The editorial offers a few suggestions:
– Put legislative redistricting in the hands of an independent commission.
– Put decisions about legislators’ perks – office assignments, parking spaces, etc. – in the hands of an independent committee elected by House and Senate members.
– Assign members to committees based on their interest and expertise – and let committee members elect their chairs.
– Extend the Open Meeting Law to the state Legislature. Require that the most important deliberations – including conference committees – be held in plain sight.
– Switch to a part-time legislature, which tends to strengthen the executive branch while attracting members with less interest in manipulating executive decisions for their own benefit.
Please share widely!
Most definitely Yes on the first one
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p>Second, qualified yes – how do we keep that “independent” committee truly independent and uncorrupt?
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p>Yes on the third, especially the last part – electing their own chairs. Eliminate the bonus money the chairs get.
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p>Yes on Open Meeting Law.
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p>Part-time legislature I have mixed feelings about, but tend towards Yes. Given how much they actually produce in a year I have a hard time seeing it as full-time job. Maybe a pay cut to go with it.
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p>Fundamentally, though, I don’t think we can diminish the power of the speaker until we get more competitive elections to the legislature. With incumbents nearly always re-elected, the power that affects them the most is not the voters but the legislative leadership.
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p>I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have the least competitive elections and corrupt leadership.
Redistricting – They’ll be objections no matter who does it. They need to be compact and keep towns together as much as possible.
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p>Assignments – I say just use seniority, completely objective, maybe draw names for those with equal seniority.
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p>Committee chairs – either what you suggest or elected by the whole House. I say definitely KEEP the additional stipend; there is more work to being a chair.
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p>Open meeting – yes unless determined by 2/3 vote to close if something sensitive is being discussed.
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p>Part-time – NO, this should be their only job and they should be paid as such. Remember they need not be on Beacon Hill full time; district office work counts too.
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p>I agree with you regarding the need for more competitive elections.
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p>No way. Independent means what? Dems have 80% of the lege, but should have the same number of seats as the microminority party at the redistricting table? Nah.
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p>Have a bit stricter rules about compactness, particularly for specific towns. A number of towns have been sliced and diced. My suggestion: a town can have no more than one partial district that makes up a minority of the district, and no more than one partial district that makes up the majority of the district. Any constraints tighter than that and you’ll find an infeasible problem or one where the solution is very strange and unuseful.
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p>Barf. An independent committee to hand out lollipops? Here’s an idea: office space by seniority (within leg, not within party), and parking spaces rented to the highest bidders.
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p>Right, and you’ll have 199 legislators on the committee to oversee recess and 1 in math class. Interest isn’t distributed perfectly, and expertise is spotty at best and often hard to measure.
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p>I like the idea of committee members electing their chairs, but assignments have to come from the top.
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p>No way. The Open Meeting Law allows for executive session, and conference committee — or any other negotiation — is far more efficient when done in private.
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p>Right, as soon as you switch to a part time physician, hire only part time electricians to wire your house, and insist that your kids are educated with only part time teachers.
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p>Full time work results in full time experience. More knowledge, more ability, better results. And nothing says manipulating decisions for your own benefit quite like writing the laws that overlap with your expertise — because you’ve got a side business which stands to benefit from the laws you just wrote.
There obviously has to be a way to make sure every committee is sufficiently staffed. There should be a maximum number of seats to fill and then the committee is closed, just like registering for college classes. I believe seniority can work here too. The longest-serving member gets first pick and on it goes. If each member needs to sit on more than one committee, then everybody should get to choose one before the Dean gets to choose his second.
In Iowa, the independent commission uses computers to draw compact, numerically-close districts, just as the Speaker does here. But the Iowa rules prohibit the commission from programming into the computer the data – party registration, voting history and the addresses of potential candidates – that undermine the integrity of the process.
Reforming the legislature is very necessary. I wrote about that hereabout a year ago. The issues are ever more relevant now – with the institution in such ill repute.
but Iowa counties are all square. It turns out that they didn’t use Native American information, rivers, mountains, or collections of arbitrary town lines to draw counties — they drew the county lines first, and Iowa remains a county-centric state because much of the land is in unincorporated areas.
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p>That’s much different from a place like Massachusetts where population density and community lines are far more “squiggly”.
I guess the question is where will the pressure for reform of the House (and Senate) come from. You’d think there would be some internal pressure but as far as I can tell, there is a whole lot of silence in that body about internal reforms. For the members in the hierarchy, committee chairs, etc… they obviously don’t want to risk their current positions. And other members are hoping to get on that ladder so also fear making an open challenge to the current structure. Progressives have done fairly well under Di Masi and De Leo so do they make a process challenge when they have good posts and are seeing some action on their priorities?
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p>And as for the legislative opposition, the Republicans can barely get their voices heard and seem to care only for smaller government – not better government.
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p>The choice for legislators is whether they need reform to remain electorally virile or not? If they think the public doesn’t care about what is happening, is too apathetic or used to thinking the worst of Beacon Hill anyway to do anything about it, then reps will care more for preserving their internal ambitions then reform. I think a lot of reps either don’t see the problem or, more likely, don’t think there is much they can do about it.
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p>But in my mind, and this may be an overstatement, Massachusetts politics is effectively dead if, in this difficult moment in our political history, an electoral groundswell for change is not generated. Taxes will go up which never makes people happy even if necessary and unavoidable. Services will be cut at both state and local levels despite the tax hikes. Average reps seem beholden to corrupt leaders – three indicted speakers says something about who reps are choosing to lead them. The economy remains in the doldrums.
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p>One would expect people to be pissed off with Beacon Hill and be seeking to send our elected officialdom a message. But you need people willing to run for office for the message to get sent. Is that happening? The issues are there, the climate is there, so where the frig are the clean-up-the-mess candidates who want to change State politics? If not this year, then when? If not now, then why not? Apathy and indifference remain the biggest barriers to reform.
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p>But the only thing that will get reps attention is a challenge. Otherwise, they will continue to worry more about what the Speaker thinks then what their neighbors think.
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p>And the thing is, if no reform movement emerges in legislative races, I fear the public target the Governor at the 2010 polls, when in reality, he is really not the problem here. You could argue he hasn’t changed the culture of Beacon Hill much, and at times, has become a part of it. But if anything that is because it is so entrenched and certainly not for lack of effort on his part. Change is most needed in the legislature and its up to citizens to make it happen.
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