A scorecard, as we like to say, should tell a story. We focus on votes that would advance (or oppose rollbacks to) our Legislative Agenda / Progressive Platform and, importantly, highlight a contrast between legislators.
There have been only 140 recorded votes in the MA Senate this session so far. This is a break from the historical trend of the Senate having more recorded votes than the House.
When putting together a scorecard, we shy away from including many unanimous votes: before any unanimous vote, there are often many legislators putting up roadblocks along the way, as well as concessions made to achieve broader support. Moreover, in a case of unanimity, a recorded vote is motivated more by legislators’ desires for a good press release than anything else (if there’s a time to voice vote, it would be then). No scorecard can ever fully capture such behind-the-scenes jockeying, but setting a high bar before including a unanimous vote helps. The same goes for purely party line votes: given the dynamics of centralized Leadership power in the Legislature, party line votes can often feel less than ideological, and more pro forma.
We also avoid giving credit where credit has already been given: if we score a bill at one stage of the legislative process, we shy away from scoring its final passage later on to avoid duplication.
See our full scorecard here or on https://scorecard.progressivemass.com.
The session kicked off with a pleasant surprise: both chambers took up rules reform packages to make the legislative process more transparent and more democratic. Most of the issues taken up in the rules debate this year were either broadly bipartisan (really, unanimous) or party line (with maybe one Democratic defection). Since we are strong believers in recorded votes, we included the vote on an amendment to the Joint Rules to require every conference committee report to receive a recorded vote (#1). Recorded votes are essential to accountability: how else do you get to know what your legislators stand for? Four Democrats joined Republicans in voting for it: Senators Jamie Eldridge (D-Marlborough), John Keenan (D-Quincy), Liz Miranda (D-Roxbury), and Becca Rausch (D-Needham).
The February 2025 supplemental budget included additional restrictions on access to emergency housing assistance, as Governor Healey and the Legislature continued to hollow out the state’s right to shelter. We included several of the votes on Republican amendments to make the bill even more harmful than it already was by creating even more bureaucracy and pushing xenophobic narratives (#2-4). Each amendment unfortunately received some Democratic crossover, whether as low as 1 or high as 7 Democratic senators joining Republicans.
During the FY 2026 budget debate, the Senate voted to enable the Health Policy Commission to cap certain prescription drug prices (#5). Although the vote was 34 to 5, it wasn’t purely party line: Senator John Keenan (D-Quincy) joined Republicans in voting against it, and Senator Patrick O’Connor (R-Weymouth) joined Democrats in voting for it.
Most votes, however, were party line, with the Senate rejecting Republican amendments to make it easier for cities and towns to evade compliance with the MBTA Communities Act, which requires rezoning for multifamily housing near transit (#6),to creating a commission stacked with anti-tax and business groups to study how they can avoid the financial burden for their misuse of COVID funds (#7), to redirect excess revenue from the state’s capital gains tax to the flush rainy day fund instead of the state’s pension liability fund (#8), and to raising the estate tax threshold to $3 million and heavily redistribute wealth upwards (#10). However, four Democrats crossed party lines to join Republicans on an amendment to block the transition to zero-emissions vehicles and scapegoat climate and energy efficiency regulations for higher energy prices (#9): Senator Michael Brady (D-Brockton), Senator Nick Collins (D-South Boston), Senator Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford), and Senator Michael Moore (D-Millbury).
In July, the Senate passed one of the few standalone policy bills of the session: an update to the state’s shield law around reproductive and gender-affirming care, which protects both patients and providers–especially from conservative state governments elsewhere in the country (#11). Republicans Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester) and Patrick O’Connor (R-Weymouth) joined Democrats in voting for it.
In September, the Senate achieved a rare win in the Legislature: unanimity around a bill that is important and substantive: the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act, which would ban the sale of sensitive data (including location data) and imposes meaningful data minimization on companies harvesting our personal information, among other important privacy protections (#12).
In November, the MA Senate passed a bill (from our list of priorities) to combat politically motivated book bans by creating clear guidelines for how schools and libraries decide which books to make available and recognize that teachers and librarians are trusted experts and should be treated as such and that personal, political, and doctrinal views should not be governing which books are allowed to be on the shelf (#17).
In the final vote on passage, two Republicans–Senator Patrick O’Connor (R-Weymouth) and Senator Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester)–joined Democrats. However, that was after multiple efforts to weaken the bill. Four Republican amendments were defeated (#13 – #16), two of which were purely party line.
While both chambers took up legislation to address cannabis regulation and the scandal-plagued Cannabis Commission, the Senate’s floor debate included more actual debate. The Senate rejected two Republican amendments that received some Democratic crossover votes: an amendment to reduce the amount of allowable individual possession of marijuana in the underlying bill (#19) and one to allow the legislators themselves — rather than public health experts — write warning labels (#18).
Although the Senate has, over the years, cultivated a reputation as being the more progressive of the two chambers, one area where that has not been the case is their treatment of Boston’s tax shift home rule petition, introduced by Mayor Michelle Wu and passed by the City Council (multiple times) and the House. The HRP would shift blunt property tax increases for residential homeowners by decreasing a tax cut for commercial skyscrapers. Cities and towns shouldn’t even need to go to the legislature to beg for approval in basic tax policy changes, but cities and towns are hamstrung by Proposition 2 ½ and banned from most tax policy changes absent state approval. The Senate voted against Wu’s HRP 33 to 5 (#20), with four of the six members of the Boston delegation–Senator Sal DiDomenico (D-Everett), Senator Lydia Edwards (D-East Boston), Senator Liz Miranda (D-Roxbury), and Senator Mike Rush (D-West Roxbury) and progressive stalwart Senator Pat Jehlen (D-Somerville) the only yeses.
Finally, the Senate maintained its commitment to the Fair Share amendment during the debate on the higher education investment BRIGHT Act by rejecting a right-wing amendment to drain state revenue by increasing the likelihood of hitting the state’s regressive “tax cap” law that limits revenue growth to the growth of wages and salaries ((#21).
As with the House scorecard, we included several other data points in the final mid-session analysis. We believe that a Scorecard should answer the question of “Did you do what we wanted you to do?” Accordingly, there are three points included for co-sponsorship (> 50%, > 75%, and 100%) of our Legislative Agenda, and we have continued to include a point for visiting correctional facilities to conduct both oversight and constituent outreach. Legislators have the ability to visit correctional facilities unannounced, a power that too few use. However, for the purposes of the scorecard, we gave credit for making any visits at all to normalize a good practice that still far too few do.
