At the start of the new legislative session, both Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano pledged a commitment to increase the transparency, accountability, and efficiency of the legislative process.
Later that month, we helped organize 30 advocacy organizations on a joint letter outlining out a suite of reforms to boost public trust in the legislative process and to make a better process for rank-and-file legislators.
With a week left until we hit the second half of 2025, we finally have agreed-upon Joint Rules from the MA House and MA Senate, the set of practices and procedures governing how joint House-Senate committees operate. (They still need a vote, but that is assured.) Rules determine timelines, deadlines, access to information, and more.
Although the fact that this did not occur until late June is damning, the fact that it happened at all is exciting, as the Legislature has been punting on the issue of Joint Rules since 2019 due to previously irreconcilable differences. It is also exciting to see real wins for the community of activists and advocates fighting for greater transparency and democracy in the State House.
It’s been clear from the start that the House and Senate would agree to a new rule in which House committee members report out House bills and Senate members report out Senate bills. And that was in these new Rules.
But what else is new in the new Rules? (See a more detailed mark-up here.)
NEW WIN: 10-Day Hearing Notice
How much notice should be provided for joint committee hearings has been a sticking point between the House and Senate since 2019. The Senate has advocated for 5 days, but the House has wanted to stick to 72 hours. Those were their positions in their Joint Rules proposals earlier this year.
However, in our letter in January, we argued for two weeks: two weeks is the standard for people seeking vacation time off work, and if we want everyday people to be able to testify, we should provide two weeks of advance notice. By embracing a 10-day standard, the Joint Rules were more pro-participation than either chamber’s original proposal.
NEW WIN: Hearing Schedules
In our joint letter, we urged joint committees to establish clear hearing schedules for the session early on (we said April 1st). The new Joint Rules say that joint committees must provide a schedule of hearing dates within three weeks of committee appointments. Again, this is more pro-participation than either chamber’s original proposal. Both this and the ten-day notice rule recognize that what is good for the public is good for rank-and-file legislators. If we want meaningful hearings, then people need to be able to show up to testify, and legislators need to show up to listen to them. That can only happen with sufficient notice.
NEW WIN: Public Hearing on Rules
At the end of the two-year session, the Joint Committee on Rules will conduct a comprehensive review of the joint rules, including a public hearing where everyday people can testify. Legislators have often said that regular people don’t care about the rules when they have argued against transparency measures; this shows that they have finally acknowledged people do.
Committee Votes
All joint committee votes will be recorded and posted on the Legislature’s website within 48 hours. This has been a sticking point for six years between the House and Senate and the subject of significant advocacy (and public shock at our outlier status).
Unfortunately, the language about committee votes does not include House language that would have required co-chairs provide committee members with a redlined version of any bill they are expected to vote on, and it does not include Senate language specifying that study orders (a polite way of killing a bill) require votes.
The new rules also specify that if no action is taken on a bill, it will be given a study order. This could become a way to avoid taking votes on bills and will have to be guarded against.
Publicly Available Testimony
Joint committees will be required to make written testimony publicly available, with limitations for testimony that includes sensitive personal information, obscene content, or information that may jeopardize the health, wellness, or safety of the testifier or others. This is a win for access to information vis-a-vis existing rules, but not as far as the Senate’s proposal and what we called for. The Joint Rules will allow committee chairs to set the rules regarding how testimony is made publicly available, but the best standard would be to simply post all of it (with the above redactions as needed), as done in several other states. We’ll have to see how this all works in practice.
Bill Summaries
Joint committees will be required to make a summary of each bill publicly available on the General Court website prior to its hearing. Summaries will be written by committee staff, as per the House proposal, instead of the bill filers themselves (as per the Senate’s).
Earlier Reporting Deadline
Joint committees will now have until the first Wednesday in December of the first year of the session (as opposed to the first February in the second year) to take action on all bills in their purview, an attempt at avoiding the legislative backlog that always results and at setting up the second year for a clear focus on legislating. The House will still abide by the rolling deadlines in its own rules, which require bills to be reported out 60 days after they are heard (with the possibility of an additional 30-day extension).
Conference Committees
As per the Senate’s original proposal, the first meeting of a conference committee (the three senators and three representatives negotiating versions of a bill) will be open to the public and media. We should hope that these are more meaningful meetings than the one held by the Joint Committee on Rules, which was more of a mumbling and disjointed press conference than a real meeting.
Also, as per the Senate’s original proposal, a minimum of 24 hours of will be required between a conference committee report filing and a legislative vote, allowing more time for review by legislators and the public. If a conference committee report is filed after 8:00pm, it cannot be voted on until the second calendar day following the day on which it was filed. More time for review is good for the public and good for rank-and-file legislators.
In a limited version of a House proposal, conference reports would be accompanied by summaries, but only “whenever practicable.”
Tracking Attendance
The House proposal had argued for tracking attendance at joint committee hearings, and the Senate proposal excluded any such measure.
The Joint Rules landed on a place that recognizes the importance of showing up while accommodating excused absences. The new attendance record-keeping would begin on October 1 (it is unclear why so late) and would count attendance both in-person and remote, both full and partial (regarding the length of the hearing).
Chairs would record all members as “Present”, “Not Present”, or “Hearing conflicts with a legislative session, hearing, conference committee or commission meeting under joint rule 29A,” posted along with the archived hearing livestream video. A member who is not present due to military service, a medical emergency, or other specified reason as agreed to by the rules of the joint committee, shall have such reason noted on the recorded attendance.
Formal Sessions Past July 31st
The the new Joint Rules would permit the Legislature to meet in formal session after July 31 in the second year of the legislative session in the following cases: reports of conference committees formed on or before July 31, appropriation bills filed after July 31, and gubernatorial vetoes or amendments. We argued against pushing more of the work of the session after July 31st, as legislators are not in the State House as regularly and thus decision-making would be more centralized and less accountable. Last session’s practice of conference committees going on through the fall and unfinished business as of July 31 wasn’t one worth encouraging.