Why is Massachusetts Failing? If you think our state is doing fine, think again.

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Do you think Massachusetts is doing pretty well, and doesn't need your activism? Then this is the podcast for you. Today we talk about how far our policies are from the views of the electorate, which policies are voted down year after year that are in the Democratic party platform, and policies where Massachusetts falls behind many other states including deep red states.

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 2. 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

Anna Callahan: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our mission here is to help you transform state politics. We know that together we can make Massachusetts policy reflect the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And that's why we talk about why state politics is so broken what we could have here in Massachusetts if we fixed it, and how you can get involved. So today, we are going to talk about how the Massachusetts State Government is failing our residents. I know each of us has had a lot of conversations with people who are very involved in politics very devoted to creating a better world for ourselves, and for others who, you know, have been traditionally marginalized. And each of us, the three of us here has heard the same thing over and over, "Oh, we live in Massachusetts; we're doing fine. We must be doing fine. Because aren't our reps mostly Democrats?" Can't tell me guys, you've heard this before.

Jordan Berg Powers: 1:07

I may have heard this one.

Jonathan Cohn: 1:09

"Even our Republicans are better than other states'." Oh, yeah.

Anna Callahan: 1:14

We've all heard it. So this is one of the things that we want to talk about today. We hope to help people understand just how much we should be expecting more from our state government. We're going to talk about all the policies that get voted down year after year, despite being very popular among voters, all the policies that are actually in the Democratic Party platform, and yet cannot get pass for decades. We'll talk about how Massachusetts, despite having an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters and constituents, falls behind many other states, even deep red ones, in policies that we should have passed long ago. But before we go on, let me introduce my super amazing co hosts. I will

start with Jordan: 2:00

you want to introduce yourself?

Jordan Berg Powers: 2:03

Yeah, my name is Jordan Berg Powers(he/him). And I have 13 years of experience in Massachusetts politics.

Anna Callahan: 2:09

Fantastic. And Jonathan--

Jonathan Cohn: 2:11

Jonathan Cohn(he/him), joining from Boston, and I am pushing on 10 years of work in issue in electoral advocacy in Massachusetts.

Anna Callahan: 2:22

And I am Anna Callahan (she/her), coming at you from Medford. Number of years, five or six? I don't know, good question. But loving it. Love talking with you every week and all the other guests that we have. So today, I want to go ahead and dive into the policies that are popular in Massachusetts, or they might be actually in the Democratic Party platform, and yet, they cannot get passed, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. These are policies where there is a

fantastic law: 3:05

it is already written, it has been worked on by a coalition for many years, for decades, and yet, it can't pass through the legislature. So I'm just going to open it up. I know we all have our favorites. Who wants to go first?

Jordan Berg Powers: 3:25

Well, I guess I'll start with my favorite, which is Medicare for All, or some sort of universal health care, which has been in the Democratic Party plaatform for many years now. It's super popular among people. It's super popular among the people whom the party that supposedly is in power in Massachusetts represents. Legislators themselves mention it as something they want to tackle when they go to when they run for office. And then when they get there, it magically disappears, nothing happens. They don't even try to work on it or do it. And this is while you know health care continues to be one of those things where people have health insurance, but they're not getting good care. They can't afford it. The specialists are impossible -- they take forever to get to. Doctors are struggling under the weight of having loads and loads of staff that have to deal with health insurance companies not wanting to pay for things. And as the hospital systems continue to get bigger and gobble up more things, the whole system is less and less rational and affordable. And yet we can't get it or even work on it or even try to tackle this big fish.

Anna Callahan: 4:31

And I'm just going to jump in because you can go to masscare.org. Mass-Care is the organization that has been working toward getting this bill passed, getting basically Medicare for All, free health care free at the point of service, passed for everyone in Massachusetts. And every two years they run non-binding ballot measures, which just takes the temperature in different districts of whether people actually want this bill passed. They've run in, oh, so many dozens and dozens of districts over the last 20 years. And I think the highest was 88%. In favor, the lowest was 55% in favor, but lots and lots of districts in the 80s and the 70s. In the 60s, this is a popular bill, nowhere did it fail to pass. And this is what happens every two years whenever they do these. So there's no question at all that in Massachusetts, this bill has majority support.

Jonathan Cohn: 5:36

Just talking about the idea of universal public goods, free public transit is something that doesn't have the same long kind of history as Medicare for All because that bill has been around for a long time. I know that it was in the party platform for almost a decade, definitely more than a decade because it was already in the party platform in 2014, when I started doing stuff for party issues back when Don Berwick was running for governor. And I remember pointing out about how he was the only one who supported this main thing in the platform. But free public transit, which is getting a lot more attention in recent years, it's something when you poll people about whether or not we should be making public transit, the buses and the trains, etc., free people say yes, because they understand that, one, cost is a hurdle for many people, that if you can make people's lives easier, by taking away that cost, that is a good thing. Also, people hate waiting. And so if we can do things that make people not have to wait to board, because every each person has to pay or however, ways that we create bottlenecks in people's experience of public goods. I remember myself when I was on one of the kind of pilot free buses in Boston when I was coming back from a friend's party and I realized, "Oh, that's actually a good way to get close, close to home." And I just walked right on. And I was amazed how easy that that was from the experience of a transit rider. Just being able to walk on is such a more positive experience and a recognition that that's a part of our essential infrastructure to move people on. Also good for climate purposes, to get people not driving, or not taking an Uber or Lyft to go whether they're aiming to go either. And again, ranging in support from a poll that Mass Inc had done before, whether it's 54% support, I believe it was for commuter rail, to like I think pushing at 80 for making buses free and low income neighborhoods, but kind of a solid support for this. And it can just, although you see action on the municipal level typic to do this, on the state level, it's just kind of a shrug with as much as they can really consider doing the idea of"Maybe we'll do a low-income fare." Which many people couldn't even access.

Jordan Berg Powers: 8:08

Yeah, and just to add to that, like buses are always late. They run on time, when they don't have to worry about people having to find money, or if I change or find them hard. It's safer for the bus drivers, right? A lot of the they're not going to get robbed, they're not going to get yelled at, that people can just come on and come off, right? So it's just like, the system runs better. And it and it's it, you know, and it's a better experience, so people are more likely to want to do it. And on top of all of that, it's super popular. People want it for their things, right? They want it as a way to get things.

Anna Callahan: 8:46

Yep, I'm gonna jump in with one of mine, which of course, whether you want to call it transparency, whether you want to call it knowing how your own state rep is voting, you know -- in almost every other state, the state legislature is under public records law, all of our cities are under public records law, you know, national government is under public records law. It just means that you get to see how your representatives that you have elected to vote a certain way, that you're expecting to vote a certain way on certain bills, that you can see how they vote on those bills. This is not something crazy, it is not something, you know, that we should not expect. And again, this wonderful organization Act on Mass, you can go to their site actonmass.org. They also worked together with Mass-Care; they helped each other to get their nonbinding ballot measures passed. They were also in 20 different districts -- this is basically to make sure that you know committee votes are public that you get to know how your own state rep is voting, how other state reps are voting, as well as other transparency reforms -- with rates ranging from 94, over 94%, down to 74%. So literally not a single district, does this get down to only 60%? Support? Average, I think of 84%. This is popular. And there are of course, reasons, of course, reasons. Incentives, why the state reps don't want for their own votes to be made public. But this is clearly something that we should have.

Jordan Berg Powers: 10:30

Yeah. I like to pause and say how there is no other legislature that does this. They always have these excuses, and always rationalize it. But no one else is doing this. No one else is, you know, in a democracy, no one else is hiding their votes from the public. In most states, even states that most of the legislators themselves look down, you can find the bills that people are trying to pass easier than in a state with every biotech company, MIT, right? Like we have all of these things. And our website looks like 1993, Geodesign. I mean, it's impossible to find things. And then they make it and then they make themselves impossible to track to follow. It's illegal to take pictures of the vote in the state House. If you're in the statehouse, and you want a public vote, and you try to take a picture of a public vote, you will be arrested. They will kick you out of the chamber for taking pictures of their votes. That's how restrictive and how lack of transparency that thing our legislature is. it is not in the same realm of any state in the country. There's no municipality I'm aware of in Massachusetts, our 351 towns, where people are taking votes and their committees and discussion and nothing and you can't find it.

Anna Callahan: 12:05

it's illegal. It's against state law.

Jordan Berg Powers: 12:11

Think about how bonkers this is, like we're into totalitarian places where people take votes and secret, and they pretend like this is a normal, rational thing that you can defend. The news media here, the Boston Globe, they'll talk about it, and they'll print their nonsense about this. But it's out of step with basic democracy, to not know, to not have votes, to not know how people vote. Think about how bonkers this all is, to have no ability, and for the decisions, who the bosses, the pay of the person, all the staff. That every staff member works for the Speaker of the House or the Senate. They don't even work for your rep. But that is bonkers town authoritarianism that they rationalized as normal.

Jonathan Cohn: 13:00

My favorite thing when it comes to the lack of transparency is how they kind of go around, they do an end run around their own rules, where their rules do technically say that if they had a meeting, and it happened, like in person, and somebody requested a vote, that there's a certain degree of transparency that would be required around that vote being a recorded vote. They never take committee votes in person, so that the rules around that simply don't apply. They just take them over email, where there was no such requirements, like where the requirements are not the same, which is just a kind of a striking carve-out. I also often remember when one state representative noted to me how the bigger reason for people not wanting their committee votes to be public is less of people not wanting to see how they voted, but whether they voted because so few people ever actually vote because often that they'll get an email that's like two hours vote if you can, nobody votes unless they're particularly impassioned, things slides through. Or not Which could include like sending everything to study in mass, the mass tabling of everything, and nobody has to be on record of having that even shut up.

Anna Callahan: 14:27

Let's do one more. Let's do one more that's popular here.

Jordan Berg Powers: 14:31

We think of our state, again, as a place where we're forward-thinking and we're sort of out of things, but it's right to work state, which means that we don't have basic protections for firing and and hiring and our our oversight of unions, you know. We do not actually have strong union protections in the state. You know, there is a bar from public employees from from striking. If we attack teachers, we have weakened the ability of teachers and teachers unions to have a say in their workplace. They constantly get demagogued. And we don't have, you know, we don't have some basic, easy rights around making it easy to become a union member in Massachusetts. You know, there are so many ways that we are behind other Republican states, right? Like we're there are more rights and protections for workers, at least vis-a-vis union support in states that we would be shocked in that we don't have here. And you know, over and over again, the unions are the backbone of most of the legislators running for office in terms of money, in terms of any bodies, and yet they continually do not support basic things for them. I live, you know, in Worcester, and Worcester is the least union-friendly town or city I have ever lived in. And it's shocking to me. We have a huge public works paid for by public dollars, and only a small portion of it was a union jobs. There was whole portions of the development of the site, at the worksites that were just bad employers who have been sued and yet, right. And so, you know, there's just a lack of just follow-through with basic union protection. If we were a state that had a vibrant, if only our attorneys general and and our governor, and our state reps and state senators treated a Starbucks the way right-wing governments treat abortion clinics and places, right? Imagine that. Imagine if we were as dogged in support of union rights as they are in suppressing women and suppressing people's reproductive freedom.

Jonathan Cohn: 16:57

I was gonna tag in there, mentioning the Attorney General's power around labor. I'm always struck about how difficult this is to pass in the Legislature -- more in the House than in the Senate -- but even still, it's something that the Attorney General can really just do on their own is around wage theft, law enforcement. Wage theft is a very, very common crime and a very not prosecuted crime that I would like to think that if we polled Massachusetts voters on whether they like wage theft, I would like to think that outside of the contingency of the people committing wage that there is a not huge groundswell of support for the wage theft movement,"right-sizing wages." That it's something that our attorney general of your attorneys general could be doing far more kind of assertively than they have, as well as the Legislature, and the onus is much more on the House and the Senate on this. But it's something that the Attorney General doesn't doesn't need to wait for the legislature to act to step up the enforcement.

Anna Callahan: 18:16

Yep. So before we go on, we are gonna get to how we compare to some other states. But before we do, I just want to make sure that we take the time to thank some of the incredibly generous people who have donated to the show in the last two weeks. Please do let us know if we can thank you personally: we would love to do that. And you, dear listener, can also donate any amount. That is totally amazing. Whether it's the price of a cup of coffee per month, or major donation, anything helps us to get more people involved in transforming our beautiful state, and by doing so also transforming national politics as well. And if you are thinking that some of your friends might want to listen to this podcast, some of our goals are to increase subscribers and listeners, we know that there are at least 10,000 progressives who have volunteered in progressive love electoral work, and that is who we're reaching out to, especially this season season five. So if you believe in fighting for social justice, and reducing inequality in health care for all in affordable housing, in reforming our criminal justice system, and if you want to be part of getting those policies and more passed, then this is the podcast for you. Pass it along to your friends. We would love to to hear from you. And without further ado, we are going to go on to part two. This is our comparison to other states. So people say, "We're doing great, we should be working in all these other states. They're doing so badly, you know. we're fine." Let's hear a little bit about how not fine we are doing here. You're in Massachusetts compared to a lot of other places.

Jonathan Cohn: 20:03

One thing I'd love to, I'd love to open with on this because when people from Massachusetts go to other states do political work, they can often do stuff in many other states. But the most frequent one, if you're going physically, is New Hampshire, and New Hampshire, unlike Massachusetts, has had same day registration and has had it for a number of decades. So whereas in Massachusetts, our legislature kind of wants to pat itself on the back for shortening the voter registration blackout period from 20 days before the election to 10, if you're in New Hampshire, you can actually just go into the polls and register itself on Election Day, which is essential for the simple reason that people move. And people, I would think that when people move, there are many different kinds of logistical things about moving that come in priority before my your registration, especially if you're somebody who has children. But, and attention goes up particularly in those final days before the election, and it's when campaigns ramp up, when media coverage ramps up, and engagement ramps up. And we're saying to people, "Sorry, you're already cut out of this process," unless you want to find a way of voting at your old location, which people always get concerned about, because they're not sure if they're even allowed to vote at an old site. And they can fill out that provisional ballot, which, if you still need to do process around, but they might not even get counted. Whereas other states, most of our neighbors in New England, already allow this. And we in Massachusetts will get riled up when we see things like Chris Sununu, in New Hampshire trying to rollback same day registration to target college students or when Scott Walker was doing that in Wisconsin, or other things where they're trying to weaken voting rights laws that they have that in their weaker form would still be stronger than what Massachusetts has. That's always a jarring disconnect for me that if we can realize that it's bad to weaken something in another state, we should think that we should think twice about why we still don't even have that thing.

Anna Callahan: 22:13

And did I hear correctly that we have the lowest turnout of black voters? of any state in the nation?

Jordan Berg Powers: 22:20

That's true. We do we have the lowest turnout Black voters.

Anna Callahan: 22:23

Yeah. And same day registration would definitely be really helpful.

Jordan Berg Powers: 22:30

And put us in line with other states. You know, another one along with voting, just to say is that we make it too difficult to vote. We just recently had this started this convoluted system of having to fill out a form to have absentee ballots sent to you. That's a needless sort of system. You know, Kansas has vote by mail. Maryland has vote by mail. Missouri, Montana, all have vote by mail systems. Utah has vote by mail systems. There is no need for us to be so far behind, let alone Colorado, California, Washington, which sends everybody a ballot for every election, just right to their home, we can do that. We should do that. There's no reason not to do it. And so, you know, this is a system again, where we are way behind other states, we find ourselves -- 20 other states. We think of ourselves as as a leader, on on democracy, right? We're the beacon of democracy started. And we are we are way behind other places on how easy it is to vote.

Anna Callahan: 23:43

Yeah, one of my favorites is universal pre-K, which I just assumed--living in Massachusetts, I just assumed nobody has a universal pre K. That's not a thing. And then I was looking at getting a job in Iowa. And my kid was four. And I was like, Well, what are we going to do? You know, if I'm, you know, if your whole family is gonna move to Iowa, and then it turns out, they have universal pre-K in Iowa. I was like, really? And that's not the only place. I think, what?, Alabama has universal pre-K. There's a lot of places -- red states, blue states -- that have universal pre-K for four-year-olds.

Jordan Berg Powers: 24:19

Georgia, Oklahoma. These are states that all Alabama have universal pre-K. Massachusetts, no.

Jonathan Cohn: 24:29

I mean, we can't be progressive like Alabama and Georgia.

Anna Callahan: 24:39

Minimum Wages, places that have minimum wage adjusted to inflation. You know, we could pop that one in.

Jordan Berg Powers: 24:46

Alaska has universal pre-K. I mean, sorry, Alaska has their minimum wage attached to the rises in inflation so that they don't have to reset it. We just recently got to our minimum minimum wage increase. And it's been eaten up by inflation almost immediately, which is predictable. Not to mention it's not remotely -- you can't live anyplace in Massachusetts while making minimum wage. And so again, this is, you know, it should be set to cost of living in the state. And it's not, you know? Yeah.

Jonathan Cohn: 25:22

In terms of things, just thinking in terms of costs, I'm always amazed when we see when we see stats about other states that allow in-state tuition for undocumented

students: 25:30

if you graduated from high school in the state, you should get the same benefits is all of the other students who graduated from high school in a state. But it's been dead since when the Massachusetts legislature shot this down, and then they're just too afraid to ever take it back up. But Texas has it. So like, Rhode Island has it. Oregon has it? Oklahoma has it. There are a number of other states that again, like with Texas, whenever there's a progressive thing that Texas does that we don't, it's like*come on*. Texas, is one of the states we often have invoke as a go-to Republican state. And they're terrible on so many things, but on that one, they've acknowledged that being slightly less xenophobic is actually good, which is hard for too many Massachusetts politicians.

Anna Callahan: 26:32

Or maybe what they're saying what they're thinking is, "Oh, we know that our residents and our voters want this. And they'll remember if we don't do this for them." Whereas here, nobody can know, the Democrats, they don't care because we're you in a party state. And so they just assume that put the D next to their name, it doesn't matter how they vote, it doesn't matter. And of course, we can't know how they vote. So, you know -- whether it matters how they vote, I mean, we don't even get to see how they vote. So they aren't held to account in the way that maybe in Texas, they are held to account for things that their residents actually need and are going to remember when they go to the polls.

Jonathan Cohn: 27:12

And it's also even with that, I would say definitely next to that is it's a part of the Texas Republican Party from back around, I think, like late 1990s, late 1990s. Or maybe it was before that, but their realization that they needed to soften on immigration as something vital to their continued success as a party. And so even if that they're harsh in some ways, and they're still terrible on border walls, that they needed to create space, because they needed to get votes from a Mexican American population in in Texas and so that they there definitely is when it comes to their popular support. It's very clear that the Texas Republicans saw this as an electoral thing that they needed to do that they needed to at least somewhat soften a reputation of them being particularly harsh toward immigrants and know that they're create goodwill with future voters by doing that. And in Massachusetts, because of the lack of competitive elections, people know that they if they can do pretty minimal work and still coast, there's no incentive to do work.

Anna Callahan: 28:18

Okay, I'm gonna jump on, I think last topic unless people jump in with more, but public college. So Massachusetts has what I heard is the fastest rising student debt. And what that really means is sort of the fastest disinvestment in public colleges. So meaning the state government has -- it used to be that public colleges were very inexpensive in Massachusetts, but you know, every two years last and last public money is going into that particular piece. And so that means more and more of that burden falls on the shoulders of students. And, you know, who's going to -- how are these people going to be able to enter family life, buy homes, you know, there, everything is being delayed? It's a real problem. And we are, you know, whether you look at it from the perspective of where we are specifically with tuition. But if you look at it from how much we have disinvested, year after year after year, we are among the worst.

Jordan Berg Powers: 29:32

So that that statistic comes from the Institute for College Access. And our our Massachusetts student loans grew 77%, fastest than every other state but one. So that is from the deep disinvestment, and that graph is starting in 2004, which we know is a time of the cuts by Democrats in divestment from public education as a whole, but definitely also higher public ed especially more than anyplace else. So Massachusetts residents have been asked to pay for the cost of this divestment more than anyplace else. And for me, it's also an important -- when we continually have to hear from sort of corporate forces in the media that we consistently and no matter what we do, if we raise taxes on some on rich people, we have to cut taxes for rich people someplace. I think it's important to remember these types of disinvestment, that we aren't even talking about getting back to 2014 levels of support for public higher education, we're just simply allowing college students to never have futures in a state that they already can't afford to buy a home, because their wages aren't enough, because we don't have any protected or anything for that, and they can't afford to get around. So it's just compounding the disinvestment from the public good that people that the state legislature does. And so when you have a consistent drumbeat that says that rich people should have to never pay their fair share, and if they're asked to pay a little bit of their fair share, that immediately has to be offset with deep disinvestment from the public good, remember that we're talking about a disinvestment from a public good that's already insufficient, that's already pulled to the bone. If I have to hear another person, say,"We just need to find places to cut money." Sure, every person can figure out how to save money on a paperclip here and there, but our state as a whole, we don't spend as much as we say we should, based on our values, if we lived out the values we put into law, if we funded everything fully that we say we care about -- feeding children, make sure people have a roof over their heads, making sure people are in safe homes, making sure that health care is affordable, right, all the things we've talked about so far, if we invested in those things, we don't have enough revenue to cover those types of investments. And that's why there's a bond bill every year. That's why there's some other lending thing that they gimmick, that they try to say that, they're pretending that they care about it, because they know that we're not meeting the needs of people, and we're not meeting the things. And so rich people live in places that have nice roads and good schools and safe to live in. Poor people and middle-class people leaving the state are leaving because they can't afford to live here. So if you want to keep rich people here, if you want to worry about competitiveness, make colleges affordable, so that great students go to them, make schools fantastic, make transportation, that's world-class that you have that you jump, jump on and jump off to live in those places. They don't want to live in Alabama. They don't want to live in tax competitive states, because those states are hellscapes for right. They want to live in places with good public investments.

Jonathan Cohn: 33:00

Just tying in on that, and I feel like it's something that should get I would like to see get far more attention in the coming years is when we talk about the competitiveness with other states. Do you know what makes us more competitive the fact that our state is not hostile to so many populations based on our thoughts. So when we when you see states that are basically they're going to be like, kind of pressing aggressive anti abortion laws. I mean, they're pas laws and laws that are kind of hostile to the LGBTQ community, especially doing that, especially to trans youth, that they're creating a hostile climate for often the type of like, upper middle class professionals that everybody says that they want to attract to the state. And so you don't need to suddenly give away a bunch of tax money like tax dollars to that company. The fact that they their workforce probably won't want to live in states that make it hostile for them or their children to live in those states is a reason for something that we know that and know that based on the tech kind of a welcoming element we are we have a competitive advantage. We also should do far more with the resources that we have.

Anna Callahan: 34:03

Great point. I am gonna do a little round robin, of what is your just a sentence or two about what you think about the Massachusetts State Legislature and how it has been doing for the last 20 years?

Jordan Berg Powers: 34:22

Yeah, I guess I'll just start and say as somebody who spent a lot of time sending these people to that building, it's just a constant disappointment that they that there is a lack of urgency around these issues, that they continue to persist and that the things that they celebrate are mediocre or a decade too late. You know, we have these big systemic issues about being able to get around, about being afford to live here, about having education that's quality and affordable, and health care that is accessible, not just health insurance that's accessible. And they just won't tackle these big issues, and they hide behind the fact that they don't have power. And then they don't do anything to them. They don't do anything to give themselves that power through transparency through accountability. And they're aided and abetted by a media system that is that is getting smaller, and being gobbled up by big corporations that have no interest in sort of investing in journalism. And those things together is a really bad place for us. And we cannot just think that this will continue forever. It will come to a head at some point.

Anna Callahan: 35:34

Yeah, Jonathan?

Jonathan Cohn: 35:36

Yeah. And I think that I was thinking of when it comes to, let's say, the legislature, Progressive Mass, where I work, is definitely not beloved amongst the Statehouse because of the scorecard we do every year of grading legislators on the recorded votes they take.

Anna Callahan: 35:50

Which is amazing. scorecard.progressivemass.com. It's great.

Jonathan Cohn: 35:55

And that I often hear about legislators who are upset like, "How dare I get a C?" Right? "Me progressive superstar, a C?" A lot of people believe in great inflation. And if we believe that an A is excellent, and a B is good and a C is average, and a DC is poor, and an F is failing, a lot of you will get a C, meaning that you're average. Even the good Republicans are still pretty bad in our legislature for all the credit people give them on a few issues. But that doesn't mean that you're going to be amazing. And I'm going to say you're doing an excellent job, keep up the amazing work rather than showing no, there's clearly room for improvement to do what what you probably told your constituents that you would fight for it, and what we clearly have the resources to do.

Anna Callahan: 36:54

My final words are that we should expect more. We should expect more from our state government, we should demand more. And if we do, then we will be able to expect more from our national government. I really want people to come away from this with the understanding that this right here in your own backyard. In Massachusetts, your state legislature is where you should be putting your time and effort, because it may be the best way that you can affect the national policies that matter to you. That's my final word. Thanks everybody so much. We love being here every week. As I love to say, send this episode to your mom, send this episode to your dad, send this episode to your friends. And subscribe. Give us some likes on social media. And we look forward to talking to y'all next week.