Joint Rule 10 Day: Arbitrary State Deadlines Not Even Followed

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Today we talk about Joint Rule 10 Day, which is a deadline for getting bills passed through certain hoops before they can pass through other hoops. This includes bills like the Transfer Fee, Debt Free College, Rent Control, PILOT Reform, Public Banking, Medicare for All, Prison Moratorium, Safe Communities Act, Vote 16, and more. 

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan  chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 38. 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 because we know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.
And today we are going to be talking about joint rule ten day, which is a deadline for getting bills passed through certain hoops before they can pass through other hoops. And today we will probably talk about the transfer fee, debt free college rent control, pilot reform, public banking, Medicare for All, prison moratorium,Safe Communities act, vote 16. There are many more than that, but we'll probably talk about most of those.
But before we do, I will have my super amazing co hosts introduce themselves, starting with Jonathan Cohn. Jonathan Cohn. He him is activist living in Boston, what I call the intersection of back by Fenway in the southend here, and have been active on issuing electoral campaigns in Massachusetts for a decade now, which still always feels weird for me when I say it.
And Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers, he him. And yeah, I work and live in Worcester, Massachusetts. And it is weird. It is weird to be doing this a long time.
I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford and still loving local politics, state politics. Always excited to be with these wonderful people here chatting with you, all you listeners.
So today we are talking about joint rule ten day. Wow, that's such a descriptive term. If you hear that term, you know exactly what it means and what it means for you as a constituent who wants to jump in and just say,what is joint rule ten day and what does it mean? Perhaps Jonathan? Happy to do so.
And I always like the opportunity to explain terms because I remember the first time I heard this term being used and it was just like used very casually by somebody. And I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. So in Massachusetts, right, where you have joint committees of members of the House and the Senate working together on different issues, as we talked before, there's like the Joint Housing committee and the Joint Judiciary Committee and the Joint Education Committee and many others.
Joint rule ten refers to the joint laws that govern the House and Senate. And it's a deadline that they created for themselves that says that all committees need to take action on all of the timely filed bills in their committees’ purview by the first Wednesday of the term. And what that means is that they can do one of it creates a branch point and one of a few different options can follow.
They can give the bill a favorable report, so they send the bill out of their committee and onto the next stage of that bill's life. They can give it an adverse report which is voting down and ending its life. They can give it an extension which says, we haven't made up our mind yet, or we haven't even thought about this bill yet, and we're just giving ourselves a new deadline.
Or they can send it to study, which is a polite way of ending the life of the bill. One thing that's just always an important bit of legislative terminology is whenever something gets talked about as being sent to study, it is not because legislators want to do their own research about a bill or to actually commission a study. It is a polite way of killing something.
I've always joked that I would love somebody to go to the library in the state house and ask for the study of these different bills, or sent for the study. Presumably it exists somewhere. Can you show it to me offices and ask that? What that meant is that all of these bills that got filed back last, the start of last year, the committees had to decide something.
So either that bill is continuing on now, living under ways and means, typically, and having kind of a nice boosting its campaign, they have an extension. So there's another deadline that might then become another deadline, become another deadline, or unfortunately, the lifespan of the bill is over, and it will, as I like to say, many of them will rise from the ashes, like the phoenix at the start of the next legislative session. For decades and decades it continues by the people, by the legislators who know making those efforts.
And, Jordan, I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts about, do we have to do it this way? Yeah. All other states do this, or how does this, how does this fit with it? It's so telling that we've allowed this to become the normality for Massachusetts politics. Just to be clear, they could pass any bill in 2023.
They could pass bills. It is so weird that our legislature is full time. It meets all the time, in theory, for two years,but it treats its legislative sessions like they're in Texas and they only meet at an even number year to pass bills and it just does not need to work this way.
You pay them to legislate, not just in between February and July of an even number year. They actually could pass bills in February of last year, in March of last year, in April.
They could pass bills at any time. But they do this thing where they just wait and wait. And in some sense, it's great that all of these bills that we care about are getting extended past the joint rule ten day which is a day when they're supposed to have some sort of report on them. But also, what have you been doing? Housing isn't getting better. It's not more affordable in Massachusetts.
You could pass real housing bills. Not one. You could pass several ways to attack the fact that it's unaffordable to live in Massachusetts at any point in 2023. They could have passed a bill and chose to instead pass a tax cut for dead billionaires. Right. Like, that's what they did.
But that's it. They don't do anything else. But they could.
And I don't want us to think that this is a normal way for a legislature that meets for two year cycle to act like it's the Texas legislature and everything has to be done at a short amount of time. But it does reflect the fact that our legislature is controlled by three or four people, that they're just in charge. Of course this is what happens.
Of course it bottlenecks because the legislature no longer legislates. Legislators don't have a real job. They goto the place, they get told what to do, and then they leave and collect a paycheck.
They don't do much else. Occasionally they'll show up to a hearing. Occasionally they'll say nice things about it.
Some of them will do real work to try to move legislation and write legislation. But most of these bills are the same bills that get filed, to Anna's point over and over and over again. They don't even have to write bills.
Right. So this is bizarre. It's dysfunctional.
It reflects the total failure of our democratic legislature and leadership. And they treat it like this is normal, andpeople in the lobbyists treat it like it's normal. Oh, joint rule ten day.
Are we going to get our bill out? Let's send an email to tell people the day beforehand to call their legislator. As if that's going to matter. Or that's how legislating should work to make sure it gets out of committee.
Like, this is bonkers. This is not a regular thing that works.
Anna, do you want to go? I was just going to say that in case there are any listeners where this is one of your first ones you're listening to, we really encourage you to listen to some of the ones early at the beginning of this season, season five, which was so long ago, but listen to stuff about the power dynamics between the speaker of the House and the rest of the legislators in the House, that it is essentially a dictatorship, and the speaker makes all the decisions about which bills are going to pass, which bills are going to fail. And this is what Jordan is talking about, where the average legislator, they don't actually have a job to do because the speaker won't allow them to do their work, which forces these bottlenecks because you've only got like 5,6,7,8, people who are ever touching the actual text of those bills and those are people in leadership. But Jonathan,go ahead.
Oh, yeah. I was going to note that what's wild about the process is that the reason that they created the joint rule ten day is because they weren't reporting on anything until the very end of the session. And so they created themselves, gave themselves a new deadline so that at least something might emerge from committee earlier that has done nothing to change the fact that everything's still bottlenecked at the end of the session.
What it does, it's always that fascinating and perverse impact of deadlines is that you really don't start things much earlier, like the deadline forces you to start things earlier, before that new earlier deadline. But do you do things like months before the deadline, weeks before the deadline? No, it's just help of the deadline. They Get some things out earlier because as Jordan noted, they could have been spending last year reporting out bills at any given time.
They could after a hearing, make a decision. When you hear from a bunch of people about the bill, they could after then decide if they want to move the bill on or cut the bill off. At the very least they know after hearing they don't want to pass the bill.
And maybe it's a good bill or bad, but it's kind of obvious by that point, especially like smaller bills that have no traction and no real people behind them at all. But everything just gets pushed off. And the inefficiency of the legislative process here is one of the things that always gets me, because there are some inefficiencies that one wants to accept because they accomplish other goals.
Right. But they have inefficiencies that aren't productive. Well, you weren't accomplishing other goal, other valuable goals.
Right. Before you pressed record, you were saying, oh, this is a remarkably unproductive legislative session. And I was, hey, like people have in fact remarked on it, there are newspaper articles talking about this is one of the least productive sessions of the Massachusetts legislature.
And even compared to other states, like we do nothing, our legislature is, we don't do. So let's, we've got a bunch of bills that I know we've talked about on this podcast before, and I just want to kind of rattle through some of those to give people an idea of whether they are moving forward. What about, let's not take too long, but the transfer fee is an interesting one because it's also in the housing bond bill that the governor sent out.
So give us a little bit about what is it doing in joint rule ten day, and then what is its chance of passing and what exactly. Just tell us a little bit about the context. Yeah.
The real estate transfer fee proposal is, as a reminder from folks, the one that would enable cities and towns to pass a small fee on high end real estate transactions to create dedicated funding for affordable housing in their city or town, that, like many bills, got an extension for the bill itself. A lot of the things, it got an extension until the end of April. But with that, and a number of other housing bills exist as campaigns, largely in the context of the housing bond bill now, which is kind of what Governor Healy had introduced last fall, her bond bill has a narrower version of the transfer fee proposal.
So a lot of the advocacy now is centered on strengthening what's in the bond bill and fighting back against the disingenuous opponents trying to take it out entirely. So it's one of those interesting cases where the bill itself has its own continued life, although a lot of the energy around it is directed towards the housing bond bill, which would be the vehicle for ultimate passage. And I do want to comment, I should have maybe said this before we started on the individual things that when you look at a spreadsheet of all these bills, there's like a few that reported favorably and then.
Extension, extension, extension, extension, extension, extension, extension. The vast majority are extended to some future date. Yes, exactly.
It says, let's have another deadline. And on that new deadline, they might say, let's have another deadline, and then they might keep doing that until eventually the session runs out and they just send everything to study if it has. I mean, transfer fee is interesting because since it got into the governor's housing bond bill, not the version we want.
Right. But there is some version of a transfer fee that it seems like it may, in fact, move through the legislature.How about rent control? Also an extension that rent control has its extension until April 18 as well.
I think I said April 30. April 30 of the transfer fee. April 18 for rent control, when the housing committee will regroup and then decide if they feel like doing anything about it again, it's something that was needed a longtime ago.
Yeah. It's just a reminder. Remind people it's not even rent control.
It's not even rent stabilization. There's a great podcast we did about it. It's just to enable localities if they want to have some sort of bill.
What's great about it is it's not even an actual housing policy. It's to allow somebody else to do housing policy in the absence of state housing policy. That's the bill it’s to have the state stop being in the way of housing policy, because it's currently not only not passing anything to make it more affordable, it's actively stopping other people from currently who want to actually do something. So let's say the city of Boston wanted to do something it, and that's all this does, is it allows that to happen. It's like the perfect quintessential and fits perfectly with our last podcast about home rules.
Like it's just a quintessential Massachusetts thing. It's not only not acting, it's standing in the way of progress.Yeah, and then one thing that I think is also key when talking about this is how some bills can advance out of committee.
The fact that a bill advanced out of committee in a prior session is not in any way a one to one on its future trajectory. I thought about this with the mention of rent control, because the kind of rent control home rule competition back in 2020 got out of the housing committee. It seemed at the time that that was largely because of the House housing chairs election campaign going on then that it would be useful for that purpose.
So in a logical world, if you got your bill out of committee but it never makes it to the floor or to passage, those things that got out of committee the session before, barring any sudden terrible change of events, should be things that you could easily advance in the next session. Because these bills are the same. The hearings are going to be similar.
You've allegedly done the work that led you to want to report them out of committee, and yet still, at best, it's a delay to that same date, or if not, they are treated just like as any new bill and given an extension despite having advanced along past sessions. It's like this weird way in which the legislature operates in a perpetual state of amnesia so that their prior work always just seems to be forgotten. I think it's also important just to name.
You were so soft about it, Jonathan. But let's just be clear. The chair of Honin had a challenger who was like,he's the chair of housing committee and has never passed anything on housing.
And then magically this bill that never moves, moved. All it did was move out of committee and voters were like, let's reelect him. And then he's not facing a challenger.
And magically we've gone back to, it's never moving. And all it did was move out of committee, didn't pass. He still hasn't asked.
He's the chair of a housing committee that has not passed housing. I want people to really take to heart. I want people to listen to this.
Do not accept that a bill moving forward is real progress. It is not. It is often exactly this kind of thing.
They're simply trying to fool you so that you react to the same people who will never pass it. That is really important for people to understand. Yeah.
To view it as the opportunity for progress. It is not the progress itself. And it is not something that somebody inherently deserves a gold star for achieving if it doesn't advance.
And that was because Honin didn't even say housing share. So the whole thing was like, he needs to stay on for doing all of his great work about housing, which he's not like anymore. Yeah, he got moved off the committee.
And then on top of that, and I think it's not just the voters did this right. You'll have people who we share values with say to our faces, Honan moved our bill for us. And I'm just like, to where, but it's just like, it's not just the legislators themselves that reinforce this.
It's our own organizations that you're giving money to who are reinforcing this bad actions. They are going up there and lobbying and then telling you, oh, you got to reelect this person. This happens all the time.
Where really terrible people who oppose simple, who oppose a lot of things, have organizations whose names, you know, will just vouch for them because they would rather keep this ridiculous system going than dream of a better system where actual policy can pass. And so they'll rep for these terrible people, all the, you know, names that we trust, names that are advocating for important things, opposing Trump. And then locally they're now, repping for the opposite, for the hope, the promise that I'm hoping that we can buzz through a few more of these.
Let's talk a little bit about, just give us some updates on debt free future, which is about free public colleges or debt free public colleges here in Massachusetts. So that also got an extension. The debt free future has an extension until March 1.
I would say that I do not expect the joint higher education committee to be, I'd be pleasantly surprised if given how soon we are to March 1, they will have actually reported something out, and it seems likely that they'll just give themselves another extension on March 1. I think it's important to note that likely they're going to give some money towards the gut governor's version of this, which is, again, a more mediocre version, and they'll call it a day. I think we'll take a centimeter towards the goal and they'll be like, look at the mile we just ran.
I think that's likely to happen. Okay, hear me out. The mention about how things getting out of one stage don't necessarily mean a full thing.
Hear me out. An escape room where the goal is to take the different bills and get them out of the escape room. Um, I want to list.
This is amazing. I want to list another one, which is the Safe Communities act, which is one of my favorite ones to talk about, because we had a Trump presidency, and Massachusetts was the only blue state to do nothing to oppose Trump in some way. And here we are on the verge of maybe a more fascist version of theTrump administration, and we're still trying to do the bare minimum to say that we believe that a state full of immigrants should still be a place where people can come and not have the full force of the federal government in lots of terrible ways.
It's a really simple bill which says that the police locally aren't also doing federal enforcement of immigration law. That's it. Not anything controversial.
It has a few other things in there, but that's the gist. And our legislature still can't pass this bare minimum piece of legislation to have our local police focus on local policing as minimally as they even do that job.Medicare for all, anyone? Oh, sorry.
It did get an extension to April eighth. That's the same thing. It's a good example, because I believe it finally got out of the house side of public safety toward the very end of last session.
And then you would think that that might mean that something new would happen, that would continue to build on that, but it's just treated just the same. Medicare parole is interesting enough. Medicare.
And I don't understand why this is the case. The healthcare financing committee just has a different reporting deadline than all of the other committees. So everything in their committee has, like, a built in extension to March 27.
So that's when that will probably, again, get another extension. They're not under this joint rule ten. Exactly.
On quarantine note. Unfortunately, some bills did not make it. What's unfortunate is, as we were talking about last session, about enabling cities and towns to pass their own laws that the election laws committee kind of sent to study, as I noted before, the polite way of ending the bill's life for the session, several of the bills that would have given municipalities the ability to extend the franchise in different ways locally.
So whether that meant allowing 16 and 17 year olds to vote in local elections, and we had a speaker on that on an earlier episode, whether that's for something like all resident voting. So like allowing green card holders,students here with visas, et cetera, to vote in local elections also got sent to study. Same for local, kind of thelocal option for ranked choice voting.
So enabling any city or town who wants to do that, to be able to do that with no additional hurdles. It shouldn't be that complicated for cities and towns to pass legislation. Yes.
All right, we got a few more here. Pilot reform. Tell us a little bit about what this one does.
It also got an extension. Right. So like almost everything else, so that's also an extension until, looking at spreadsheet till the end of April.
And what this is something that, so with pilot, for those who aren't familiar, it stands for payment in lieu of taxes. And pretty much every municipality has some large institutions that are tax exempt. They're your hospitals.
They're the colleges, the universities, some of the larger cultural institutions that have nonprofit status. And Even when, as is a case where, let's say that a lot of the hospitals and the larger universities don't really act very nonprofit-esque and how they work, but they are tax exempt. And so that can be a huge drain on municipal finances.
And that bill would have created a system to enable municipalities to require a certain amount of money from larger institutions as a kind of payment in lieu of taxes. That's typically been, the percentage for that has typically been, let's say, based on an underestimate of what those municipal, what the city has to pay as a service to those institutions, because they're still served by the fire department, they're still served by water and sewer and the roads, et cetera, that they should contribute to. And often even, it's always wild to me in Boston, where we are very institution heavy, and there's a pilot system in place in Boston.
It needs to be improved. The contribution should be larger and they should be more required. So many of these universities pay so little, and Harvard even once tried to argue that paying payroll taxes for its employee salaries should count to pilot.
Wow. When it's like, following the law does not exempt you from other commitments. Yeah, but I think the structure of this is that they would have to pay, like, some percentage, like, a quarter of the real estate tax that they would normally pay.
I mean, we can't even get our state legislator to pass, and we're talking over a billion dollars. We're only talking about these gigantic institutions. Absolutely.
It's 15 million for the threshold. That's different from, let's say, the billion threshold is for the endowment tax bill,but for a nonprofit valued it over with property valued over $15 million to be able. And that the cities or towns,if they so chose, could require kind of pilot payments equivalent to 25% of what they would otherwise owe.
A small fraction of what they would otherwise owe. My God. Okay, so let's cover a couple more.
Who has some favorites? We had prison moratorium public banking. We already talked a little bit about with the prison moratorium. That one's interesting because it gets to one of the weird quirks of the legislature,where there are some bills that get sent to different committees in the House and Senate.
So that in the House, the prison moratorium bill, and as a reminder to people, that would basically putting a moratorium on new prison and jail construction, because we do not need more prisons and jails inMassachusetts that will not ultimately keep. People can. And also, as was made clear by the women in MCI Framingham during the hearing, there's a lot of unused space in the existing facility, and money should be spent on programming, not on building new beds that are being built to be used.
But that was in the judiciary committee on the House, where it exists, got sent to study, which was disappointing to see that Chairman Mike Day decided to end the life of the bill in the House. But it's got an extension on the Senate side, where it exists, in the state administration and regulatory oversight committee.That's another great example to the point they passed that past session, they passed the prison moratorium,and then Charlie Baker vetoed it.
So you would think, hey, you passed this, why don't you fast track it in the new session? Because you already said that you supported it, and then the House voted even just to terminate. Unbelievable. Because heaven forbid they finished their work.
But also. What a wild ride. Just to jonathan's point, I should say that Mike Day voted for a bill that he then got rid of.
Yeah, the same. Less honestly, because, again, less focus from the know. I think ultimately, these people are not committed to the things that they say that they're committed to.
They'll lie to your face just to keep power. So I think Mike day is a good version of that. So I just think, what is.
How, like, think about how weird that is. They could have just passed it again in January. They could have literally surpassed it in January.
But no, anything that Baker had vetoed that got cut short. They could have been like, let's like, pass. Put them on Healy's desk.
Yeah. That would make the most logical know. It's not like there's been a third of the house has turned or a quarter or a fifth or a 6th or a 7th.
I mean, some minuscule fraction. And these people voted for these things that they're now just like, yeah. Ithink the other one that I think Anne and I both are interested in is Medicare for all, which has a different reporting deadline of March 27.
But I think it's a good reminder that health insurance is unaffordable in Massachusetts. There is yet another report that came out about sort of like, we're all screwed. This is really getting bad.
It's much worse. We're losing doctors. There aren't enough nurses.
This system doesn't work. It turns out doctors don't want to work in a system where the only thing that matters is how much money they make and getting to spend six minutes. If they spend more than six minutes with patient, they'll get admonished by some administrator who's just looking for money.
Like, imagine you went to medical school. You care deeply about helping people, and some person who wants to make money is like, how dare you spend eight minutes with a person? Right? Guess what? That's not enjoyable for them either. So we're not doing anything to make it our medical system better.
If anything, it's getting worse. We are seeing more and more attempts to consolidate, which just means less and less ability for us, for regular people to get access to care and get access to care in an affordable way,that is getting worse. And on top of that, all these systems they've put in place, instead of just doing Medicare For all that will just control costs, have completely failed.
And now we're having a whole system, a whole hospital close, and whole systems close, even though they're supposed to be oversight. Guess what? There's no oversight. And so now we're in even more of a crisis around our medical systems.
These could all be fixed with really simple solution that other countries do. But instead of doing the thing that they say that they tell people, they tell voters that they believe in when voters ask them for it, instead of doing the thing that experts say would save money and work better. They are so beholden to corporate interests and to leadership that it continues to be the case that we cannot get movement on this really simple solution.
I don't know. I get reports you see Blue Cross blue shield on these people. The system is collapsing on itself.
And literally, the legislature is just like, maybe we'll do nothing. Yeah. Let alone prescription drug prices are out of control.
They're not affordable. It's really hard to get. I could endlessly talk about the fact that I have had asthma since I Was three, and yet somehow every month, it's some sort of bizarre process that I have to go through to get my asthma medication that I need to breathe.
And I'm just like, I've been three. I still have asthma condition. Yeah.
The insurance and my doctor's office and the one place I can get a pharmacy because they've all closed, are all somehow just bizarrely unaware that this is the thing. And I have my side hustle, which is just to get medication that I have to pay for. Yeah.
And everybody has these stories. Everyone has a story like this, but they do nothing. They do nothing well.
And I think that's the motto for the day. They do nothing. So I hope people have enjoyed our joint rule ten day podcast.
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