David Bernstein has really had it with the Massachusetts Legislature’s opaque back-room operations and its continuous failure to address many of the state’s long-term needs. And in this month’s Boston Magazine, he’s offering a solution: “Let’s Dismantle the Massachusetts House of Representatives”:
If all of this infuriates you; if you’re also enraged that Beacon Hill continuously fails to seriously address the state’s long-term needs for transportation, housing, education, and development; and if you’re sick and tired of the state legislature’s opaque back-room operations, I have a proposal for you: Eliminate the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Points for boldness! This is also a thoughtful argument that touches on the feudal origins of the two-chamber system (the nobles needed a safe space where they could protect themselves against the tyranny of the majority) and the present effect of that system, which is to allow “special interests to gum up the works without any public accounting for legislators.” Exhibit A in this regard is the conference committee process, which comes into play every time the House and Senate pass differing versions of a bill:
As Beacon Hill watchers know, bills in conference committee pile up until the final days of the formal session, when the supposed work of two years, 200 legislators, and committees in open hearings is actually done in a hectic rush, by a handful of people, horse-trading within and between bills, until finally spitting out new versions for the two chambers to hastily endorse.
Also not to be missed is a timeline detailing Speaker DeLeo’s consolidation of power and predicting the end date of the DeLeo era (January 2021, when he becomes a lobbyist).
A couple thoughts:
First, in deciding on its governing rules for this new (2017-2018) session, the Legislature acknowledged the problem of the end-of-session bottleneck. The new rules require the joint committees, which handle the initial consideration of bills, to complete their work in early February rather than in mid-March, and they also prohibit the appointment of new conference committees within 14 days of the end of a legislative session. But there’s no deadline for conference committees to finish their work, so stay tuned to July of next year to see if these rules changes have practical results.
Second, if the Legislature is continually failing to address the state’s pressing issues, the question arises — what are they doing with their time?
My theory: they’re doing a lot of enacting, but the bills that are passed fall under the decidedly “noncontroversial” category — designating bridges and overpasses in honor of beloved community members; establishing sick leave banks for one state employee at a time, exempting a single municipal position from the Civil Service laws, or granting one additional liquor license to one town.
In 1997, the noncontroversial bills like these made up about a tenth of the Legislature’s output. Now it’s more like one in three.
The graph presents a corollary of Bernstein’s thesis — our Legislature avoids many pressing issues (charter schools and marijuana being two recent examples) and increasingly contents itself with hyperlocal items lacking in wide application or great import.
Anyway, read the article. I’m not quite convinced about the remedy he’s proposing, but the diagnosis is beyond dispute.
It was a well thought out and analytical argument that really details how the current legislature isn’t working. It identifies the major problem as the consolidation of power in the Speaker and other leaders who are abusing their state salaries and pensions as a means to pad their coffers before they lobby. He really lays out how DeLeo functions and how his short term personal financial goals are dictating how the chamber operates. His proposal is undermined by the consolidation he argues for-just merging the bodies as is into one.
I am not sure if consolidating the body in the manner he proscribes really solves that problem-arguably it would weaken the power of the more progressive and transparent Senate and empower the Speaker even more-who already uses the greater size of the House as excuse for why he needs to wield so much power.
A truly unicameral body like Nebraskas would have fewer legislators. Meeting in the middle with say 100-120 Senators and eliminating all vestiges of the House seems like the best hybrid. And I would add in other features like setting the same base salaries for all members, term limits for leadership and chairmen, and maybe drawing chairmanships by lot to eliminate the consolidation of power. Term limits for the body should also be on the table-they largely worked for California and it would create a move up or move out mentality that would decrease the lifers who can’t hack it in the private sector or elected offices with greater responsibility.
None of these reforms are likely to happen while th existing supermajority is composed the way it is and it’s unlikely voters are educated or passionate enough to put them on the table. But I’m glad he brought these ideas out into the open.
I remember the last time this was done, also in the name of efficiency. The House membership of 351 for each city and town was cut to 160, with a bigger salary of course to make up for the burden of more than one community.
How did that work out? Less transparency, less representation of those outside of major cities, less accountability, far greater expense. I remember hearing a presentation in the Great Hall, explaining that the members representing at least part of a MWRA community was more than 50% of all representatives, so ‘we’ could be sure that our fee structure, debt, outfall pip increases, etc., would always be handled in a way favorable to those members. And screw the bumpkins for not being smart enough to live in a city anyways.
What would a unicameral legislature mean? Well, first and foremost – WAY more money for everybody. Staff, too, and vehicles and maybe housing. Power would be concentrated in an even smaller cabal, without even your other representative to appeal to.
Maybe we should wait 15 years before a legislative leader is indicted and convicted before giving them even greater lack of accountability?
Let’s not cut off our nose…etc. I know a lot of people just don’t like Speaker DeLeo and his leadership. Get over it and get to work to elect a person who pledges not to vote for him in 2019. A similar campaign during the leadership fight between Kevarian and Mcgee was successful a hundred years ago. Well not really 100 years ago. I also remember the LWV referenda campaign to reduce the House. John Thompson was the devil then, and his role as an open thug was rewritten to insist that Speakers be more discreet in their boys will be boys shenanigans, and not get caught. Oh well.
I haven’the researched the corruption data in Nebraska, and I don’t remember how George Norcross convinced his fellow citizens to morph into a single legislative body, but I think time and resources are better spent in voting the devil’s you see out.
Besides David doesn’t live here any more.
How were those past campaigns successful and what best practices can you advise us to consider? Is this an effort you’re willing to participate in with your own activism and who you campaign with/for?
For one thing, reducing the size of the House, which has been done a few times, is not the same thing as eliminating one of the legislative chambers, which Bernstein’s article proposes and which strikes me as possibly a more effective response to some of the apparently intractable problems we have.
…than a complete overhaul of the state government.
“Is this an effort you’re willing to participate in with your own activism and who you campaign with/for?”
Not fair, and irrelevant as to whether her ideas are valid. (And none of your business.)
She mentioned in passing a grassroots campaign to get Keverian elected, which happened a few years before I was born, and she didn’t provide details on how this worked and how it could be replicated today. I think the climate is entirely different now and it’s a much harder task. But I’d like to learn more.
Keverian kept his promise, government was open and accountable; and there was total chaos in the House. The result was that Charlie Flaherty was elected as Speaker in 1991, specifically to reestablish autocratic and nontransparent rule over the Body.
There are issues of whose ox is gored, here, “progressive” Speakers, such as Flaherty and DiMasi are supported; “conservatives” like Finneran and DeLeo are demonized.
And no one does squat on the ground…
How did open government lead to chaos? If model congresses and student government in my experience can have both order and openness surely the General Court can.
… and political absolutism, with little knowledge of, and less concern about, the compromise, log rolling, conniving (and hardball) that goes into successful legislating.
Furthermore, in those days, there was more overlap between activists and District electorates, which meant that any deviation from proposed legislative action was monitored, with the potential for punishment by organized electorates.
Nor were there any sanctions against prima donnas in the Body, which resulted in further chaos in the House.
If one wants to to extend the old metaphor (and Bismark misquote) about laws and sausages, the activists were vegans.
Rank and file reps needed (and still need) a designated villain to insure the flow of work, the privacy to achieve same, and internal sanctions against disruptive colleagues; hence autocratic House leadership and opaque process.
This is also why the progressives in the House vote for DeLeo during the Speakership election. They know where their bread is buttered.
This is why informed people who care about issues tend to tune out politics.
It isn’t that I disagree with anything you’ve written here. It seems to me that what you are saying is that “Open and transparent government causes DeLeo-style autocracy”.
Is that what you mean?
Not all of us have time or inclination to make politics and government our full-time job. It seems to me that electing people to represent us — and staying in touch with them after doing so — is our only effective mechanism for keeping our government representative.
If the disaster of our current legislature was caused by the actions of naive and misguided activists twenty-five years ago, what is the learning for informed voters today?
I remember that time fairly well, and there was plenty of chaos in the more autocratic State Senate. It’s a truism that the least transparent institution is the most productive.
Because the Senate only has forty members, the group dynamics are different Simply put William Bulger’s autocratic tendencies were limited to consolidating power, not enforcing decorum.
For all the good that did for Bill Keating in 1994…
but the line from Keverian to DeLeo is a little too pat. Keverian erred but was not some naif, he’d been McGee’s number 2, for goodness sakes.
Mostly, though, the speakers we got after K (including the incumbent) were, if anything, reversions to the mean, so if anything the House’s short-lived experiment with democracy signified zilch.
…but self-indulgent infantilism within the House membership.
There were a whole crop of newly elected reps in the House immediately prior to Keverian’s coup against McGee. People tend to forget that there was a mantra of political individualism running rampant at the time, wherein the concept of internal discipline within legislative Bodies was considered to be undemocratic.
Consider the political climate in the middle and late Eighties as a sort of political theology, with then-Senate president Wiliam Bulger as the Antichrist.
It was this, not Speaker Keverian, that led to chaos on the House side.
Keverian was in the position of a dedicated and extremely talented day care teacher that was not allowed to discipline the two year-olds in the center.
…that legislators should NOT act as individuals, accountable to their consciences and their constituents before following leadership? If so I fundamentally disagree. Office and committee assignments should not depend on being the Speaker’s pets. Also, any legislation filed, not just that which is favored by the Speaker, should be referred to and heard/marked up by the appropriate committee, and if reported out favorably voted on by the entire chamber.
Without disputing your characterization of Keverian (with which, in fact, I largely agree) and having seen your characterization of the autocratic tendencies to perpetuate in the Mass Legislature borne out by history, I’m uncertain why you characterize the legislators under Keverian as, essentially, out of control’: having seen McGee shown the door those self-same ‘two-year olds’ (one of whom was presumably Flaherty, the autocrat-in-waiting) may have been far more deliberate in their mischief-making than you allow…
Nor is it clear, that the so-called ‘chaos’ under the Keverian speakership was all that much real entropy rather than just a stark contrast with an artificial and imposed, indeed exaggerated, stability — which manner of ‘stability’, I believe, results very much from an ‘autocracy.’
The narrative, such as it is, fits snugly into justification of autocracy (not saying you’re making that argument, just saying, rather, you’re buying into its descriptive power…) ‘Things are more stable under the autocrat’ is the rallying cry of autocrats always and everywhere… and they are always willing to either create chaos or point to the stark differences as proof.
While I appreciate the historical illumination, I still struggle to connect your commentary with what our best path forward is today.
What do you propose that progressive Massachusetts Democrats do in 2017?
One of those little irritations in my life is that we as citizens have ceded too much power to outside structures – the fact that many of those structures operate with the best intentions is moot – to the detriment of community-accountable grassroots politics.
Over the past forty years, structured Party organisms have been allowed to wither on the vine, the result (in my opinion) is a tendency to govern by abstraction. Corollary to this is a tendency to think of electioneering as synonymous with marketing. A direct result of this was the shifting of resources from permanent, locally-based, volunteer-staffed field organizations to media operations and paid operatives.
The elite political wisdom at the time of Keverian’s Speakership was that there was no need for Party-centric grassroots structures; that elected officials should govern as individuals, with power bases comprised of organized advocacy groups reinforced by media buys. It was this cultural corruption that created chaos in the House. In this context I use the word “corruption” in the software sense, not morally or legally.
The result of this was an elitist culture that soon morphed into class bigotry. It is no coincidence (as the commies used to say) that the first systematic privatization of State services in the Commonwealth occurred in human services, particularly in mental health. We are in something close to a zero-sum game, where average citizens have little to no knowledge of the politics and personalities that are in play on local, state, and national levels.
A first start for progressives would be to get adequate information about the actual dynamics of state politics. THis would require a division of labor, wherein folks who know the actual internal dynamics can obtain accurate information about (for example) the chances of a given bill getting out of committee and why. This requires the ability to relate to the worker bees on various staffs, and the sense to keep confidences when necessary.
Thus, political approached can be premised upon real-world dynamics, not infantile morality plays. for example, it would not hurt to have people capable of reading the text of a bill and analyzing line items and translating same into understandable English. (A good source for the latter is the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.)
On the ground, we have to come to terms with the facts that the most credible surrogates for issues and candidates are neighbors and other folks who can establish organic ties to voters. These are the people who need to be recruited and nurtured for successful progressive politics.
In particular folks have to understand the difference between mobilizing and organizing.
As a class, progressives are competent mobilizers, but crappy organizers; in fact I’ll take that one step further: As organizers, progressives often default to Orange Hatting, and thus operate as right-wing outreach mechanisms.
So, as a first step, I would suggest taking the time to ask people outside of one’s geographic and social comfort zones what they think the problems are. If a congruence of interest exists, allow the locals to organize each other.
At the local level in, for example Boston, all development has to go through zoning. It never hurts to get on the mailing list for the Zoning board of Appeals.
The same goes for city council/town meetings. One can empower people by providing access to public notices in a timely matter. “Timely” is defined as before the fix is in. Most local and State policy information can be obtained – either directly – or indirectly (through developing relationships) .
Back to the Legislature. The prime duty of Leadership (as perceived by rank and file) is to protect incumbents. That, not abstract political beliefs, is what all the post-Keverian Speakers had in common.
Most campaigns I’ve been involved with organize down to ward and precinct, but I suspect that you would be hard pressed to find people other than the likes of us who even know which ward and precinct they live in, let alone who the members of their local partisan committees are. There’s also a stigma to that kind of organizing in a way that’s too permanent. It conjures up images of ward bosses, party machines, smoke-filled rooms, and corruption (and I DO mean in the legal and moral sense).
Actually serious grassroots organizing is quite doable and more cost-effective than a modern media-driven campaign.
It is, however, labor-intensive, and much of the work can be boring. A lot of my activist acquaintances are boring-averse, preferring the rush they get from rallies. And they wonder why they lose…
There are some important preconditions:
1.) The preliminary outreach is best done early, because such organizations have to be structured as permanently-functioning self-sufficient entities.
2.) There must be both an internal and external social component to the organizing. To the degree that these groups are successful there must be bonding within the group itself, and between the group and the community it serves. (Examples range from the donuts and pastry available to volunteers to ward, town or county Democratic picnics.)
3.) For field work, whenever possible, it’s best to recruit from within. People who actually live in a given area tend to be better acquainted with the facts on the ground than outside operatives (the latter tend to fall in love with their models). There is a real wisdom-of-crowds dynamic that is a force multiplier when qualified locals organize their own neighborhoods and run their own GOTV.
4.) Outsiders doing phone banking and canvassing is usually counterproductive. Just as it is, shall we say, unwise for Massachusetts progressives to phone bank in Georgia elections, the cultural dissonance between activist and mainstream cultures can create … unproductive results.
5.) One of the most stupid aspects of modern Democratic campaigning is their tendency to overtarget electorates, creating ever smaller contact universes. This is the antithesis of Party-building because there is no-reach-out-and-touch mechanism to engage potential supporters. Hence, warm bodies reaching out to their neighbors in saturation canvasses (in addition to being scalable – there are a hell of a lot of neighborhoods) are good long and mid-term approaches to building active constituencies.
The issue is not to “shift” civic culture, but to reinforce it.
6 6’s
I think too many progressives assume that being progressive is the enlightened default and once someone knows that rep A doesn’t vote progressive the voters will be eager to send him or her packing. That isn’t how it works at all.
People have local issues relevant to their lives they want advocates for.
Canvassing now to find out what those issues are will give progressives a much better footing going into 2018. For our ballot questions, our statewide candidates, and for legislative primaries. PA progressives are already doing this to find out why nominally Democratic strongholds were attracted to Trump. They are just gathering data and having conversations without judging the people whose answers they take down. We should do that here.
Some local examples I’m familiar with:
Toomey lost this time around because his district had changed and while his voting record had changed to suit it-a lot of newcomers didn’t know who he was while they had met Mike through the Bernie campaign and through local Cambridge/Somerville issues Mike had been active on the last few years. Mike raised more money, worked it harder, and was rewarded for it.
Kim Maxwell did very well in the precincts in her district outside of Fitchburg where people appreciated that she campaigned there. This black social democrat won some Trump voters using this method. Where she failed was really getting any votes from incumbent Steve Hay in Fitchburg itself where Hay had been a popular city councilor and was perceived to have done a decent job in his few months as state rep. She lost many of her own voters from the special to him in the second primary now that it wasn’t an open seat. It may she been smarter for her to wait until 2018 after Hay had more time to court controversy and while building her own local brand/network as Mike did after he lost to Toomey in 2010.
Those are just two primaries I am familiar with. For a ballot question-once we uncoupled CPA from wonky jargon and called it “money for parks” we could connect this abstract policy a lot of progressive actors in the community wanted to a direct local need the community wanted. Connecting the ideological goal to a local need is crucial.
which I put in quotes because it’s a stronger word than I want, but can’t think of something better:
Your way sounds like you want to follow rather than lead. I prefer to persuade, though framing is something worth massaging.
Also, getting people responsive to canvassing like this is exactly what I think requires a cultural shift at least in my experience. I personally am not comfortable doing traditional canvassing DURING an election season primarily because so often I get the vibe that people would prefer I not be there, that I am intruding on their personal time and space. I can’t imagine being more successful or welcomed during times people expect a break from politics. I would LOVE nothing more than having such an active civic culture that if people went a week without a knock on the door they would wonder if they had been forgotten, but that’s not what I see. What I see is either people would like to keep to themselves OR they are so opinionated that they will chew you out at the first opportunity.
If not, here’s a working definition:
There is also the kissing cousin concept of discovery:
In real world politics this can be summed up as finding out and understanding voters’ priorities (and the intensity thereof) and addressing them in an honest, organized and competent fashion that benefits your candidate or your issue.
Modern progressive organizations are conspicuously incompetent at both.
For both field intelligence and issue/candidate outreach one needs accurate information about both the priorities and personal issues perceived by individual voters. Both are best known by those voters’ friends and neighbors. For example, canvassers are best received if they are from the same neighborhoods as the people they canvass; or failing that, can establish an organic tie to the voter by shared cultural experience.
The same applies to phone banking.
If, on the other hand, canvassers are selected from a pool of folks that know nothing about the communities in which they work; if they condescend to voters in those communities by (wrongly) presuming a lack of civic culture; and if canvassers are incapable of dealing with disagreement – or indifference – on the ground, those canvassers should get the hell out of field work.
In this business, Christopher, the messenger is arguably more important than the message.
Mantras about framing notwithstanding, progressives aren’t all that good at messaging to folks outside preexisting ideologically-similar white upper middle class demographies.
Thus they need to enlist and empower locals.
On the separate issue of “leadership”, you should be reminded that the ultimate goal of an organizer should be to put himself out of business.
…and a certain amount of solicitation of feedback is appropriate, but what what has always bothered me about your argument is that it sounds so darn parochial, and if correct is antithetical to both my wishes and assumptions. I’m probably biased because of my academic background. I hold a master’s degree in political management with a concentration in campaign management. That and other trainings I have been through I should be able to put to use anywhere in the country, but you make it sound like my degree is only worth anything in my own state and district in which case I want my money back. Maybe that’s another part of the culture that needs to change. If someone calls me about a candidate I could not care less if the person has a southern accent, though I will probably chuckle a bit at and politely correct any easily-made errors in pronouncing certain municipal names in our state.
Wish I had thought of the vegan label
n/t
If anyone is interested, here is an old Kevarian profile from Commonwealth.
Thanks for finding this.
In the early days representation was by town, but each down got different numbers of representatives based on the population thereof.
240 was the number from the mid-19th century until 1978, when it went down to 160. Before 240 was agreed upon, each town got a number of representatives proportional to its population — at one point in the 1830’s, there were more than 600 of them. Now that would be a budget debate.
I went from original to current, without taking into account the intervening changes. I do not remember the change in 1857.
cities and towns, not 240.
…but as HP confirms above the House membership was 240 for several decades.
Gosnold has like 60 people. You’d need 20 or 30 thousand state reps to give Gosnold its own seat.
Before 1857, each town had at least one rep. After that, the number of reps was fixed at 240, so it was no longer true that each town had one.
Per the 1964 Reynolds v. Sims ruling, State Legislative districts have to be to roughly equal population.
for the 14th Amendment!
I see nothing in the equal protection of the laws clause, especially when you consider the context in which it was written, as requiring equal districts. By the same logic that says the federal Congress has one chamber by population and the other equal by state, states themselves should be able to have, say, one chamber by population and one by county.
…and I fundamentally disagree.
I said the former membership was 240 meaning immediately before it was 160, but then made a reference to “in the early days” (ie even further back historically than 240). As for Gosnold, it would get one rep under that system for the same reason a couple of states get US House representation despite not achieving the population standard of congressional districts. Back then when towns were smaller, towns with up to 150 “ratable polls” (which I think means white men with a certain amount of property) got a representative with higher numbers getting progressively higher numbers of representatives.
Meant to uprate.
…that neither chamber of the General Court is a House of Lords (in reference to that safe space for nobility swipe). Both are elected with the only difference being size of district. Generally speaking the most logical reason for two chambers is for two different representational models, but SCOTUS nixed that a few decades ago (overreaching IMO). We obviously need a legislature, so I would look to best practices from other states and push for reforms.
as it should, so let’s lower the number of our elected representatives?
I’m always wary of proposals that dilute representation and the political power of voters. People that say Town Meeting doesn’t work well. Let’s get rid of it.
Judy suggests a political solution. How about frustrated progressives doing to state reps and senators what people have been doing to congress people and senators?
Between two chambers-one that’s run like an autocracy and the smaller “elitist” chamber having more transparent and democratic governance. I say term limits are an easier way to encourage more frequent open seats and decrease the power leadership and individual legislators acrrue. That reform and a new primary voting method worked for California. We’ll see if ranked choice can pass and if it will help here.
Only 22 primaries were contested last year and only two were successful. This is appalling and really an indictment of the moribund local civic culture of this state. Mike Connolly, one of the two winners, is working with local progressives to model his race. Another friend who runs MA DFA and another in Our Revolution say a record number of candidates may run. So we will see-I say both/and. Put term limits on the ballot and run record primary challengers and you’ll light a fire under their asses. Otherwise I’m inclined to agree with the skeptics that It doesn’t matter how large the chamber or how many reps there are if people don’t pay attention, don’t vote, and don’t hold their elected officials accountable.
As the saying goes, we have term limits – they’re called elections. If voters want change someone needs to step up, but those same voters should be allowed to return legislators who are doing a good job. Not to mention that politics is the only profession where some see experience as a negative, which has always greatly annoyed me.
It’s broken at the state level. The reality is voters don’t bother with downballot races and they’ve only become less competitive as HP points out in the last few decades. One party rule is part of the problem, but good luck getting the Republicans to truly create a compelling local platform and if you want to start a third party god bless you. Now yours truly will happily spend the rest of his adult life teaching new voters to be engaged-but reforms that encourage more frequent, more competitive, more open seats are good ones. And term limits are just one way to level the playing field and make the members truly equal and not dependent on leadership for guidance or sinecure. It’s also the easiest to understand and easiest to pass.
It’s got downsides like any changes-and we can learn from the failures as well as the successes of California. The successes are younger, more women, more minority legislators and far weaker speakership spreading power around. Partisanship goes up-which around here would be a good thing if it’s liberal partisanship and more bills are passed more efficiently. The downsides is staff and outside lobbyists have more influence on the process since they have more experience writing the bills. The authors of the study suggested a 14 year limit on total legislative service rather than particular term limits which may be a better way to go.
In my view, the damage caused by forcing top-notch legislators like Denise Provost to leave office is FAR worse than the damage wrought by folks like Colleen Garry.
Massachusetts is a one-party state because the Massachusetts GOP died a self-inflicted but natural death decades ago. Forcing Democrats to step down because too many of them are actually Republicans is, in my view, the wrong answer.
I agree with Christopher — the better answer, to me, is to primary bad reps or to run against them. If need be, hijack the dead GOP apparatus (after all, Mr. Trump showed one way to do it) to run a candidate as a member of the GOP.
I think one approach that we haven’t tried yet here in MA is to actually investigate, prosecute, and convict corrupt legislators even if they are Democrats. Now THERE’s a novel idea.
Seriously, though, I wonder how hard it would be to put some teeth into the carrots and sticks available to the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
Perhaps if our brand actually meant something, we might find more seats opening up and greater voter interest.
And Somerville is probably one of the few communities blessed with greatness local and state legislative leadership across the board-and it’s the kind of involved district where primaries actually happen and being a progressive matters to voters. Even Cambridge can’t hold a candle to Somerville on this front.
But we shouldn’t base statewide policy on outliers-I would argue Provost would be far more effective in a body that had weaker leadership and more frequent turnover. And these limits would probably lead to more Republicans in the short term in those more conservative districts-but that’s accelerating a good trend.
I’m not necessarily in favor of it-but I would definitely put it on the ballot and I think you’d see the abuses with Speaker term limits and salaries end pretty darn quick. The referendum process is one of the few sticks voters have in this state-the threat of one ended the Olympic bid and the threat of term limits could be the stick the chamber needs to reform itself.
But definitely Somerville is a model for other communities in terms of how active its ward and town committees are and how competitive it’s legislative primaries can get.
We haven’t been clear about how long the term limits are that we’re contemplating. Ms. Provost took office in 2006. I suspect, under most of the proposals, that she would not be an effective legislator today because she would have already been forced to step down.
I hear you about basing policy on outliers. At the same time, I think I can make an argument that Mr. DeLeo is himself another outlier.
I’d like us to find a way to rid ourselves of the bad apples while not forcing our best once-in-a-lifetime officials to step down while they are still effective.
I fear this is a prescription for mediocrity. We see something similar in classrooms, by the way. Too many times in too many schools the handful of truly gifted students are unable to achieve their full potential because the school and classroom policy and culture is more focused on the mid-range students (and on dealing with the under-achievers).
That’s the amount the California committee recommended to reform their system which is currently 4 terms or 8 total years in either house (whichever comes first). Raising it to 14 is reasonable-it’s almost twice as long as a president and 1.4 times the average time an American spends at the same job.
Provost was only elected to the House in the first place thanks to one of those “musical chair” special elections after Jehlen won a special senate race. And she had to wait a bit of time to move up to that seat. Those races could be ensured to happen in more districts across the state every cycle. And like Jerry Brown in California existing incumbents would be grandfathered in. So the clock would start with the first election after its adoption.
I’m open to counter arguments-but they have to be proposals that have similar immediate impacts on changing the culture of the House. I might not vote for this but I’d love to see it make the ballot and light a fire under their asses.
…when I ceased to work in the legislature a dozen years ago, the GOP caucus was 16 – not enough to force a roll call vote. In exchange for some support on various matters, DiMasi changed it from 20 members to 1/10 of the membership (which is why I feel badly for Brad Jones from time to time, as he is criticized for votes taken, things not opposed, etc. He didn’t have much of a choice).
Now, it is double that and rising. The moribundity of the MASS Republicans, who have more effectively distanced themselves from Trump than Dubya has turned around some.
To the response ‘well those conservative Democrats represent more conservative districts’ I say let them send Republicans. The caucus could double and it would still be an effective majority-but now the conservatives within that majority would face real pressure from the progressives. As is-the progressive caucus needs to start working with the Republican caucus to outflank the majority on procedural issues.
It also worth noting that Geoff Diehl was the first, and for awhile, only legislator with the cajones to put Olympic funding on the ballot. I’ll never vote for him and disagree with him on 90% of the issues-but he showed the value of what a single member can do when they aren’t afraid of rocking the boat.
“How about frustrated progressives doing to state reps and senators what people have been doing to congress people and senators?”
Exactly! They would be utterly shocked and would be responsive. It’s the lazy way out to blame the legislature. It’s our fault.
If we don’t support legislators that voted for pay raises and ending term limits that’s an awfully small list of who’s left. For every hack like Miceli there is a progressive like Kaufman guilty of the same behavior. And he can point to the amendment on the ballot as an accomplishment to justify it. Smizik got a climate change committee (that has yet to meet). I can respect their transparency. Connolly won his primary vowing to end perks and restore term limits and he’s giving back his raise. Also the voters aren’t the ones who turned their back on clean elections or term limits. They did their part and got ignored.
would have fewer lawmakers in it. It could be any size, say, 200, which is the total number of legislators now.
The problem, it seems to me, is not the number of legislative bodies, but the amount of power that has accumulated into a single person. I’m not sure how reducing the number of those who get to be in the room where it happens from three to two helps with transparency, good governance, or anything else. Getting rid of conference committees is great, but if the Speaker controls everything and gets his way every time, then we’ve not really solved the problem.
Why, you might as well abolish the MBTA!
Read this yesterday. It seems relevant in light of this thread.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Democracy-for-Realists.pdf
They literally wrote the textbook my Electoral Politics class relied on (interestingly 538 just got started and Silver was a guest lecturer which was cool-though his work is greatly indebted to them). Wang has also written extensively on this work, showing how oligarchic our system actually is. Aaron and Bartels make a great point that our system is designed for an era of far greater civic involvement thet depends on an upper middle class big enough to be involved in communal life.
I’m reading a great book called Glass House which is a personal history of a Rust Belt community rocked not by global trade but by shareholder value and the stratification of classes into segregated communities. The kind of Burkean/Jeffersonian vision of yeoman farmers and the merchant class working together in common at the local level was strong right through the 1970’s when it began to fall apart.
How can we expect communities with opioid epidemics and high male unemployment to have a healthy civic culture? So much of our eroding civic culture can be directly traced to income inequality. One of the reasons social conservatives like Murray like basic income is its potential to give civic culture a shot in the arm. This certainly happened where it’s been tried in Kenya and Manitoba-we will have to see how it works on a wider scale.
Locally, I think the barrier to entry to run for office is exceedingly high in terms of finances and making the right connections. Having worked with several challengers last cycle at the local level I am quite discouraged that hoping primaries or elections can get us out of this mess alone is a viable strategy.
We either need some lefty ALEC with big donors to really start aggressively funding and recruiting local primary challengers or hope that our local grassroots web can work this out. It’s a decades long process to make our statehouse progressive and I fear we don’t have enough time. The worse income inequality gets the more likely Trump like candidates will get elected even in this state. Look at Bristol and Worcester County and tell me that progressive democrats are holding back the tide-you can’t. Even your own hometown has become Trumpier and feels alienated from Beacon Hill.
Like the Olympics-term limits are the rare tripartisan issue that would get a broad cross section of Commonwealth voters active and excited about changing the culture of Beacon Hill. It’ll send a message and hopefully incentivize the leadership to get its act together.
we have unreasonably high expectations for democracy, expectations that American democracy has never and will never meet.
Term limits are a bad solution to a frustrating, but expected, situation. They have deprofessionalized more than one state legislature and opened the door for lobbyists to write legislation and tell state reps and senators what to do.
One of the reasons that progressives don’t have power is that not enough voters in enough areas of the state are progressive. As Achen and Bartels explain, and which we have known for a while, people don’t vote on issues. They vote on identity. The vast majority of voters are low-information voters.
… this doesn’t explain how far we’ve come over such a long time. I can’t imagine that the problem of ‘low information’ and/or ‘identity’ voters has not been with us since the founding of the Republic… So the simple presence of majority low-information doesn’t explain how our democracy has evolved and is, suddenly, unworkable…
of research. I wasn’t tying to explain how our democracy has evolved and is, suddenly, unworkable.
Here’s the link to the review, which is more a review of research on democracy, than a book review. It’s worth reading.
..are perfectly well informed and know exactly what your goals and issues are, and simply disagree with you?
And of course, we are not a democracy but a republic.
Perhaps pigs fly. In the world the rest of us live in, the GOP and it’s supporters live in La La Land.
These “low information voters”:
– Don’t know that “Obamacare” and “the ACA” are the same thing
– Think that climate change is a hoax
– Think that air pollution is a hoax
We are watching an unscrupulous demagogue, liar, and fascist throw us headlong into utter chaos. Claiming that anyone who agrees with the stuff we’re talking about is “well informed” is simply an oxymoron.
The Russians either did or did not attempt to manipulate the 2016 election. The current administration either did or did not have inappropriately close — or even treasonous — ties to the Russians.
A “well informed” voter understands that these are questions of fact that are answered only by investigation.
Similarly, the science of climate change is clear and compelling. A “well-informed” voter either rejects science altogether or disagrees that climate change is a “hoax”.
We know that the new EPA is acting to destroy scientific evidence. These actions are comparable to, but even worse than, extremist Muslim factions that destroy ancient and priceless sites.
How does your speculated “perfectly well informed” voter know of these things and still support these thugs?
Perhaps, instead, today’s GOP is plunging all of us headlong into a bottomless abyss of chaos, lies, and sheer ignorance — aided an abetted by those who refuse to face the reality of what is happening all around us.
90% of voters I talked to canvassing for a special election:
-didn’t know it was happening
-didn’t know who their rep was
-didn’t know who the candidates were
Also asinine not to hold these simultaneously with the presidential/gubernatorial primary or a local race. Make it all in April like I’ll does-one thing they do better.
Asking adults in MA to identify their local legislative officials, their member of Congress, give a quick summary of each statewide office and who the officer is. Ask them what the Governors Council does. I’d bet under 5% would be able to do all of that. Most voters don’t live and breathe this stuff or even follow the news.
I think your question about the Governor’s Council is a trick question, because as far as I can tell the answer is “nothing whatsoever” — isn’t that the complaint?
I doubt very many of us can even name all the statewide offices without cheating, never mind who holds them.
Quick … no cheating … what office do the following people hold?
– John Lebeaux
– Robert Hayden
– Jolette Westbrook
The Governor’s Council confirms judges and a few other magisterial appointments, but I wouldn’t be surprised if JConway is trying to make a point with that question. As I recall he has long been anti-GC:(
I see now, these are appointees.
Yeah, I think I know the six elected ones. I would have a hard time answering the names of Ms. Polito and Mr. Galvin if asked who holds that office. The latter is particularly vexing for me because he’s been there an eternity — and I still don’t know his name.
It’s always been the case that state department heads tend to fly under the radar.
Most voters are low info and don’t self identify as progressive. This is the exact reason they can’t be trusted to vote in progressive challengers in primaries on a scale large enough to really change the culture on Beacon Hill.
The legislature is already deprofessionalized with lobbyists writing the laws and most legislators having other jobs. What voters are clamouring for film tax credits or corporate giveaways to GM? Bernstein lays out how DeLeo basically has used his perch to enrich himself and his supporters to max out his pension and retire in time to lobby. Especially since it’s unlikely investigators are going to catch up with him at this point.
Every progressive rep who voted for the pay raises and ended Speaker term limits did so to have some influence in his leadership to get their bills on the floor. Jay Kaufman explicitly cited this as reason for his vote since he advanced the progressive income tax forward. That’s just one policy it will take voters to pass since the legislature doesn’t legislate anymore.
They left marijuana policy to the voters knowing that the statewide electorate would take the heat off of them in individual districts but they absconded a key public policy role to craft a legalization regime that made sense and are now retroactively picking up the pieces and delaying the onboarding of a critical new sector of the economy in the process. But they are ready to fast track online lottery tickets.
Incumbents are routinely unopposed and routinely retained in the off chance that they are. Only two challengers in only 22 contested races across the state picked off incumbents. This basically allows a lot of people to hold a lucrative second job and get a lucrative state pension while doing little work. Term limits is the jolt the system needs-and is the only stick voters have left to wield.
It will also refresh our bench and make it more likely we have compelling candidates for governor and statewide offices. It would end the fiefdoms like Bill Galvins State Department or Dempseys Ways and Means chairmanship. It will create a move up or move our culture that will spur folks like Jamie Eldridge too cautious to risk their seat to pursue higher office the jolt they need to primary entrenched incumbents like Galvin or even primary members of Congress more frequently as outsider Seth Moulton did. This would make a far healthier democracy than the one we have and it relies on the voters literally saying yes to one piece of legislation. Those musical chairs that happen with special elections could happen regularly in every district across the state every 4-8.
The problems, we agree on. The solution, however, doesn’t follow as far as I can see. I can’t see a link inherent from the problems to the solution. And no consideration of unintended questions.
We have a political problem you suggest solving with a structural, unconstitutional change. That’s not necessarily bad, but what about a political solution? Political pressure on elected reps? Progressives could dog them, push for term limits for the speaker. Progressives could push for a non-binding resolution that I’m sure much of the GOP would join. There are probably laws that would could be changed make it easier to run as well. And as Petr suggests, we’ve made a lot of progress in this state with the existing system.
Citing the California model.
Pro: younger, more diverse legislature
Con: more partisan (don’t see that happening here), overly reliant on staff and lobbyists to craft legislature and unlikely to defy a Governor (how’s that really all that different from today?)
Voters have tried campaign finance reform in the past, Speakers have pledged to follow and broken term limits in the pass, they just gave themselves a huge raise while gutting what’s left of the T. And literally 1% of them lost to a primary challenger, and only 20% of them had either a primary or general contender. I wouldn’t call the status quo healthy.
To Toms point a max lifelong service of 14 years in either house is ample time for someone to make a difference without it becoming a living. If they accept term limits I’d be willing to raise their salaries.
to the ball game.
…inherently or intrinsically a pro? Seems to me demographic make-up should take a back seat to political compatibility with one’s constituents.
“One of the reasons that progressives don’t have power is that not enough voters in enough areas of the state are progressive. “
The people can pass this via a constitutional amendment just like next years progressive tax and ranked choice reform (which I also support).
in 1994 by ballot initiative and the SJC ruled it unconstitutional?
what issue are we talking about that was ruled unconstitutional?
And Mark is correct-though I do not believe that particular referendum was written as a constitutional amendment. And sorry for hijacking the thread HP-my digression on term limits became a wider topic in its own right. Bernstein’s original piece still has a lot of merit both in its analysis of the present dysfunction and his radical solution of unicameralism to solve it.
I’m too obsessed with Russia to focus on anything else.
One we’re all grateful for. And I appreciate HP for her deligence on state level issues which often get overlooked during these strange times.
HP rocks.
It’s been fascinating to see some of your more speculative sections become confirmed as new information is leaked and attained by the mainstream press. There are a lot of great security insiders on twitter and the broader net I follow because you introduced them to me-and they are getting the inside scoop. It’s a real issue-this isn’t Troopergate. It’s real. And scary.
I’d be inclined to defend them on, say, the marijuana vote. There’s no way to really decide without considering your personal situation. So instead of trying to gauge that, and your district, why not throw it to referendum? It’s not like that’s a bad thing.
There are certain built-in gaps in accountability though. They said last year that:
1. They wouldn’t raise taxes.
2. They wouldn’t cut local aid.
… a two-fer which essentially protects every current member. They should have to explain their cuts, or their tax increases, or whatever they do.
I think if you’re going to make the argument that important policies shouldn’t be left up to the voters than you should have the courage to address them. Many No on 4 people like Sen. Lewis made that argument, and make it today to justify delaying the will of the voters. Jehlen and Rogers took the political risk to put together a policy their colleagues didn’t even hold a vote or a hearing on. I’m actually with referendum critics that they are a poor substitute for an informed legislature making good decisions-ours is uninformed and largely unwilling to take risks which forces our hands to legislate at the polls.
Similarly, they can get away with the two fer since there isn’t any external pressure that forces them to choose. Trump got away with this right until last week-the media does a lousy job covering policy and most voters lack the fundamental analytical skills to consider these questions with the thoroughness they require. But when faced with reality, of course you can’t cover everyone while cutting them at the same time.
There’s no policy silver bullet for reviving a moribund civic culture. So Bernstein’s proposal is DOA since voters don’t understand it and it’s likely the same character of legislator will find a way to persist in his model anyway.
Term limits have a good effect on increasing competitive elections and reducing the power of legislative leadership. The trade offs are more short term budgeting, short term policymaking more broadly, more empowered staffers and lobbyists, and more empowered executives and agency heads. I think having a debate to consider those tradeoffs is worth it-and I think it would force legislators to defend their records the way their lack of primary and general election challengers precludes at present.
…titled Against Democracy by Jason Brennan. He argues that democracy should be replaced by epistocracy (rule by the knowledgeable) because the vast majority of voters don’t know what they are doing. His standard for good governance is competency and good outcomes, but at least the latter is subject to some opinion. Try as he might he’s not completely successful in keeping his libertarian preferences out of the way. He ignores what to me are basic principles such as no taxation without representation and just powers being derived from the consent of the governed. (He also goes into a whole thing about how it can’t truly be our individual consent if we vote with the losing side.) I am sympathetic to some of his diagnoses, but agree with almost none of his suggestions. He wants to greatly restrict the franchise because to him the same logic that requires certain professions to be licensed applies to voting. The closest I would ever come to qualifying voters this way is to require the same test of natural born citizens that we do of naturalized citizens. There is also the issue of the efficacy of the vote and it seems pretty clear he has never done a field or GOTV operation. In many ways he sounds like he takes all the excuses one gives for not voting, gives them a scientific veneer, and converts those excuses into reasons some people shouldn’t vote. Many of the arguments he makes are similar to ones I would make about our being a republic rather than a democracy, but he seems to forget we have checks and balances to curb the worst excesses even of majority rule. I think things like campaign finance reform, districting reform, and civics education would go a long way toward alleviating some of his concerns.
Mandatory voting on a Monday America takes off. And I’d make passing the citizenship test immigrants pass a graduation requirement we take as seriously as the MCAS. It’ll shift the schools focus to create real civics courses geared toward graduating active citizens.
Digression-but I’m really excited to be potentially teaching a new civics curriculum next fall. It’s called Civics in Action and it combines community organizing training with a step by step approach to civics. Kinda an outside in/learn by doing approach. The school I’ve applied to is 90% African American who are exactly the students we should be targeting with this. Also you should totally put that teachers license to use Christopher-we disagree on a few minor questions but I’ve never doubted your knowledge or passion for politics.
Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders, by far the best book I know about community organizing. Not coincidentally, it explains what’s wrong with trying to organize around something like abolishing the House of Representatives.
I’m glad that at least one school system is putting civics back into the curriculum.
I have long felt (ever since my 11th grade history class, actually) that we teach history exactly backwards, teaching it chronologically from oldest to newest. The result is to make it virtually irrelevant to students, while obscuring the very real and profound role that history plays each and every day.
I suggest that we instead teach “reverse history”. Start with some current event, perhaps of the student’s own choosing. Use that event as a context to research and explore the historical events that lead to the current event. For each of those, research and explore the history of THAT event.
The result is that the student traverses the universe of “history” in a context that helps the student appreciate why the events of so long ago are still relevant. The student begins with a single current event, and uses that to trace and thus reveal to the student the rich network of interconnecting themes and issues of “history”.
It seems to me that, for example, the current controversies over network privacy rules and surveillance are clarified by understanding the abuses of the cold-war Soviet bloc, as well as our own US counterparts. Those lead to an exploration of the many first-amendment controversies that came up during the 1960s and 1970s. It is difficult to appreciate the role of Breitbart and Steve Bannon without the context of the American Nazi party and its marches, George Lincoln Rockwell, and so on. All that sets a frame for understanding how the First Amendment came to be — from that comes an appreciation for the role played by the Constitution, and from THAT comes an appreciation of the Magna Carta.
Understanding how the current conflict between the personality cult of Donald Trump and the demagoguery of today’s GOP and those of us who passionately revere the rule of law is greatly enhanced by an approach to history that encourages students do discover how this conflict has been playing out for thousands of years.
I suggest that a key element that each of you (James and Christopher) can and should bring to the classroom is passion for such material, passion for the issues it raises, and passion about the importance of connecting students — especially young minority students — to all this.
My sense is that all too often the effect — even if not the intent — of current school systems (especially public school systems) is to quash such passion.
I only just read this, but the class I taught Wednesday organically went in this direction. I started with Loving and went chronologically through the relevant privacy and marriage rights cases that eventually established the federal right to same sex marriage in Obergefell, but the students in the group discussion naturally kept looking at it from the present backward as they applied the relevant precedents and were more engaged when I presented this issues as active decisions they could side on (we did mock votes).
. . . that holds up the Boston City Council as a positive example.
I think the analysis of what’s broken is on point. I don’t think he really fleshes out the way his solution would be implemented. Joining a third party or passing a small property tax surcharge are far less complex to explain to voters in comparison 😉
And thanks for the book recommendation-always in the market for good ones!
Managing the Massachusetts House of Representatives is like herding sheep. Maybe if we bring the membership back up to 240 representatives (it was reduced to 160 in 1978), it will be more like herding cats, a legislative improvement.