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Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Cities, towns urge state to release grip on alcohol licenses
BOSTON (SHNS) – Municipal leaders clamoring for greater authority over the number of alcohol licenses available in their cities and towns once again urged lawmakers Monday to adopt reforms previously embraced by top Beacon Hill Democrats. Cities and towns currently must petition the Legislature in order to gain additional licenses, but proposals from Rep. Joseph McKenna and Sen. Jacob Oliveira (H 437 / S 279) seek to overhaul that protracted, unpredictable process by strengthening licensing authority at the local level. The existing licensing framework, with control concentrated on Beacon Hill, has been in place since the 1930s, said Massachusetts Municipal Association legislative analyst Ali DiMatteo. In the last five years, the Legislature approved more than 80 home rule petitions, creating over 265 liquor licenses across Massachusetts, she said. 'We know you share this commitment to supporting local businesses and thriving downtowns. But actions that can often feel non-controversial but time-consuming for the Legislature are worth an effort to simplify,' DiMatteo said at a committee hearing. 'Additionally, making the process more efficient can help municipal officials make more nimble and quick decisions when it comes to alcohol licensing. Local licensing authorities need to be entrusted with determining how many licenses are appropriate within their communities.' Local licensing authorities would be allowed to grant licenses for the sale of alcoholic beverages 'for on premises consumption apart from the current statutory quota limitations,' according to a House bill summary. The bill also requires that municipalities have a minimum of two off-premises consumption retail licenses, with additional licenses available for every 5,000 residents. 'It's important to note that the commonwealth will retain control over the granting of licensure through the regulatory powers of the ABCC,' DiMatteo said, referring to the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. 'But passage of H 437 and S 279 would streamline the lengthy process that exists now.' Gov. Maura Healey last session floated a proposal to enable local governments to establish their own liquor license quotas and bypass the home rule petition process, though she did not end up incorporating that reform into her proposed Municipal Empowerment Act. Senate President Karen Spilka had voiced her support for the policy, telling reporters last year she 'never understood why the Legislature approves them to begin with.' Boston gained 225 liquor licenses under a successful home rule petition last session, intended to spur economic development in 13 targeted ZIP codes, including in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and East Boston. Legislators from Boston and outside the city celebrated that law's economic development and equity benefits. Meanwhile, Cohasset's restaurant scene, including a major development project on the harbor, is hamstrung by the lack of liquor licenses, Town Manager Christopher Senior told lawmakers. He argued local officials need 'flexibility to provide licenses to locations that make local sense.' Cohasset is currently seeking five additional on-premises licenses through a home rule petition. 'We are now a victim of our own success. Every one of our 14 on-premises all alcohol licenses have been issued,' Senior testified virtually. 'We are down to the last of our four wine and beer on-premises licenses.' Oliveira, a Ludlow Democrat and one of the bill sponsors, was not allowed to testify virtually before the Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure. Rep. Tackey Chan, who was co-chairing the hearing in Room A-2, made the decision based on a House joint rules reform measure that prohibits joint committee members from participating remotely but still allows the public to testify virtually. 'Pursuant to the House rules, the chair is not recognizing committee members who are not here physically in person,' Chan said. 'As a result senator, the chair does not recognize Senator Oliveira.' Committee co-chair Sen. Pavel Payano, who said Oliveira was 'on line' and ready to testify, accused the panel of trampling on a 'sacred principle that no voice in democracy could be silenced.' Payano argued that silencing Oliveira also equated to silencing his constituents in Belchertown, Palmer, Wilbraham, Longmeadow, South Hadley, Warren, Hampden, Springfield, Granby, East Longmeadow and Ludlow. 'I think that that is a travesty,' Payano said. 'You're telling the entire community your concerns are not welcome here. This is just not a matter of procedural fairness. To me, I find it discriminatory. You know, the folks out in western Mass., it's not the same as people that are closer to Boston.' Payano then read the testimony that Oliveira had prepared to deliver. Chan, who said he understood 'there are complications for some folks,' reiterated the House stance that legislators should testify in person. The House-Senate conference committee tasked with reaching a deal on joint rules reforms has been unable to reach an agreement for weeks, and plans to meet on Thursday. The Legislature is operating under 2019 rules, which are 'silent on remote participation,' Oliveira said. Ana Vivas, spokesperson for House Speaker Ron Mariano, told the News Service that Oliveira's testimony 'has been taken into consideration.' 'It's also important to point out that the current joint rules do not expressly allow for remote participation, and have no mention on how to administer remote hearings,' Vivas said. Senate President Karen Spilka said Oliveira was meeting with child care providers in his district Monday to discuss options to lower early education costs in western Massachusetts. 'It is deeply troubling to deny any sitting legislator the opportunity to testify on their own bill,' Spilka said in a statement Monday afternoon. 'The joint rules the House and Senate mutually agreed to in January do not prohibit remote participation, and the notion that one branch's rules can bind the operations of joint committees is without merit. I can personally attest to Senator Oliveira's hard work and dedication to his district, his constituents, and the Senate. I thank him for ably serving all three this morning.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
There are three key elements of the Redemptionist reaction that especially resonate in the present. First and foremost, the rhetoric of their movement insisted that racial equality is an inherently foolish and futile pursuit due to the intractable incompetence and inferiority of people of African descent wherever they are found on the globe. In an 1867 address to Congress, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that 'Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people…wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.' Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, in the majority opinion for Williams v. Mississippi, an 1898 ruling that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination claims to the explicit text of law, declared that the Negro race 'by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies,' has 'acquired or accentuated' certain habits, temperaments, and characteristics that mark them separate from whites in their carelessness, dishonesty, docility, and lack of 'forethought.' Popularly, the banner of Black incompetence was carried by demeaning depictions in material and theatrical culture, as well as in D.W. Griffith's racist epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Reconstruction-era Black legislators as 'comically' idiotic, necessitating the violent restoration of white rule. This rhetoric is, unfortunately, resonant with today's attacks on 'DEI,' with critics insisting that efforts to recruit, incorporate, and promote Black talent in higher education, the military, and in many workplaces amount to the dangerous promotion of incompetence. President Donald Trump, for example, immediately and falsely blamed a horrific Washington, D.C. plane crash on DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration, despite no supporting evidence and overwhelming testimony to the contrary from aviation officials. Meanwhile, figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made attacking and dismantling DEI a large part of their public persona, while ignoring legitimate concerns about their unprecedented lack of qualifications for their own roles. High-profile Black leaders like former Harvard president Claudine Gay or former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., have been targeted for defamation and harassment to drive them out of their positions, similarly to Black elected officials and business leaders in the Reconstruction era. The consequence of these campaigns is a revival, from the highest offices of the land, of the Redemptionist lie that common sense should treat Black people as presumptively unfit for positions of authority or public trust. Those who believe otherwise, then, are caricatured as foolish and sentimental. These arguments frequently draw their legitimacy from pseudoscientific racism and the related idea of the backwardness of African diasporic peoples—and expand much further than politics. From Silicon Valley to the media landscape, people in positions of power are reintroducing theories of racial hierarchy under the guise of defending 'free inquiry' or 'realism.' As the Scientific American and The Guardian have documented, a network of actors is actively working to launder eugenics-era thought into legitimacy, cloaked in appeals to genetic science, meritocracy, and market rationality. From Tucker Carlson's monologues, to Elon Musk's offhand remarks about intelligence and heredity, to the administration's executive order against teaching the social construction of 'race,' a new generation of elites is reanimating the old canard that racial inequality is not the legacy of injustice but the reflection of the fundamental inequality of natural 'racial' kinds. Second, we are encouraged to feel shame because of the perversity of consequences. Whatever the good intentions of the last decade or so of racial progressivism, we are told, we have only exacerbated crime, deepened distrust, and stood in the way of economic rationality. Take, for example, the so-called 'Ferguson Effect,' the notion that protests against police brutality demoralize police and exacerbate crime. Just as the reactionary historiography of Reconstruction, led by William Dunning, cast Reconstruction as a misguided, radical experiment in Black suffrage and governance, the Ferguson effect casts protest movements like Black Lives Matter as accelerants of violence and civic decay. Both assert a kind of intuitive 'common sense' that masks deep ideological anxieties. The Dunning historians appealed to the logic of natural racial hierarchy, while proponents of the Ferguson effect draw on a racialized sense of law and order where public safety is presumed to hang precariously on police exercising sweeping authority and compelling broad deference and admiration. In both cases, dissenting scholars have had to work uphill to replace myth with measurement. As social scientists like David Pyrooz and Richard Rosenfeld have shown, the Ferguson effect—when tested across dozens of major cities—fails to reveal a coherent national trend. Rigorous studies consistently find that changes in policing behavior, while real in some places, did not drive national crime patterns, and where proactive policing declined, crime often did not rise at all. Importantly, the best accounts have not only rejected the broad claims of de-policing as a driver of crime but have also emphasized the dangers of clinging to these narratives. The fact that cities like Boston and Baltimore are currently experiencing record homicide declines undercut the notion of a generalized crime wave and affirm something protestors proclaimed: that differences in police approaches matter immensely. Another pillar of Redemptionist rhetoric is the feminization of progressive politics. From Reconstruction to the present, reactionary voices have sometimes attempted to discredit movements for racial justice by portraying their advocates—especially white women—as naïve, sentimental, meddling, and destabilizing. During the postbellum years, white female abolitionists and teachers working with freedpeople were mocked as ' nigger schoolmarms,' accused of spreading delusion and disorder, and often singled out in violent retributions. These women played a vital role in founding schools, advocating suffrage, and supporting Black citizenship, but were often cast by their critics as insubordinate, hysterical, or morally corrupting. This gendered stigma echoed through how Reconstruction itself was characterized—less a serious project of transitional justice and constitutional refounding than a crusade driven by feminine sentimentality run amok. As recent historians have shown, many white women brought genuine moral and pedagogical commitments to the work of abolition and Reconstruction, but navigated a public discourse that portrayed their efforts as irrational and disruptive. Their work, particularly in the South, became one of the earliest battlegrounds where political femininity was equated with moral overreach, excess, and social breakdown. This trope has only persisted today as figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative intellectuals have revived a strikingly similar line of attack. Writing in City Journal, National Post, and across the digital right, they framed 'wokeness' and progressive racial discourse as symptoms of what they call the 'feminization of American culture.' The rise of DEI and new norms around pedagogy, student activism, and campus protest culture is attributed to a dangerous excess of 'feminine' traits—emotionality, overprotection, inclusivity, and moralistic judgment. This narrative not only ridicules the intellectual and political work of women but also seeks to cast entire movements for justice as self-indulgent and unserious. It is an old trick: to attribute the presence of injustice not to the powerful who perpetuate it, but to the women and marginalized people who criticize it. What makes this rhetoric particularly potent is that it insists on old gender hierarchies as the norm. To understand this history is not merely to lament its repetition, but to arm ourselves with clarity. The reemergence of scientific racism, the delegitimization of Black leadership and achievement, the panic over DEI and protest, the feminization of justice—are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a coherent tradition of backlash, one that knows how to speak the language of realism and reform while advancing the cause of domination. The task, then, is not simply to refute the lies with better data, though that matters. It is to refuse the shame that seeks to make us forget what we glimpsed, however briefly, in the streets in 2020 and beyond: the possibility that this country might confront how far it is from the scale and scope of its promises, and seize upon that reckoning to remake itself. We will either find a way to remember that aspiration without apology. Or, we will watch another moment where the tentative promise of reconstruction curdles and congeals into something genuinely worthy of our collective shame. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book is
