Every two years, controversy bubbles up on Beacon Hill over how transparent the Legislature should be when it comes to how committees decide on bills. GBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with GBH News State House reporter Mike Deehan to learn more about one of the groups that is demanding more transparency. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: So there's a group of activists, some inside the House, many more outside the legislature, who have apparently been reading your tweets. They're fighting for changes to the rules the House uses to conduct business. You remind us how much of this happens behind closed doors on a regular basis. What is it they want?
Mike Deehan: The group is called Act On Mass. There are actually a number of other transparency efforts going on, and this group's really taken charge this session as the rule debate goes on and on. Basically, what they want to do is they want to make all committee votes publicly available upon request from that committee. So these are already technically made public, but these "yes" and "no" votes on bills as they go through committee are buried deep inside these official documents that are really hard for voters to parse through. It's hard for me to parse through them half the time. And there's some concern that email polls, where a lot of how business is done at the State House, aren't really being tracked very much at all by committees, and they want to standardize that system. They also want to get all of the testimony that's submitted to committees. Especially now in the COVID days, there aren't really live hearings in person, so there are letters and testimonies sent into these committees that influence the way the chairman decides on things and how those members vote. The last thing they want to do is they want to lower the number of members that you need to insist on a floor vote be taken instead of just something that goes by a voice vote — "yays" versus "nays" — so that would put members on the record for voice votes when there is a certain number of supporters. So now House Speaker Ron Marciano, the new speaker of the House, he's delayed this debate over the rules package until July to give members more time to consider things like this.
Watch: Deehan discusses the lack of transparency on Beacon Hill.
Deehan: But the most important dynamic here is that really so few have signed on for this Act On Mass effort. At last count, 20 of the House's 160 members have signed [the group's] pledge. Add that to the fact that the legislature actually has a pretty high approval rating — it's 65 percent in Massachusetts, which is one of the highest in the country. Not very popular, state legislatures. So there's probably still some appetite to make some reforms, especially since Mariano is new; he's just taken over. Now is the time to do it at the beginning of the end of the term. House members not officially signed on still might want to open things up a little bit, but this full-blown effort is probably going to go the way that all the other reform efforts have gone on Beacon Hill over the years.
Mathieu: Well, say no more. So few House members have signed on, Mike, where are the activists actually getting their support?
Deehan: This is the part that's kind of new. They claim to have recruited thousands of volunteers from each district, and they're using that to put pressure on members saying, "well, we have this list of constituents that you need to answer to, even though we're a statewide group." But beyond that, we don't know much about Act On Mass. They say most of their fundraising comes from independent donors and they admit to some labor unions contributing. But here's the ironic twist for a transparency group: they refuse to say which groups fund them, which in political jargon we call "dark money."
