that goes way beyond what we have in Massachusetts. Were we to install that, we’d combine the political power of the Speaker and governor, keeping everyone in line yet even more. Question time is a grand tradition that I’d like to see in Boston and Washington, DC, but that doesn’t mean we need to take on the rest of the system that goes with it.