Earlier this year, both Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka promised reforms to make a more transparent, efficient, and accountable legislative process. We are delighted that, for the first time in six years, the House and Senate have agreed to Joint Rules, and that these new rules contain concrete, pro-democracy improvements.
We have been clear for years that better process helps produce better policy, and that the top-down, closed-door way that Beacon Hill operates disempowers the public (at the expense of monied interests) and makes it harder for rank-and-file legislators to do their job.
These new rules will make it easier for everyday people to engage in the legislative process by increasing the notice for hearings to ten days, providing bill summaries, and establishing hearing schedules earlier in the session. These new rules will provide greater accountability by making committee votes public and by making testimony publicly available. They will empower rank-and-file legislators to engage more in the policymaking process by making their votes more meaningful and their attendance at hearings more expected. They will push against the bottlenecks that occur late in the session by pushing up reporting deadlines.
We look forward to holding Beacon Hill accountable to their new rules. Rules only improve the process if they are, in fact, followed.
These new rules should be the beginning, not the end, of democratic reforms. That we have them at all is a credit to years of advocacy and popular education, the landslide win of Question 1 on the ballot last year, and the willingness of candidates to make Beacon Hill’s inertia and lack of transparency a key issue. There is more to do, such as structural reforms like fixing a stipend system that centralizes power or the deeper work of changing the culture of Beacon Hill in a way that encourages legislators to be more willing to speak out, stand out, and not settle for inertia and small wins. But today, we celebrate.
