In 2017, Massachusetts legislators introduced the Safe Communities Act. This bill would have prohibited the creation of a registry of Muslim citizens and restricted the extent to which state officers could be involved with deportations. When President Trump threatened a “Muslim ban” and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, both policies were extremely unpopular among the Democrats who make up a strong majority of Massachusetts voters. Yet, according to transparency advocacy group Act on Mass, the bill floundered in committee for months before receiving a “study order”—in other words, it was left to rot. There was no record of how relevant committee members voted, nor did the “study order” ever lead to an official report. The bill died, seemingly, without cause. The Safe Communities Act is not at all unique in that regard. Medicare for all and comprehensive sex education bills, for example, have each died in committee six times in the past decade without a single publicly available vote. A 2021 study from Brown University showed that climate legislation, “despite strong public support,” consistently failed to make it out of committee.
How can that be? The answer lies in Massachusetts’ exceptionally opaque state legislature. The Commonwealth has a fundamental transparency problem due to decades of de facto one-party rule and uncompetitive elections that incentivize legislators to listen to leadership over their constituents. The newly elected state auditor, Diana DiZoglio, has proposed an audit of the legislature, but her plan will do nothing to fix these underlying issues.
In Massachusetts, the process for a bill to become a law is a little more complicated than what we learned in Schoolhouse Rock. As explained by Massachusetts Legal Services, a bill is proposed by legislators in the State House of Representatives or Senate, or by the governor directly. Legislative clerks then catalog the bill and recommend its passage to one of 33 joint committees, which include members from both chambers. Theoretically, the committees have a month to support the bill, recommend it die, or—crucially—send it to a study order. The last of these options is generally regarded as a way for legislators to quietly kill a bill without explicitly voting against it. In practice, this period goes much longer than a month, as these committees are chronically behind schedule.
Naturally, a curious constituent might want to know how their representatives vote in said committees. They will most likely, however, be out of luck. If the representative is on a House or joint committee, their votes are not legally required to be made public. Each individual committee technically gets to decide whether to publish those votes or not, but Act on Mass Organizing Director Brenna Ransden explained in an email to Brown Political Review that, “it’s unclear which (if any) committees [opt to do so,] since we don’t know which (if any) joint committees submitted their own rules this session, and those rules are not available to the public.” Moreover, committee meetings are generally behind closed doors; committee members get to decide that as well.
Assuming the bill gets through the committee, it must now survive three separate readings in each chamber, along with stops in the Steering and Policy or Ways and Means Committees, floor votes, public debate, and a check-through by the Committee on Bills in Third Reading. If it makes it through all of these steps, it is sent to a conference committee to iron out the inevitable differences between the House and Senate versions. There is one more vote on this final version, and then it is sent to the governor for approval.
This process is, without question, arduous. Yet, legislators sweep over many of these intricacies as mere formalities in the process; and almost no bills make it to the governor without a super-majority of supporters. What the governor does at this point, or who the people had elected to that office, does not matter. In practice, by the time a bill makes it out of committee, it is all but guaranteed to pass as legislation. Those floor votes, usually nearly unanimous within the Democratic supermajority, are often carried out with just a “voice vote,” leaving no record of any individual legislator’s position on the issue. The internal goings-on of these committees are, therefore, the most essential step in Massachusetts’s legislative process, but they are far too often veiled in secrecy. For most Massachusetts representatives, there is no way of knowing how they voted on key issues in those votes that truly matter. It is, therefore, impossible to ever hold them accountable—perhaps by design.
In 2022, nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts legislators ran completely uncontested, without even a nominal opponent. This puts the Commonwealth firmly in last place in the entire nation for competitive elections. This lack of competition means that, for most representatives, party leadership holds far greater sway than their constituents. Indeed, newly elected officials seem to quickly discover that, if they want any power, they must fall into the party line. And if some rowdy citizens decide they want someone else, who exactly can they vote for instead? At the national level, Congresspeople who face the most competitive elections have been shown to be the most productive legislators; if they want to keep their job, they know they have to deliver results for their voters. In Massachusetts, citizens are often unable to either vote to remove their representatives who do not legislate how they would like or see those votes in the first place. It is then no wonder that Massachusetts passed fewer pieces of legislation than any other state in 2023, despite a strong partisan majority.
There have been efforts recently to alleviate some of these issues. In March 2023, Massachusetts State Auditor Diana DiZoglio publicly announced a new effort to audit the State Legislature for the first time in a century. The audit would examine the body’s finances, which are currently exempt from public record. Immediately, however, DiZoglio faced sharp backlash from legislative leadership, who argued that her proposal amounted to executive overreach. While waiting for a legal resolution, DiZoglio began promoting a ballot initiative that would expressly authorize the auditor to investigate the legislature, hoping to hand the issue to Massachusetts voters in 2024. Ultimately, the State Attorney General, Andrea Campbell, announced in early November that she did not believe a nonconsensual audit was legal, barring said initiative results. As of October, the initiative is still collecting the 75,000 signatures it needs to make it onto the ballot.
Regardless, the State House’s transparency problems go far beyond what a mere financial audit can solve. No revelation of monetary missteps will fix the broken machine politics of one-party rule. This is not to say that Massachusetts voters should suddenly cross the aisle and vote for the Republican candidate—it is clear that most Bay Staters’ values contrast the GOP’s. What we need is institutional reform that clarifies where our Representatives stand, and elections that force competition beyond mere party affiliation.
To directly improve transparency, the Commonwealth, as a starting point, should make committee votes public. Last year, voters in certain districts overwhelmingly approved a similar ballot proposal. The legislature has refused to even grapple with those results, pointing to a broader need to make elections more competitive. Possible reforms range from having entirely nonpartisan elections, as is done in Nebraska, to simple ranked-choice voting, which was narrowly defeated in a 2020 ballot measure, but is slowly becoming more prevalent in local elections. These sorts of changes will be difficult, as institutional overhaul always is, but they are desperately needed in a state like Massachusetts.