The first interim $1.25 billion (yes, billion) budget passed today. Even other legislators don’t get to know what the Conference Committee is talking about. Doesn’t that bother anyone but me?
When the State House News Service asked Speaker DeLeo what the holdup was, he reportedly said, “What happens in conference, stays in conference.”
Isn’t that a bit too much like “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?” This is not at all the way I expected representative democracy to work – with all but six legislators, well eight if you add in the Speaker and the Senate President in the dark, twiddling their thumbs about the public fisk.
This is NOT the way to restore public confidence in government.
I
Please share widely!
I think the virtual single-party control of the Legislature is a key cause of this situation.
The majority leadership almost never has to worry about not having the votes on budgetary matters, in particular. The Republicans in the Legislature are too small in number to put any budgetary decision in doubt. As a result, Democratic leaders can take the votes of the rank and file membership largely for granted.
At the same time, the leadership has apparently doled out sufficient perks to keep the rank and file membership content with the situation. The result is that a small number of people in the Legislature have almost absolute power.
No dispute that politics behind closed doors can be conducive to mischief — or that the Speaker’s comparison of the budget conference committee to Las Vegas didn’t help him any.
But shining a light on the political process does not necessarily elevate it. Consider the budget debates of recent years — very open, even live-streamed on the Legislature’s website. Members of the minority party, motivated by an opportunity to set the debate agenda, file amendments to “crack down” on some disfavored group, lately undocumented immigrants. Members of the right-wing noise machine, motivated by an opportunity to increase their ratings, give non-stop coverage to the debates, urging their listeners to light up the State House switchboards. Members of the listening audience, motivated (unlike the author of and commenter to this post) simply by an opportunity to demonstrate that they are angry as hell about something, pour calls in to every legislators’ office. The result — a showcase of enmity to no purpose.
Transparency can get you only so far. It’s impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good – T.S. Eliot.
The meaningful “process” was when the legislation was written, in this case the sneaky, hidden outside sections that came into being without going through the committee process. What you are descibing is meaningless posturing, a kind of venting when everyone on Beacon Hill knows that the real “workings of the sausage machine” ALL took place behind closed doors and were not web streamed at all.