Small Potatoes - Why We Lack Big Progress in Democrat-Majority Massachusetts

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Today we talk about why so-called "state wins" are actually small potatoes. We dive into how we hear from state reps or state senators "Hey, look at these amazing things that we did," and how looking into their boasts reveals that not a lot of actual change was made compared to what else could they be doing with their time and with their supermajority.

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 36. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics. We know that we could have a legislature and laws that support the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.
And today we are talking about why what are called state wins are actually small potatoes. So we are going to be going into a lot of things that we hear from state reps or state senators or other people who send out, hey, look at these amazing things that we did, and looking into them and seeing really what is the impact of these things and what else could they be doing with their time and with their supermajority. So before we go on, let me introduce my two fantastic co-hosts.
I will start with Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers, he him and I had the misfortune of having like over 100 state reps as state senators email me about the things that they've done in the legislature and it's a depressing foray.
And Jonathan, Jonathan Cohn, he him join from Boston. I've been active and issued electoral campaigns here in Boston and statewide for a number of years, and I'm not on as many lists as Jordan. I'm happy about that fact.
And I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford. And we are going to just dive in.
We're going to kind of popcorn around. Feel free to jump in anytime, bring up some things that you have heard people say that are, oh, gosh, wasn't this wonderful? And why don't we start off with the basic concept that we should be expecting more. We should be expecting more from an entire legislature that is over 85% Democrats.
And there is a democratic party platform here that is very ambitious and we do not pass most of the stuff in there. We now have a Democratic governor. We should be expecting more.
And in other states, we've talked about this before, in other states that are more purple where they may have one legislature that's Republican and one that's Democrat, once they get both that are democratic, they suddenly pass a bunch of laws. It happens very quickly. They pass a bunch of stuff that we as people on the left expect that Democrats support.
But in our state, because it is a one-party state, there is never that effect where people are pushing to get a bunch of things passed, where there's an ambition to pass legislation. And I'll pause there and let you guys jump. Yeah.
The one thing that I would tag in with that is I feel like the important thing to acknowledge with the Massachusetts legislature is that unlike, I'd say, like, around a decade or so ago, where some of the things the legislature did pass, I think, actually were harmful, where back in the days, where a number of Democrats would gladly sign on to Republican messaging, a bill harmful to immigrants for the communities of color, that we reached the point where that's not happening anymore. And I think that's to the credit of a lot of organizing and activism in a state as well as larger political trends. But moving from that to a situation where you get, like, a few big wins each session is still incredibly underwhelming in the context of what the potential that exists in the legislature is that when we think about national politics, it's now divided.
But even when we had a Democratic majority with the House and Senate, they were slim in recent history. Now it's kind of a very slim Senate majority and not a slim Republican majority in the House. And so that the ability to pass things legislatively then becomes difficult because now they're doing nothing.
And then, frankly, doing nothing in the Congress is better than doing something, given who controls the House. But when Democrats did have a majority in vote houses, and if you would need somebody like Joe Manchin to be like Kirsten Sinema, you have a balancing act of how to get that last person on board because you need them for a simple majority. However, in Massachusetts, where you have, as you noted, a supermajority with room to spare, that same balancing act, at least in theory, doesn't need to exist.
And you could then be passing legislation, passing many different things, passing legislation earlier in the session so that you aren't constantly waiting until often, as they do, until the end of the session, to pass bills, whether that's because they've spent months in conference committee or because you just take them up then, and you could actually be quite active and proactive in thinking of what are the problems that exist in the state, and how do we use the ample resources that we have in the state to fix the problems that we have in the state. And instead, you often see things sometimes that there are good things that are long overdue, some things that there are minor but helpful tweaks that are hardly anything to sing about. But it's always like that gap between how much potential that you would expect out of that heavily democratic of a legislature and what we actually see is always jarring.
Yeah. And I think it's, what's so unnerving about it is that there's really big problems that they just continue to not address and they just treat it like, it's going to be fine. And in a time of rising fascism, it's not going to be fine.
We need to have a clear vision for what it is that we could do, that progressives could do if they have power. What is the alternative vision for the world currently? The alternative vision for the world is it's less shitty. We're not going to fix any of your problems, but we're just not going to be as blatantly terrible to you.
Well, that's not compelling, that's not helpful. That's not things. And in a state legislature that has the largest majorities of democratic votes and should have clear progressive majorities, clear vision.
To have our state do basically nothing, to have one of the least proactive state, you know, productive states in the country is likeshocking. And some of the states that we're behind are states that have sessions for three months, not two years. Right.
They could pass anything last year, right. The calendar year of 2023 passed and the only successful thing they did was cut taxes for rich people. That's ridiculous.
They did nothing else at all and pass a budget, which they're required to do by law. We can do better. We can dream better, we can be big.
We can go a lot better. So as somebody gets a lot of emails for folks, let me give viewers who don't have this misfortune some of the things that you get when you get these emails, the biggest victory lap that they love to take is the pennies they get for their accounts. Now what's so great about this is they'll say things like, when we held firm on local aid, we gave you local aid.
They're required to give local aid. That's the bare minimum that they should be doing is providing towns with money. And then they'll trot out like a Republican person who voted against some of the build back better bills.
They'll trot out like, look what we did. We got this park. And I'm just like, you got pennies.
And one of my favorite examples of this is here in Worcester where thank God for Jim McGovern, who had to cover like three-quarters of the cost of something that our local legislature got a little bit of money for started and then quickly realized they have enough money to finish and needed to get Jim McGovern, who's high up in Congress, to get an appropriations to bail us. And like that happens all the time. And it's just like, what? So money for towns is the number one thing.
They love this. They run on it. You'll see it.
I've written it many times on literature for elected officials. Right. Look at the money we got.
And it is always depressing because it's pennies for what we could and should be doing to invest it. And I will also make a comment that the only reason that we don't just automatically everybody gets funding for your representative district is because it allows the speaker to have the power to punish people who don't do what he wants. Right.
So it's deeply undemocratic that they can even say that as a victory lap. And what they're saying is, I kissed the ring, I did what I was told, and that's why we got money for our district. Yeah.
It's the thing that speaks to the fundamental problem with the earmarks and that it's always very understandable why all legislators love them, because then you can say how you got the specific thing, but it just always stands out to me that why is funding happening for specific programs like that through the budget, rather than a state grant program for specific items where they have a clear set of parameters for which organization should be funded, a clear assessment of need, and then the money gets doled out accordingly. Obviously, that is far less attractive to legislators, and it doesn't play into the same ability to use that as a tool of power, but it just speaks to how politicized that process becomes and how much more sensible it would be for things tobe taken out of it. Absolutely.
Some of the other ones that I love that they'll take victory laps for are like funding of local nonprofits. Right? Like they'll like, look,we got this money for this thing, which is not small for that nonprofit. But again, I remember we were trying to unseat an incumbent, and their answer to why to keep them in power was like, well, I run because I fight for this nonprofit.
And I just think you're a state rep for the whole state. Your job is to legislate a vision for the state. And the reason we should keep you of 160, only 160 of the 7 million people live here, it's because you fight for one nonprofit.
What are we doing? What are we doing? This is kind of one hop off topic, but I just wanted to use that point as an opportunity to make a case before that people, of why it is important, whatever district you live in for state rep districts and senate districts outside of yours, because people can think there's often an understandable parochialism that will come up around elections, that the only things that are particularly worth paying attention to are the ones that you yourself can vote in. But although you can only vote for so many state legislators, the votes that they cast affect the entire state and the votes that they cast affect you and have that, like, that basic case for why you should actually be interested for what happens in places across the state in the same way in which people feel that they have a vested interest in congressional races around the country, because people understand that those votes, that that person votes on things that affect them. Same is true on the state.
Yep. And Jordan, I'm going to encourage you. You were talking about it.
You just threw at us a bunch of these really small potatoes things. Just throw them at us. Yeah.
So these are some of the things that they also take victory lapse for. One of my favorites is somebody was like, look, in a bill that passed, I got updated information on nutrition in schools. And so what that means for laypeople who don't understand is that the state is going to add some paragraphs.
It's going to add some paragraphs of instruction to DESE, the Department of Education, Secondary Education. And then DESE has to make that into something that teachers could pick up, and then a teacher would have to pick that up when they were doing a lesson plan. Hey, the state has updated this.
I'm going to implement these changes into the thing. And I will tell you that anybody, my daughter does some of these classes, they are already teaching because they're five or six years old, ideas because our legislature is so far behind. So it's just like, this is one of my favorites.
This is a ridiculous thing. They talked about early education, workforce apprenticeship. So, like, having people get paid even less money to do early education, which is not bad.
It's good. We should be encouraging people to go in and make it easier. But again, that's small potatoes.
One of my favorite ones that they did with health insurance for public employees on day one. So what happens is, let's say you get hired by your state rep to work for them. You don't get health insurance for six months.
So they had to pass a bill to treat their own employees more human. Yeah. And when we talk about things they should have passed 20 years ago, this is that kind of thing.
Who gets a victory lap for that? I'm not saying it's not good. Obviously, it's good forever ago, and that's ridiculous. Yeah, but the staffing, it's always so jarring about how terribly they were treating staff that if you started a new job in the legislature, you didn't have health insurance for several months.
And for all that, Massachusetts loves to talk about its role in having close to universal health insurance and setting a standard for the country and how we did that so many decades ago and those very people who passed that were not offering health insurance staff on day one. One of my other favorites, there's a bill that's up there that I think is a nice example of the problem is ending housing discriminations against families with young children, which means that they're going to, in theory, right. You'll add it to the things that you can't discriminate against.
And maybe if in a wild dream they'll even up enforcement, which they can't do because they don't have any money to do it. But let's just pretend that they upped enforcement of this rule. Go ahead, Anna.
Let me jump in, because having personal experience with this, I just want people to understand the reality. Like, if you are trying to rent an apartment and you have a kid under six years old and the landlord has not fully de-leaded the apartment, then because of the state laws, they are in some risk at renting to you that they might become, if you do certain things, they could be liable to actually de-lead their apartment, which could cost a fair amount of money. And so the standard procedure is the instant they find out you have a kid that's under six years old, they just say, oh, sorry, apartment is not available anymore.
And that happened to us over and over. We learned to just not tell anybody. It was awful.
It was so bad. My sister couldn't rent anywhere. I couldn't rent it.
It was terrible. And just to be clear, I have a de-lead cert, and that means that they de-leaded it. But there are some places that still have lead.
It just means that they painted over it or they covered over it. And so if something happens, right, that's like a whole thing. So as somebody who has it, that's a real concern because the state, again, did not do any real money behind de-leading.
And it's a whole other lot. We can do a whole podcast on that. This is a real problem that happens.
This reminds me of when I went to purchase our three decker. At no point did anybody meet me. Only my white wife was at any part of the conversation.
And it was only at the end that they realized that Jordan was not her. And I bought it by myself. Just to be clear, she also in no way contributed because for some financial reasons, in no way contributed to.
Yeah, so those are real things that are happening. So even if we did enforce it, right, let's say we enforced it. Anybody who's on a zoning board or any foot of construction knows they're not building.
They're already de facto discriminating because most of the things that are being built are single, are single rooms. They're single-people occupancies. They're high money, one or two people at most.
They're not building for families. So by de facto, our cities and towns are already discriminating. And because the state has failed to actually address housing, it doesn't matter that you've added this small thing that will literally never be enforced.
It doesn't matter if you add it because there's no place for people to live. Right? We're not building the sort of homes that could substantiate families in the cities, period. And for the most part, unless you have more disposable money than I can imagine, you're probably not getting it in the towns either.
So for people who get any of these emails from your state rep. Right. You vote in those elections, you may be on their email list.
We're asking you to just take a breath and pause as you're reading through these things and think how many people are affected by that bill? Is it 10,000? Not saying that's bad. Is this something that should have been passed 20 years ago? I mean, the driver's license bill took 20 years to pass. 20 years.
And I'm not saying it's not good, of course. Should they have passed it last year? Yeah, of course. I mean, that went through, went through a ballot measure.
And then there are things like the fair share, which is increasing the taxes on the wealthy. And the legislature basically undid the whole thing by cutting taxes, by cutting other taxes on the same wealthy people. Even things like the climate bill, which was really impactful.
Sorry. Which was really important. We desperately needed climate bill that we passed after over a decade of not passing anything, even that bill, because it relies so much on implementation and it is already behind in implementation.
There are ways that they can pass, quote, unquote, pass good things. And yet the implementation either never happens or hasn't happened yet, or like a fair share, they basically undo it completely. They didn't even pass.
We had to pass. That's right. We had to pass out another ballot measure.
But the things that. I have a closing statement, but I'm going to let you guys time in a little bit before we end here. Any other things that we want to talk about that we think they should be doing more, I would just underscore with your point about how much implementation matters on things that it's often very easy to, once legislation gets passed, to think, okay, that work is done.
And I think that many legislators view their work as done when they get signed into law. But there's so much more to happen to make sure that whoever's supposed to be implementing it, I think about this with the Department of Corrections all the time, is that it's one thing to pass criminal legal reforms, it's another to make sure that the Department of Corrections is actually following them, which can be very difficult work. Yeah.
And I'll just say I think it's really important that we keep our eye on the bigger idea. So we have real problems in our state. It's too expensive to get around.
There isn't enough housing. And on top of that, the housing that's there is not affordable. We're doing hatch meal things that may affect housing costs 20 years from now.
Health care sucks, right. Health care. Right.
They can't even do like a hack on public option. They can't do anything imaginative to fix it, which is something that the legislature passed, that Romney vetoed, that they never went back and fixed, which they could go back and fix. They could provide a public option literally tomorrow with nobody opposing it or at least nobody that worth noting.
They're not addressing any sort of protections against AI, against the future of jobs. They're not thinking about any of these things.We are going to be continuing to run deficits because of the tax cuts.
They think. They didn't go back and say, hey, we really maybe need to readjust these humongous tax cuts we gave to rich people to make sure that we could pay for things. They're not doing that.
They're not revisiting any of those things. So unless, yeah. If you're among the 20,000, 30,000 people that are affected by some of these bills, they are really impactful.
They're really important. They can be life-changing things. But we have seven, 8 million people who live here or come through here and we're not passing things to make vote to address those big issues.
And they could, because they have like super, super majorities, they have majority. They can lose votes and still do veto-proof, which is two thirds. Right.
Like, they can lose people and get it right. The Republicans celebrated adding one person to their ranks. They have no future, and yet we are not passing anything like big ideas, big changes, big vision for the future.
They're not passing any of those things. Yeah. And my final thought is just know a lot of people say that the democratic policy platform, Democratic Party's official policy platform in Massachusetts is wonky, nobody cares, blah, blah, blah.
But the truth is there is nothing out of the state leadership, out of the state legislature, out of the state Democratic Party. There is nothing provided as a vision. Nothing.
So if you're looking for, if the problem is like, oh, well, nobody has a vision, that's the problem. Honestly, there is a clear vision coming out of the Democratic Party. And what's nice is it is in fact a little bit more grassroots.
It's not just the people sitting in elected offices in the state legislature who are creating that. So we have a policy platform and I encourage everybody to go and read that thing because there is a lot of stuff in there that would be fantastic that is really aligned with what everybody listening to this pretty know agrees with. Certainly a lot of our listeners agree with, and there is no reason I mean it's literally the official democratic party platform for the state of Massachusetts.
So what is the reason? That the leadership of both of those houses sees their job not as to make sure that vision happens, but it's almost as if they see their purpose as to ensure that they block that vision from happening, that they obstruct that vision from happening. So we leave you with that today. We hope that you read these emails with a little grain of salt, understanding that there is way more we could be doing and the vision is already out there.
And with that said, we thank you all for listening. Thanks, my co hosts, and we look forward to chatting with you all next week.