Latest news with #MichaelMoran
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Our job is not to chase social media clicks,' House Rep. says
BOSTON (WWLP) – The House of Representatives passed its rules package on Tuesday, and they are hoping to extend traditional session deadlines and increase transparency for their branch. The House is looking to make significant changes to the structure of committees–bi-partisan and bi-cameral groups of lawmakers who determine the fate of bills. Under the new House rule, lawmakers would need to report bills out of committee on a 60-day deadline in an effort to prevent future logjams of major bills at the end of the session. Coalition for Homeless Individuals calls for budget funding The House said it also looks to publish bill summaries, submitted testimony, and committee votes, rising to calls for more transparency from the public. 'Taken as a whole, I really do believe that these changes are historic, transformative,' said Brighton Representative Michael Moran. House Republicans pushed for a rule that would force the House's compliance with an audit by the state auditor, a power newly granted to her via a November ballot question. The ballot question passed with nearly 70% voter approval, but opponents to the rule, arguing separation of powers concerns with an audit, said the voters cannot be trusted to follow the constitution. 'Our job is not to chase social media clicks. Our job is to uphold the constitution,' said Stoneham Representative Michael Day. The amendment to the rules package failed to pass, and the battle between the legislature and the auditor is continuing its trajectory towards the courts. The House and Senate will need to reach a compromise on joint rules before they take effect, with several disagreements to iron out. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Boston Globe
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Mass. House leaders will move to make committee votes public, vow a ‘more accessible' Legislature
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 Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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
