Every now and then, the Massachusetts Legislature sends the rest of us a reminder that it is, for better or worse, an alternate dimension — one governed by its own logic and sensibilities, and whose occupants aren't overly interested in squaring their own worldview with everyone else's.
In recent days, it's happened twice. In early February, a proposal from state Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven (D-Somerville) to publish a full rundown of committee votes on the Legislature's website was quickly nixed in the House, via a voice vote that shielded the legislators doing the nixing from added scrutiny. And last week, the Massachusetts Senate eliminated term limits for the Senate president — meaning that current Senate President Karen Spilka will likely retain that role as long as she wants to, rather than being forced to step aside for a successor in 2026.
The implications of both these moves are worth teasing out. In each chamber, legislators are chosen by the public and paid with public money for their service — which, presumably, is dedicated to doing everything possible to improve their constituents' lives. Yet the House's vote also suggests that, however genuine its members' commitment to public service may be, they also feel they have a basic right to evade public scrutiny. (If there's a higher-minded rationale, the lack of debate before the aforementioned voice vote kept it from getting a hearing.)
In the Senate, Ways and Means Chair Michael Rodrigues said eliminating term limits was necessary to preserve an equitable balance of power on Beacon Hill, since the governor and House speaker can both serve indefinitely. (After previously supporting term limits, then-House Speaker Bob DeLeo successfully pushed to eliminate them back in 2015.) The idea here is that Spilka — and any other Senate president — would have been weakened in relation to the other members of the "Big Three" as the end of her tenure approached, and that removing that liability will help the Senate advance its priorities in the future.
As realpolitik, there's some heft to this argument — but it still falls short. After all, while the Massachusetts governor doesn't face term limits, voters can rehire or fire her every four years. In contrast, the House speaker and Senate president get their posts via indirect democracy: the public chooses the members of those chambers and then those members choose their leaders, after years of horse-trading and alliance-building from which the electorate is excluded. By following the House's lead, and effectively giving the Senate president that role in perpetuity, the Senate is providing an extra layer of political insulation to a leader who's already got plenty.
What's more, the Senate is also joining the House in blurring the personal and political in a way that can hurt the state rather rather than helping it. As Jonathan Cohn of the group Progressive Mass told Mass Live: “When you give one person that level of power- and agenda-setting for the body, it also just slows things down, because you’re the one person and you’re in charge indefinitely for the future. It makes it clear that everything needs to run through you."
Yet even if you're irked by the Legislature prioritizing institutional prerogatives over the public good, you can see why they do it. Last year, GBH News reported that
nearly two-thirds of state legislative races were uncontested — including the reelection bids of Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano. A serious challenge naturally shifts the orientation of any politician, forcing them to think a bit more about how to explain the choices they've made to the people they hope to represent. It stands to reason that a lack of serious challenges would do the opposite.
This story first ran in GBH News’ politics newsletter.
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