Jonathan Cohn and Scotia Hille, “Beacon Hill’s new rules are good. They should follow them. ,” CommonWealth Beacon, December 17, 2025.
THIS SUMMER, the Massachusetts Legislature did something that surprised everyone. And, no, we aren’t talking about passing a budget on time. The House and Senate agreed to a set of joint rules for the first time since 2019, including a number of transparency reforms that activists had fought for for years.
The Massachusetts Legislature has often been ranked as the least transparent in the country, and the opening of this session created a fertile opportunity to change that. Last year, we saw a chaotic end of session that left many key bills on the table, competitive legislative primaries waged over voters’ desire for a more small “d” democratic Democratic Legislature, and a blowout victory for Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s ballot question on auditing the Legislature. Everyday people–and not just advocates deep in the trenches–were seeing that things needed to change.