Lawmakers Breaking the Law

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Today we talk about the three times when the state legislature broke the law instead of passing progressive policy, to make sure that they crushed progressive policy. And those times include crushing clean elections (getting money out of politics), Medicare for All (healthcare as a right for all people who live here), and education funding reform (ensuring that everyone--no matter their race, no matter where they live--had access to a good childhood education).

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 42. 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 state legislature and state laws that truly represented the needs of the vast majority of the residents of Massachusetts.
And today we are going to talk about something that really fires me up–the three times, and there have been at least three when the state legislature broke the law, instead of passing progressive policy, they broke the law to make sure that they crushed progressive policy. And those include clean elections, getting money out of politics, passing Medicare for all, healthcare as a right for all people who live here, and education funding reform, and ensuring that everyone, no matter their race, no matter their funding and money that they have and where they live, that everyone had access to a good childhood education. So we're going to talk about those three.
Before we do, let me introduce my two fantabulous co hosts. I will start with Jordan, Jordan Berg Powers. He him. And I look forward to this conversation about how the legislature is lawless. Jonathan. Jonathan Cohn. He him his, have been watching the legislature for a number of years and looking forward to the discussion as well. And I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford.
And we are going to start with Jordan, who is going to talk to us about clean elections that passed in Massachusetts in the how it died. Yeah. So in 1998, voters voted to create a really good, clean election system.
Unfortunately, most people, this has been lost to history. But in 1998, voters passed by a two thirds majority, a system whereby in the 2000 election and following, people would get to sort of give a little bit of money and then public money would go to a person running for state Rep, state Senate. And the system worked is that it got matched.
So if you gave a little bit of money, more money came into the coffers so that people could spend less time raising money and being connected to rich people and more time talking to regular people and feeling less wedded to sort of corporations and to rich people and to the chamber and instead really a representational democracy. Because as the Supreme Court has said all the time, money speaks. And so the voters loved it.
Two thirds majority passed it in 1998 and the legislature immediately undid it. It did not even wait for it to be implemented. It first refused to appropriate money for it and then it went about gutting it.
But in 2002, the Massachusetts supreme judicial Court said that, quote, state legislature had violated the state constitution by refusing to appropriate funds required by the state's new election law. The law was approved by two thirds of voters in a ballot initiative in 1998 and established a system of voluntary public financing for candidates for state office. The legislature implemented the state's new clean elections laws, or repeat, the Supreme Court just said, violated the constitution by refusing appropriate funds, yada yada.
And basically what ended up happening is that the state, because it was so popular, the state house didn't want to just simply repeal it, although that's in and itself a problematic thing that it's not clear it should or could do, but it could have just said, like, you know what? We don't want to do it. But instead what it tried to do is kill it with 1000 cuts. And it took an appellate court to literally sell vehicles and land to fund the public the clean election laws so that some candidates could run through the law that got passed by candidates.
And the only person who successfully did so was then state Rep. Jamie Eldridge and now state senator. And after that election, the legislature moved it to be just constitutional officers.
So your governor, your attorney generals, people running for that office could get public financing. And eventually they limited it to the governors and limited how much money you could get so that it's ineffective. So rather than doing the thing in public of cutting it and getting rid of it, what they did was they killed it by 1000 cuts over time and tried to do so secretly in clear violation of the law.
Like, I think the other piece is just say this judicial court does not like to get involved in the legislature, but it was just such a clear violation of the law. They were like, yo, y'all, this is out of control. This is completely lawless.
And they did it basically unanimously. Like, there wasn't pushback from state reps on this. Yes, one thing I want to is how you started off with, oh, it passed in 1998 by two thirds majority.
Like before that, years and years of organizing, all of the work for years, thousands of hours of volunteers dedicating their time, their energy. And what happens when people do this and then the state just break through a law? They don't give a crap. All of those people are utterly devastated and never get involved and engaged again.
The death of democracy, the kind of democracy that is like people engaging in making their better place. And I just want to point out what's so jarring to me with this is that watching the way in which they so quickly kind of move to undermine the entirety of that contrast with their response to certain other corporate backed ballot questions. So if you think about the way in which legislators still talk about how, well, because in 1986, when voters passed a very idiotic tax cap law that we got to hear all about back in 2022 and 2023.
I think they made some decent tweaks to it, but it just still shouldn't exist as a law of capping the amount of money that the state is able to take in that the media and some of the legislators who are like, well, the voters spoke of like the voters of 1986.I wasn't born yet. A number of people who voted on that are probably dead or live in another state.
And why that, over 30 years after, gets treated as sacrosanct when something like that immediately. Same with the rent control. That because in the kind of the early 90s, landlords were able to ban rent control in the state.
What was that slim majority by slim majority, right when the municipalities that actually had rent control wanted to keep it? That took the issue off the table for years because legislators were like, well, the voters spoke and they don't want this. It's Like the voter spoke by a narrower margin when the communities that had it said they wanted to keep it, and that was causing no harm to all of the other people who said that they didn't want it. And it's just a striking double standard when it comes to the underlying.
When something serves a public interest or those kind of with less advantage and connections that they always like, well,maybe we should think twice about this. Whereas when they kind of benefit the most well off or even terrible parts of society,they're quick to keep them as sacrosanct for as long as possible. And I just want to say, like you said before we started recording, the reaction to the Uber Lyft law is not like, we'll just do whatever we want.
Who cares? They're like, well, we have to deal with Uber and Lyft, because what if they put their ballot initiative, not to mention, I'll just say really quickly about Uber is when black people had penny cabs and latino people had rideshare They Were just like, people got arrested, they had their lives taken away. They got thrown in jail.
Uber does the same thing as a penny cab, and there's no oversight of that. No one's arresting the executives of Uber for illegally creating taxis. But now that not only did they break laws that black people literally went to jail for and brown people literally went to jail for, now they're trying to create whole new systems of a subclass of workers, and the legislature is like,whoa, we're powerless to do anything about it with our supermajority, right? Totally incapable of doing anything after the fact, like, quick side comment, because then we have other issues.
That fact that people still call them ride sharing companies as though that they're carpooling is one of my pet peeves. Yes,that's right. It's a taxi.
It's a taxi thing. And I mean, it's the same thing with the. Right.
The same thing. A bunch of businesses said they'd repeal the higher sales tax and they bent over backwards to hurt workers to avoid that thing happening. Not because it's good policy, because sales taxes are not good.
They're not good policy, they're not good taxation, but because it made them look bad. That's it. Because it makes them look bad.
To repeal something that they had an opportunity to pass, progressive taxation that didn't hurt poor and brown people, Imean, to poor people and middle class people and instead passed a tax package that hurt poor people and middle class people. And the businesses were like, well, we'll attack that because people hate that. And they were like, what if we hurtmore poor people instead of looking bad about it.
Right. So it's just so selective when these people, and just to be clear, it's some of the same people because some of them are still there. So it's literally some of the same people on the clean elections.
The other piece I just want to say, and then, Anna, we should move on is it was a lot of people, I think, depending on who you ask, it was ten years of working on it. It literally destroyed an organization. Some donors to progressive causes, walked away from Massachusetts for over 20 years, did not fund in Massachusetts because of it.
So it was not just a core strike at democracy, which it was. It was just a clear power grab by a few people against democratic oversight. It also was a way to just absolutely set back progressive change in the state and to wrestle control back to more corporate conservative people.
Right. It just absolutely destroyed because, yeah, people did. It turns out when you work on something and then people just disregard it like that, it really does set it back.
And they never want to set back business interests that way, but they're happy to set people, they're happy to set regular people back that way. So let's go on to our second one, the Medicare for all one. My mind was blown when I heard this from the organization that has been pushing for Medicare for all here in Massachusetts for many years,for decades.
And basically the story is not too different from calling elections. A big coalition got together. Thousands of people were working on this.
They managed to get 90,000 signatures in eight weeks from every legislative district. And by getting those signatures, what it did was it kicked off a mandatory process where the bill had to get voted on two consecutive sessions in a row by the legislature. And so the legislature voted the first time, and during that vote, the bill passed.
This is a Medicare for all bill, basically passed 153 to 41. So we're talking wildly. This was not close, right? So wildly in favor.
And, of course, leadership saw that, and they realized that if they allowed it to get voted on the second time, it was going to pass. So what they did was they just never let it come out of committee. They just wouldn't let it come out of committee.
If it can't come out of committee, nobody could vote on it. So if nobody could vote on it, it can't pass. So they did that and killed it.
Just total death by it disappearing into the ether. And again, you got to remember that the supreme judicial Court ofMassachusetts, they do not like to step in. They really don't.
But in 2007, they said, you know, you can't just do that. The law states that if they get the 90,000 signatures, you have to vote on it. You can't just not have a vote.
That's the whole point of the. And so the supreme judicial Court said, sorry, you broke the law. But then what did they say? They said, but we're just the courts. We can't do anything about it. Oops. There's an Oopsie in Massachusetts.
And nothing happened. Nothing. They broke the law.
And yet not one single legislator went to jail, was fined, was taken off of the legislature, was told they can't run again. Nothing Happened to anyone, even though they broke the law in a way that affected the lives of 7 million people, the lives, the pocketbooks. I mean, the devastation that the amount of change that that would have caused, the amount that would have helped 7 million people is, like, indescribable.
Not only that, but you know what would have happened? It would have gone national. Other states would have picked it up if we had done that. So the amount of damage and literally people dying and going bankrupt and all sorts of stuff that happened because of that, not one person saw repercussions of any kind.
Nothing. Remember when we used to have, like, sound effects and music? Yeah. And I think the other pieces, too.
It's like, what does the media decide to be outraged by? Right? It's not like they ran lots of reports. They don't bring it up again. If the legislature doesn't fulfill a promise to give tax cuts, they will bring it up forever, nonstop, right? For the 30 years 1986, they'll be like, well, I mean, voters decided in 1986, we have to have these taxes.
The interesting thing is how much the media parrots the voice of the business class, because it's the only thing propping up their industry left. So they do this self selection of that voice because we're not the audience for it. The advertisers are their audience.
And so it's just bizarre that they don't bring it up again. There's no holding accountable. They're not even going to attempt to make reference of it.
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And Jordan, back to you. Well, I don't have anything else to say about. It's just like, yeah, I just think it's ridiculous.
Just add and we can include this in the kind of notes for this. I was just out of curiosity, looking up that back in July of 2006 when the legislature was like, we're just sending this to study. We're never doing anything more with this.
It's fascinating to see what the votes were as well as, because even a good share of the opposition to it. And this speaks to,let's say, the kind of top down nature of the democratic party and the legislature, that a good chunk of the people voting no,we shouldn't just send this thing to study were Republicans who didn't support the thing itself. But just like sometimes being oppositional to democratic party leadership or wanting something to move forward that they want to actually defeat on the ballot in a way that they think would help them.
But it's even sadder to realize how even fewer of the people who are like, no, we should actually do the thing were part of the democratic caucus. Unbelievable. So we are going to go on to our third issue.
And, Jordan, if you could give us some background on how the state broke the law around education, that would be great.Yeah. Massachusetts was purposefully discriminating against students of color before 1993 and the way it was appropriating money.
So the state gives money to cities for education, and it was purposefully sort of making sure that white neighborhoods were getting more money than other neighborhoods. There was a lot of research into that fact, including them being relatively honest about it, about the politics of it, about who votes, all those other things, and the legislative. And a lot of activists did a lot of work to both lay the groundwork for it, to eventually sue the state over it, to do the pre research that went into the background of the state judicial findings not dissimilar from getting rid of brown versus the board of education.
It took a lot of research and work and look into and interviewing people of color, the effects. Right. There's a lot of background research that goes into the ruling.
You can actually read. It's a pretty good ruling. And so the bunch of plaintiffs, especially in Brockton, sue the state over its disproportionate way it's allocating money.
The state's judicial supreme court rules that it is illegal what it's doing, and the legislature is forced to fund public education. It does not decide to just fund public education equally or to fund public education in such a way to ensure that black and brown students get what they need. They create this convoluted system so that they can still create a system of tears and inequality, but do so with the guise of some sort of like, oh, look, we have some rules now that will make it better, but they got seven years to implement it, and then they were supposed to, by law, review it every three years.
So after 1993, by the year 2000, it was supposed to be implemented. And then 2003, 2006, they voted. So this is a law that they passed that they had to relook at that every three years.
They also implemented the MCAS through that system, which one of my favorite little diddies about that is that there were three tests. So we think of MCAS as just a test. There's actually three companies that backed the MCAS that they werelooking for as a possibility for the MCAS.
And of the three they picked, they picked the one that most correlated to race as an outcome. So they picked the most racist of the three background tests to be the foundational test for the 1994, but the 1993 law around MCAS. So they do a bunch of stuff to both make it worse, public education worse.
They don't fully do it. They don't fund it in such a way. It's sort of a compromised version of funding in such a way.
But they only do it because they got sued for discrimination. And then they finally passed this law, and then they literally never follow that law. They never once review the foundation, even though they're supposed to.
Every three years, they never do it again. So 1993 to all the way activists and teachers had to get together almost 30 years later to finally get the legislature to follow the law they passed.
That's it. To just follow the law they passed. And the legislature still doesn't do that.
It creates a commission, separate commission, to do the review. So then the review of that happens, and it turns out we're underfunding public education across the board. Not just poor students across the board, but especially black and brown students.
And that is what leads to the save our schools and the changing of recently of the foundation budget. So they passed the law 1983. And I would joke with legislators all the time, I was like, the police don't come here to arrest you all for breaking the law.
But you did pass that law, and you are currently breaking it. And if you had stolen those, you stole supplies from students by not funding it. But if you were black and did it, you would just get arrested.
Right? Like, the police aren't in there being like, you pass us law, you really need to get to it. Yeah. Somebody goes in and starts actually hauling out items from a school, we acknowledge that they are stealing from a school.
But when legislators chronically underfund their statutory commitments to a school that doesn't get counted as theft, when it's still theft. Exactly. I have a fun question for the three of us.
What do we think should happen to legislators who break the law? First of all, they step down, they break the law. They step down, they can't run anymore. That's it.
I would love that. That would be amazing. You break the law, step down.
Yeah, we can have a trial. I love this. Let's have a trial.
We put them on trial locally. They have a jury of their peers, twelve of their people, and let's put them and they can't run again. There should be some mechanism for enforcing the rules that they themselves pass.
It's just like these other two examples. The ballot measures that pass and then they just totally broke the law has to happen. And whether it's leadership or every single one of them that agreed that voted that way doesn't matter to me.
But I do think, in all seriousness, because we're not going to get a trial, although I'd love that. In all seriousness, judge duty or something. Yes, I would love this for us.
That would be fantastic. But since we're not going to get that, I do want voters and regular people to remember these stories and to bring them up because they aren't history in the sense that they're far off times. Right.
It is endemic of the way in which they flout laws when they want to and hide behind them when they don't. And so they masquerade as being with us for us, wanting to fight with us. And then they hide behind these rules, these laws, when it's convenient to them because they don't actually want to legislate in a way that puts us first.
They want to legislate in a way that makes business happy and alleviates any sort of blowback to them from voters. That's it.They don't actively want to put us first.
Some of them do. Almost none of them will. They're not going to prioritize it.
They won't actively fight for it on a regular basis. And that is what I mean. I think for me, this session is not just it's funny because they're all lawless, and I like to remind them that whenever they talk, we talk about the carceral state and policing, but also just because I think it's important to remember that because this is how the legislature functions today at this moment, if not worse now than it was to be.
A kind of quick comment for me here, is that, Jordan, your points reminded me about how legislators or politicians at any level so often depend on the kind of amnesia of the general public. And I believe I mentioned this before on one prior episode, where it's very easy, given how many things happen on any given day, for just to kind of rely on collective forgetting in politics of things that happen. We do this on things that are large scale.
Like, you could speak to the collective forgetting that exist in society around COVID, where there's like a terrible global pandemic, and we just kind of, like, forget that that happened and wonder why things that happened in 2019 don't feel as faraway ago as they do, but, like, wonder if something happened in between that makes that seem a little bit closer at the sametime. But that often happens with politics, where specifically when legislators do act against their stated values or the public interest kind of rely on that we'll all collectively forget for them. Yeah.
And I think one of the jobs of the media is to give us our collective memory, right? They do a lot of. They create culture. They Create collective memory.
The first stop of a historian is usually a newspaper, right? Like, that's an old adage for a reason. And so I think it's important to note how detached and sort of terrible our systems are around this and how corporate they themselves are. That's why Ialways talk about it in the podcast.
So I looked up a WBR story from June 18, 2018, how the state's grand education bargain came to be and how it comes upshort. And it's an eight minute story featuring white men as the only protagonist in this story. So the people that they immediately go to, so it says.
But the funding disparity between Massachusetts wealthiest districts and its ports had grown incredibly wide in 1993 Brockton, Yada, yada. Finally, Brockton and its co plaintiffs might win their case.
So it puts the people who were doing all of the action, the activists, the research. That's why I mentioned that piece. All of the years of actual work, if you read the Supreme Judicial Court decision, it is founded on the work of black and brown parents of these people fighting of really good research.
It's founded on all of those things. They are now passive voices in this story, as if they just happened upon a lawsuit, right? They just, oh, this thing happened and immediately goes to the next sentence, says pressure mounts, right, as the subset,and it goes to business leaders, as the people. And they get named Paul Revere, who is a terrible person who hurt black and brown students, but gets put up as, okay, because of the right of center position that he positions himself on education.
Oh, I'm just trying to manage this system, but somehow the management of the system always hurts black and brown students. Right? So the implementation of the MCAS, right? So he is at this thing. He's executive director at the time of the Massachusetts Business alliance for Education, and he gets named.
That organization gets named. Not any of the activist organizations, not any of the things that organization gets named. Andhe gets named in this story.
And then Jack Rennie, some random person who runs a small business, gets named, and they get credited for this 1991 every child a winner report. That, quote became a blueprint for the education reform law.
That's a bad law, it's a compromised law, but it gets put out as a good thing that happened. It's not a good thing thathappened. It's a convoluted way to again keep structures of inequality in place.
It was a compromise that could pass and get signed by Bill Weld, a Republican, and through a legislature that got quoted as discriminating against black and brown students, that legislature and that governor had to pass a law. And this was the best version, which was one that still held in place those inequalities, those foundational inequalities. And rather than saying that they literally named, the next two people are representative Mark Roosevelt and Senator Tom Birmingham, who certainly helped shepherd that law.
And I commend them. They did fight for really good things. But that's four white men who get at a story.
They are named in this 2018, not years ago, six years ago, 2018, WBR story. They are the center movers of this story. That is really important media literacy moment, but also the importance of how this continues to happen.
Right. And so the story then is this good thing happened. Not we were forced to compromise with really conservative people who believed that black people did not deserve equal education or at least not to fund it.
That's the story. But that's not the story that gets told. The story that gets told is, oh, there was this problem that a few people happened upon, but they won't get named.
And it got fixed by all these white men. And fixed, don't worry about it. Got fixed.
I mean, there were some problems. We had to go back and fix it years later, but it got fixed in 1993 as best they could. That's The story that WBUr told.
It's terrible. Yeah. I am going to ask for each of us to give a little closing statement on the state legislature breaking the law.
How much of a fan are you? I'll start with Jonathan. I would say that they should be accountable to the public, in the public interest. And I will say there's a public interest as well.
To my point before about there are times that you can have large amounts of corporate money buy a result, and I don't think that needs to be treated as sacrosanct. But their job is to represent the public interest, and that means that they should actually hold to that much more, much more clearly in their job rather than thinking that they work for somebody more higher ranking above them or to the well funded lobbyists who always manage to get behind any closed door. Great.
Jordan, you just let us know that you had one final sentence for us before I go. No, he's good. He said he talked a lot.
He loves it when they break the law. Just kidding. I will say that we bring these up because we want people to understand that our state government does not represent us.
So these are just the extreme examples, but this happens every single day in the state house. So what happens in the statehouse is we have totally undemocratic top down. The speaker and the leadership team make all the decisions.
They decide what bills are allowed to come out of committee, and you can see what the final product is. When you look at these extreme examples. They would not, they broke the law to make sure the Medicare for all did not come out of committee because they do that every day.
It's not just about these three examples. It's about what happens in our state government every single day. And this is what we all need to be pretty upset about.
And hopefully these examples of literally the supreme judicial Court coming in and being like, sorry, guys, but that's illegal.You cannot do that. Hopefully that gives us a renewed sense of outrage that can help us to be more active in the fights that we have to fight today around making sure that our government is not so top down, it's not so dictatorial, and that we end up with a more democratically Maldi, democratic state house and state legislature.
And I'll leave it there. Thank you so much. We love all our listeners and we look forward to talking with you all next week.