House seeking 60-day limit to put 'pressure' on committees

Yahoo

21-02-2025

BOSTON (SHNS) – Top House Democrats hope to avoid another end-of-session 'logjam' by overhauling how joint committees operate, they told reporters Thursday, with an eye toward shifting decisions to the committee chairs, moving more bills on a faster timeline, and shying away from omnibus-style legislating.
House Speaker Ronald Mariano acknowledged two trends that have generated frustration among the rank and file in recent years when he and Majority Leader Michael Moran spoke to the press after sharing a brief summary of their 2025-2026 rules proposal. The Quincy Democrat said the ideas are meant to address the centralization of power at the top of each chamber and the move towards mega-bills packed with a variety of policies.
The full text of the draft rules is set to be filed Monday, the speaker's office said, ahead of debate at Tuesday's formal session.
Joint committees would have just 60 days to consider the fate of a bill after giving it a hearing, and would not be able to seek bill extensions past March of the term's second year. Joint committees often send a bill for a layover in the House or Senate Ways and Means Committee, from which it may not emerge by the end of the term. Ways and Means committees would not be subject to the same 60-day clock.
The House's tweaks follow the Senate's Feb. 13 proposal which also addressed committee work and transparency-related measures.
It's 'all in an attempt to kind of push things through the process and stop some of the logjam,' Moran said Thursday in the corridor outside the speaker's office.
The proposal would effectively scrap the so-called Joint Rule 10 Day deadline that committees have faced for years as a blanket target for shipping out legislation. For timely-filed bills heard in the spring of Year 1, committees currently have nearly a year — until February of Year 2 — to recommend passage or rejection.
Under the Mariano-Moran proposal, committees would have 60 days from holding a hearing on a bill to take action on it, with a possible 30-day extension. Committees would have rolling deadlines based on their hearing schedules and the newly-established March date would be what Mariano called a 'drop-dead date.'
The March date would come into play for the final bills that don't get heard until later in the session, and for late-filed petitions. Senators also voted to adjust the committee-reporting deadline, proposing to move the current Joint Rule 10 deadline two months earlier, to December of Year 1.
The speaker said the House's proposed move would result in devolving more responsibility to the committee level.
'My feeling is, by keeping this deadline of 60 days, we put pressure on our chairmen,' Mariano said. 'We want our chairmen to make decisions [about] what bills are going to come up, what bills are important. This is to empower the members and have them involved in the decision-making, rather than taking it all out of the speaker's office. And now it goes back into the chairmen's bailiwick.'
The speaker's office did not publish a complete draft of the rules proposals being teed up for debate Tuesday, but did provide a topline summary of some reforms that Democrats plan to bring to the floor.
Under the 'new setup,' they said, the committee co-chairs' offices would handle preparation of bill summaries, a departure from the Senate's proposal that bill sponsors file summaries alongside their legislation. House staff would handle the summaries for the House bills, and the Senate co-chair's staff would compose the Senate bill summaries.
'We're not going to have members do it, because members are going to go to the advocates, they're going to go to lobbyists. We want to make sure our members are getting accurate information from the staff,' Mariano told reporters.
After joint hearings, House and Senate co-chairs would poll the members of their own branch on their own branch's bills, similar to the approach sought by the Senate.
'So every senator that sits on a committee is now going to have to take a vote on a poll to get that Senate bill out of the committee. So we're empowering a lot of the legislators in these rules,' Moran said. 'They're going to have to respond, and they're going to have to put their best foot forward in a way that they hadn't before. But since I've been here, this is a big change in the rules.'
And there is a focus on attendance at hearings. Under the proposal, representatives and senators would only be able to participate in committee hearings physically at the State House. Remote participation would still be allowed for members of the public.
Lawmakers' committee votes would be posted online — something long sought by transparency advocates — published along with their attendance record for participation in hearings. The 30 or so joint committees often schedule hearings at conflicting times.
The proposal to publish how each lawmaker votes on committee polls, key decisions on whether bills advance in the legislative process or stall out, reflects a major shift for House Democrats. For several terms, the Senate has sought to require joint committees to make clear how lawmakers vote in internal polls.
The speaker told reporters he was aiming to have the 194th General Court feature more individual bills and less omnibus legislation.
'One of the things that was frustrating last July was the bills were too big,' Mariano said. 'And if you take my health care stuff, I was trying to negotiate a hospital bill with a pharmacy bill. It just didn't work. So what we want to do is we want to keep these things moving so that there's no temptation to sort of pile them all into one big bill and get it through at the end. We're hoping that we can deal with these things as they come up.'
In recent terms, the July 31 end of formal business has evolved into all-night wait-and-see sessions as negotiators struggle to reach agreement on mammoth omnibus bills. Last year, lawmakers were unable to strike agreements by the July 31 deadline on a number of large bills including packages on hospital oversight, prescription drug pricing, the long-term care industry, economic development, the opioid crisis, and clean energy siting and climate policy.
Later on in the availability, the Quincy Democrat repeated: 'The bills are getting too big.'
The draft rules are a work in progress. As of now, there is no change to the July 31 end of formal sessions, something which is set by the rules and not by the Constitution or statute. Mariano said that is currently under discussion and could be subject to change before Monday.
'I guess for the first time in a while, there's some agreement and understanding between us and the Senate that we want to make some changes,' Mariano said, adding that he was 'cautiously optimistic' about advancing areas of common ground with the Senate.
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