CommonWealth: It’s time to bring transparency to the Legislature

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn just had an editorial printed in CommonWealth about transparency in the MA State House. Read an excerpt below and the full piece here.

***

In 2016, when the Massachusetts Legislature updated the state’s public records laws, they chose to punt on the issue of how such laws should apply to themselves. Indeed, Massachusetts remains the only state where the courts, Legislature, and governor’s office all claim to be fully exempt from public records laws.

In traditional Beacon Hill fashion, the Legislature created a commission to study the issue further, and the bicameral commission ended up with no actual recommendations.

But that’s not the fault of the senators in the commission. Frustrated with their House colleagues, the six Senate members issued their own report on December 31, 2018. In the report, they highlighted several as-of-yet-unadopted ways make the Massachusetts Legislature more accessible, including the release of all written testimony received prior to all committee hearings and any testimony or other materials submitted in-person during the hearing process, upon request and the online publication of any vote recorded either by electronic poll or by a vote of the “yeas and nays” during a committee meeting or executive session.

Earlier this month, the Senate reaffirmed their support for making testimony available (with, of course, appropriate redactions for “sensitive personal information or information that may jeopardize the health, wellness or safety of an individual”) and publishing committee votes online in the Joint Rules. The House again is proving a roadblock. In the Joint Rules on which the House plans to vote today, public access to testimony is gone. And although the House embraced a form of publishing committee votes, they narrowed it to a list of the dissenting votes and the vote count. Why not just list yeas and nays as we do everywhere else?

To be clear, public access to testimony and committee votes are not radical reforms. The majority of US states, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, and New Jersey, publish committee votes online. And states like Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Oregon go further than the proposal to simply make testimony available upon request: they publish it by default—something that the Massachusetts House showed it was able to do last summer with testimony submitted on the police reform bill.

Boston Globe Letter: Moving Forward with Driver’s Licenses

Emily Achtenberg of JP Progressives’s Immigrants Rights Action Group penned a letter to the editor to the Globe about the need to pass the Work and Family Mobility Act:

Marcela García is right to wonder whether President Biden’s proposed federal immigration reform promises, as the headline of her column puts it, “a new day, or an old story, for the undocumented” (Opinion, Feb. 2). Here in Massachusetts, we should be concerned, too, about our elected state officials’ failure to protect our undocumented neighbors.

Last year, the proposed Work and Family Mobility Act, which would authorize driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, failed to pass the state Legislature after being reported out of committee for the first time in 15 years. The bill received widespread support but was opposed by Governor Charlie Baker.

As the pandemic has revealed, undocumented immigrants make up a significant portion of the essential workforce, the people who keep our economy going and our families safe while suffering a disproportionate share of COVID-19′s burdens. Now more than ever, households need the ability to drive in order to gain access to medical care, testing, and vaccines; grocery shopping and food distribution; jobs; and schools. Public transportation and ridesharing options are unacceptably risky as well as severely curtailed.

The Work and Family Mobility Act has just been refiled in the Legislature, and it deserves our active support. Fifteen states, including Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware, plus the District of Columbia have legalized immigrant driving. Let’s catch up in Massachusetts.

PM in the News: Redistricting Looms Large

Our Framingham chapter chair Beverly Hugo recently had an op-ed printed in the MetroWest Daily News about the importance of a diverse Redistricting Committee. The lines of our Congressional and legislative districts will be redrawn later this year, with major issues of representation at stake.

Redistricting will determine our political power for the next 10 years. Make sure the ‘redistricters’ reflect us

The Joint Redistricting Committee, which is to be appointed by Senate President Karen Spilka and Speaker of the House Ronald Mariano will oversee the 2021 redistricting process.

As is customary every 10 years, the process of redistricting has begun. Although this undertaking culminates in November with the Legislature voting on newly defined congressional and state districts, the process begins now with the appointment of members to the Joint Committee on Redistricting. 

Ultimately, the Joint Committee will determine whether the political power of our communities is fairly represented.  It will decide which candidates run for office and who they will represent. The delineation of legislative districts will affect nearly every issue our communities care about for the next decade. 

The goal of the committee is to ensure that district lines are centered on the voters, not political interests, and that the redistricting process is fair to all our communities. 

Having a truly representative committee composition will also encourage public participation in the process by attending hearings and submitting proposed maps. In addition, a well composed Committee will assure participation from historically underrepresented communities.

In decades past, we have seen what can go wrong during redistricting: the legislature could break our communities apart and dilute our political power; it could combine communities with very different priorities into the same district; or it could otherwise draw district lines that do not make sense for voters. Massachusetts did, after all, invent the gerrymander.

We also know what can go well. In 2011, Massachusetts broke from its legacy of closed-door redistricting, where district lines were essentially drawn by those in leadership without any regard for input from members of the legislature and the public. Instead, it conducted a far more open and transparent process with statewide hearings and platforms that allowed Bay Staters to submit their own maps – resulting in districts that reflected common interests of voters, rather than protecting incumbent politicians.

Redistricting will shape Massachusetts’ political future — and the process begins with the Senate President, Karen Spilka, and Speaker of the House, Ron Mariano. I am confident that they will meet their responsibility by appointing legislators to the Joint Committee who will equitably consider Massachusetts’ racial and geographic diversity. We call on them to do exactly that.

Beverly Hugo is the founder of Progressive Framingham/Metrowest.

PM in the News: Two Letters in the Globe

Two PM board members recently had letters to the editor published in the Boston Globe.

Jonathan Cohn, “Mass. should move on Safe Communities Act before session ends,” 12/28/20:

The Globe editorial board is spot-on with its call for ending Bristol County’s 287(g) contract with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in light of Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s latest abuses of power (“Time’s up, Sheriff Hodgson,” Dec. 21). Massachusetts is the only state in New England where such contracts exist. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait until the new presidential administration to end them.

A bill called the Safe Communities Act, filed in the Legislature by Representatives Ruth Balser and Liz Miranda and Senator Jamie Eldridge, would end such contracts with ICE and take additional steps to make sure that the rights of our immigrant communities are respected. It was reported out of committee in July, and it deserves a vote before the session runs out.

If we don’t take action soon, Massachusetts will have gone the four years of the Trump administration without passing any new legislation to strengthen the rights of immigrants in our Commonwealth, a sorry reflection of the politics in our so-called deep blue state.

And Mohammed Missouri responded to a misguided column by Globe opinion columnist Joan Venocchi:

Don’t blame the progressives

The 15th Suffolk state representative race was the most hotly contested legislative primary of 2018 (and the most expensive). Voters in the district looked to the State House to find a bold response to the chaos and daily horror show of the Trump administration. They were hoping for bold action to protect immigrants’ rights, ensure a livable planet, and invest in community needs. But despite the high rank of their state representative, Jeffrey Sánchez, they didn’t find that leadership. So they voted him out, as we do in a democracy.

It’s easy to blame progressive activists for any disappointing outcome, as Joan Vennocchi does in her column “With Speaker Mariano, progressives get what they deserve” (Opinion, Dec. 29). But she ignores that Ways and Means chairman Sánchez was himself supporting majority leader Ron Mariano for speaker, and many of Mariano’s supporters pledged to him more than a decade ago (“Long the House’s consummate insider, Ronald Mariano poised to finally lead it,” Page A1, Dec. 27). An alternative outcome, unfortunately, wasn’t in the cards.

Many politicos believe that Mariano’s tenure will be short before he passes it on to someone else. Rather than relitigating old fights, I hope to help build support for a progressive speaker. I invite Joan Vennochi to join me.

Lowell Sun LTE: Supporting Immigrants’ Rights

Dee Halczak of Solidarity Lowell penned a letter in support of the Safe Communities Act and the Work and Family Mobility Act in the Lowell Sun:

There are people in our communities, friends and family and neighbors, who have been here for years providing needed services and stability to our communities. But because they arrived here, the way desperate people do, without dotting all the i’s, under current policies we’re supposed to forget those relationships and the good they’ve done and deport them to places many of them don’t even remember and where they have no connections to help them survive.

It is time someone did the humanitarian thing and found a way to help them stay here and thrive, instead of kicking them out of the only country many of them really know.

One state can’t change federal immigration policy, but it can protect its residents from excessive zeal in the enforcement of unjust rules and regulations.

Massachusetts legislators can lead the way by passing the Safe Communities Act, which allows our police to focus on the jobs we hired them for, and the Work and Family Mobility Act, which allows people to obtain a drivers license so that they can support themselves and their family without providing information on immigration status.

We’ve been arguing over this issue for half of my lifetime. It’s time to stop arguing and do the humane thing. People are already here. Pass the legislation that will let us all go on with our lives and focus on more important things, like standing together to help this country overcome one of the worst crises it has ever encountered.

CommonWealth: Mail-in voting was huge success; let’s keep it

Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn penned an editorial for CommonWealth about the need to make recent voting reforms permanent — and to build on them with Election Day Registration. You can read an excerpt below and the full piece here.

**

ON SEPTEMBER 1, Massachusetts voters broke a record. Whether by mail, by dropbox, or in person, 1.7 million voters cast a ballot for our state primaries, exceeding the previous record from 1990.  

To put this into perspective, 1.7 million is approximately the same as the number of votes cast in the 2014 and 2018 state primaries—combined. And it’s more than the 2010, 2012, and 2018 state primaries combined.  

We also saw more votes cast in our Democratic state primary (1,427,868) than in the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year (1,417,498), which had itself broken the record from 2008 (1,352,157).    

Why did so many more people vote this year? The answer is simple: the Legislature made voting more accessible.  

Mailing every active voter an application to vote by mail accomplished two important goals. First, it reminded voters that an election was even happening. (If you have ever volunteered for a campaign, you would be well aware this is one of the main hurdles to increasing engagement.) Second, it enabled voters to cast their ballot on their own timeline rather than having to figure out when during a narrow 11-hour window on September 1 they would have time to go vote.

CommonWealth: We must act now to protect the primary election

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn penned an editorial for CommonWealth earlier today about the need to pass a strong COVID voting protections package. Read an excerpt below and the full piece here:

THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE primary on September 1 is now less than 100 days away. If we want to avoid the horror stories we’ve seen from states like Wisconsin and Florida, then the Legislature needs to take action — and fast — to ensure we can have a high-participation election while protecting public health.

First, we need to expand early voting to include primaries. The landmark 2014 election modernization bill brought early voting to Massachusetts, and it’s been a hit. When it premiered in the 2016 general election, more than 1 million voters chose to vote early. Early voting will help spread the number of in-person voters out across a greater number of days, making it easier for both voters and poll workers to follow physical distancing guidelines.

Second, we need to reduce the number of people who have to show up in person to vote, and that means embracing vote-by-mail. How to go about this was a major sticking point during the recent legislative hearing on election reform, with some legislators preferring to simply enable every voter to request an absentee ballot, others wanting to mail every eligible voter an absentee ballot application, and others wanting to go further to mail every voter a ballot.

CommonWealth: A stronger state safety net is part of the cure

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn penned an editorial in CommonWealth with Karen Chen of the Chinese Progressive Association, Elena Letona of Neighbor to Neighbor, and Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods about the need to strengthen the safety net in response to the pandemic. You can read an excerpt below and the full piece here.

LIFE UNDER QUARANTINE can easily cause many of us to lose track of time. But one date we should remember is this: Today marks one month since Gov. Charlie Baker issued a declaration of emergency.

Have our state policymakers been responding with the needed urgency? Not really.

The Legislature, now rightfully in remote function, has waived the one-week waiting period for unemployment insurance and allowed cities and towns to postpone local and special legislative elections (and took steps to expand voting access for new dates). These are important first steps. But without larger and more comprehensive action with an equity lens front and center, we risk leaving the most vulnerable populations—those who were already living in a state of emergency—behind.

Pandemics are not “great equalizers”: they underscore and exacerbate all of the inequalities that were already present.

CommonWealth: “Beware of Rodrigues’s ‘boring middle’”

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn penned an editorial in CommonWealth about the new Senate Ways & Means chair:

OVER THE PAST few legislative sessions, progressives have looked to the Massachusetts Senate as a beacon of progressive policymaking. Across a range of issues, the Senate has been willing to pass bold and expansive bills that end up watered down—or dead on arrival—in the more conservative, top-down House.

However, Senate President Karen Spilka’s choice of Sen. Michael Rodrigues to chair the powerful Senate Ways & Means Committee should give progressives everywhere pause. Although the Westport Democrat describes himself as part of the “boring middle,” much of Rodrigues’s record locates him squarely on the right.