Mass. House leaders will move to make committee votes public, vow a ‘more accessible' Legislature

Boston Globe

20-02-2025

Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, indicated the House is ready to adopt
similar
changes as the Senate. Both
The House, for example, will propose posting online the votes cast by individual lawmakers on legislation in joint committees, a change the
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The House is also seeking to require that lawmakers must be physically present for committee hearings, which would reverse a practice embraced during the pandemic to allow lawmakers to participate remotely. The House rule package would also provide a public record of lawmakers' 'hearing attendance' in joint committees, in effect giving voters insight into whether their elected representatives are showing up to hear testimony on bills.
'People want to know how they're voting. We want to know who's there,' Mariano told reporters Thursday.
Senators often serve in leadership positions on more committees than House lawmakers, given their chamber, at 40 members, is far smaller than the 160-person House. The Senate earlier this month
also passed a rule allowing its members to vote remotely on legislation on the Senate floor, continuing a change that was adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been scrapped by the House and
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Mariano said the House will seek to require committees to produce and post online 'plain-language' summaries of all bills before
lawmakers consider the legislation during hearings.
Hearings provide a public forum for advocates and opponents to weigh in, and typically are one of the first steps in vetting legislation.
The requirement for easy-to-digest descriptions is similar to a change adopted in the Senate, which sought to have lawmakers themselves file summaries of their bills. Advocates, including the group Act on Mass, have praised that move as a 'step forward for transparency.' The Senate also adopted language requiring it to publicly post summaries of any bills reported out by the chamber's budget committee, through which most major legislation flows.
Mariano said he prefers that staff, not lawmakers, summarize legislation going through most committees because lawmakers 'are going to go to the advocates, they are going to go to lobbyists' to produce the summaries, suggesting they might not be forthright about the bill's full impact.
'We want to make sure our members are getting accurate information from their staff,' he said.
But it's unclear if another major piece of committee work — the public testimony it receives from advocates, lobbyists, and others — will be universally available outside of the four walls of the committee hearing room in which it is offered. The Senate's rules proposal would require it be made public, but Mariano said he prefers to leave that to the committee chair's discretion.
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'The intent is to, as much as possible, make as much testimony as public as we can, with [the] understanding that there are some sensitive things,' said House Majority Leader Michael Moran, a Brighton Democrat. 'You've got to be careful. Some people don't want that testimony made public for different reasons.'
The proposals, which the House is slated to vote on Tuesday, follow a session in which lawmakers
That drew scrutiny from news media, watchdog groups, and
The Legislature is not bound by the state's public records law, nor its open meeting law. State Auditor Diana DiZoglio and advocates have repeatedly criticized it as being
Mariano said DiZoglio's audit push and the calls for more transparency were not his motivation to pursue the rule changes.
He said the 'pressure' came from a desire
to avoid the crush of major bills lawmakers juggled last summer. For decades, the Legislature has operated under rule that lawmakers
wrap up formal sessions by the end of July every two years.
The Senate proposed keeping that July 31 deadline in place for some bills, but allowing lawmakers to take votes through the end of the two-year session on so-called conference committee reports. Those are agreements on major bills that are hammered out
between both chambers, usually in secret negotiations,
and are designed to reconcile differences between similar bills passed by the House and Senate.
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House leaders on Thursday didn't release details of how they, too, might change the calendar, but Mariano said they'd likely try to 'fine tune' the Senate proposal.
In a potentially major shift in practice, Mariano said he also wants to move away from
That practice means lawmakers take fewer roll call votes, which means voters have fewer opportunities to see where their elected representatives come down on specific policy proposals and thus less information to judge their performance.
In recent years, including last session, the Legislature has tended to leave many of the most complex bills to pile up at the end of its formal sessions. For many bills, that means they either
To move bills along faster, Mariano said the House will propose that committees, in most cases, must act on bills within 60 days of considering that legislation in a hearing.
Committee chairs would be allowed to request a 30-day extension.
When a bill emerges from a committee, it's not guaranteed to pass or even make it to the House floor. But the reshaped process could help more quickly narrow the list of bills that could emerge for a vote.
The 'goal,' Mariano said, is to pass more bills and fewer omnibus packages, which would require a change in practice by House leaders.
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'The bills are getting too big,' Mariano said. 'We want to keep these things moving so that there's no temptation to sort of pile them all into one big yoke and get it through in the end. We're hoping that we can deal with these things as they come up.'
Matt Stout can be reached at