Beacon Hill leaders are racing to complete work on major energy legislation, reforms to the child welfare system and other meaty topics. But it's a less urgent issue that's shedding light on how business gets done in the State House.
Many of the bills that pass the legislature to the governor's desk to become law take years to get there.
They get filed, die somewhere along the way, and get refiled the next session to go through it all again — until finally, maybe, getting a vote.
That's what happened to one of last session's most notable bills. You remember the one:
A bunch of music nerds wanted to make the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" the official rock song of the Commonwealth. The bill was heard, it got a lot of press then …
"The bill died," said Joyce Linehan, policy adviser to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the original sponsor of the Roadrunner bill. "It never made it to the floor. It essentially died in committee."
Linehan and others again testified before the Legislature this week about the merits of the song, which captures songwriter Jonathan Richman's wanderlust in mid-century Massachusetts.
There's no indication that the bill will get any further this year than it did last time, and that's an important civics lesson to anyone introduced to the ways of lawmaking because of the silly rock song bill.
