Did you know that three of the last four Speakers were convicted of felonies related to corruption and bribery? The Speaker of the House controls everything that goes on in the building -- including what laws get passed in Massachusetts.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: 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.
Check out the video of this episode on YouTube.
Sign up to get updates.
Notes for this episode:
DeLeo unindicted co-conspiritor
63 Democrats switch their votes
Speaker threatens demotion for a vote
"You don't vote your own way and be a chair."
Did you know that three of the last four Speakers were convicted of felonies related to corruption and bribery? The Speaker of the House controls everything that goes on in the building -- including what laws get passed in Massachusetts.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: 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.
Check out the video of this episode on YouTube.
Sign up to get updates.
Notes for this episode:
DeLeo unindicted co-conspiritor
63 Democrats switch their votes
Speaker threatens demotion for a vote
"You don't vote your own way and be a chair."
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program and hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 5/19/2021 @ 1555ET by AH.]
Anna Callahan 0:00
[Laughs] Hi there, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. This is Anna Callahan. You are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help you understand state politics. So we're here to tell you why it's so broken, to imagine what we could have here in Massachusetts if we fix it, And to report on how you can get involved. I am as always joined by the superly amazing Jonathan Cohn and Jordan Berg Powers. And Jonathan, would you quickly introduce yourself?
Jonathan Cohn 0:29
Yeah, my name is Jonathan Cohn. I'm a progressive activist here based in Boston. I've been active with issue and electoral campaigns since 2013 here. I'm happy to happy to be here. These have been great conversations.
Jordan Berg Powers 0:40
My name is Jordan Berg powers. I use he/him. I have 11 years experience in progressive politics and happy to be here.
Anna Callahan 0:47
Awesome. Anna, she/her, little less time, but but very interested and having fun with these conversations. So we we've-- in the first few episodes, this is Episode 4. And in Episode 1, we talked about what you could have if we had a great state legislature, but people don't realize you can pass almost any national policy here in Massachusetts for 7 million people. And in Episode 2, we talked about how much impact you can have at the state level, given that we could pass that kind of policy and lead the country, it costs so much less and takes so many fewer volunteers to elect people at this level. And then in Episode 3, we talked about how our a-- over 80% veto proof super majority of Democrats is really failing to pass policies that are popular in Massachusetts, have majority support in or in the Democratic party platform. It gets weird.
Anna Callahan 1:49
So today, we are going to get into why.
Anna Callahan 1:53
Why is that? Why can our legislature not pass obvious wins for everyone? And so we're going to dive into the power of the Speaker of the House. So essentially, the the house, the State House, is not a democracy. And when I started this podcast about a year and a half ago, I described it as a junior high school with one bully, and his friends controlling everything that happened. So I think that's an interesting sort of way of looking at it. And we're going to talk today about how much control the speaker has, and what that does to the process of voting on things.
Anna Callahan 2:41
The speaker of the house -- and only the Speaker of the House -- can appoint every chair and co-chair of every committee, and those chairs and coach co chairs really affect the agenda of those committees. The the pay by the Constitution of Massachusetts, the pay is the median income here, which is around $66,000. And the chairs and co chairs get bonus pay, right? And that could range from $5,000 to $75,000. So you heard that right. They can more than double their salary by becoming one of the coveted chairs at the top. But they definitely increase their salary by quite a bit by being a chair or co-chair. It also determines how many staff you get. You know, the Speaker determines where your office is, and Ed Markey very famously had his office in the basement I think? There was a story of someone whose whose desk was in the hallway and didn't have an office.
Jordan Berg Powers 3:48
That's Markey.
Anna Callahan 3:49
Oh, that was Markey too. there.
Jordan Berg Powers 3:51
Yeah, he has a famous ad that says they could tell me where to sit but they can't tell me where to stand. Yeah, you illegally framed his-- he illegally-- his campaign ad is in the-- is in the State House. I don't know if it's illegal back then, but it was-- it's in the State House.
Anna Callahan 4:05
Nice.
Jordan Berg Powers 4:06
He was in the hallway in the basement.
Anna Callahan 4:07
In the hallway and in the basement! And he's not the only one that that happened to. So, but the Speaker even controls where you sit in the chamber. So if he doesn't want you to talk to the people that you tend to, you know, do stuff with, then you'll be sitting very far away from those people. So just the sheer amount of control that the Speaker has over what happens in the building and how much people get paid. is a little bit crazy.
Jordan Berg Powers 4:37
And it lends itself to where we are right where three of the last four speakers have gone to jail. They are you know, because that absolute power corrupts right there is like living example of that is Massachusetts State House and the Massachusetts Speaker. They have so much power, it automatically corrupts and the fourth person who didn't go to jail, DeLeo was an unindicted co conspirator. So this is from a WBUR news article from July 2014. It says, quote "The prosecution's designation of Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, as a co-conspirator and an alleged scheme to bribe lawmakers, ahead of his election as Speaker has no direct legal ramifications for the Winthrop Democrat, but it underscores the extent of his involvement in a scheme where prosecutors say jobs were traded for votes and accusation that Deleo has rejected as false." You could take that with you will. But I think that that, you know, for those of you who don't remember, Trump was famously an unindicted co-conspirator. Right. Nixon was famously an unindicted co-conspirator. This is the sort of thing that corrupts dictators get in the American judicial system, when they have when they have this absolute power.
Anna Callahan 5:54
That's insane. I mean, power corrupts, and here we are three out of the four literally convicted. Last one unindicted. [laughing]
Anna Callahan 6:03
Wow. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, the other question is, does this actually cause any votes to change? Right? I mean, maybe this is all theoretical power, and people are still voting the way they want to, we can hope we cross our fingers. There was a great example. Not that long ago, where, you know, one of the Reps was presiding Petrolati, I think, and it was just a rules vote. And so he marked no on the rules, vote for himself and for DeLeo, and then rep started voting, right. And then Petrolati he kind of leans over and talks to DeLeo for a second. And then he switches his and DeLeo both to yes. Because apparently they meant to vote yes. And he was wrong in the vote in the no vote. So at that point, 63 democrats switch their votes from no to Yes, who had already voted. Because they saw that the Speaker changed his vote. And they were like, whoops, I guess I was supposed to vote "No," I guess I was supposed to vote "Yes" on it. So I mean, it is it's like insane the amount of power and how it actually affects the the voting that happens on the floor.
Jonathan Cohn 7:17
And just just piggyback on that quickly, it's a very striking thing to see about how much Reps take their cues from leadership and how they're voting with that, that whether whether they didn't do, they just simply didn't care or whatever they whether they just suppress their own prior considerations of it. Saw a queue and voted accordingly. But I think the other kind of question about this kind of following along the lines of does it actually change people's votes is, well, does-has anybody actually lost out from this? Like they we talked about this kind of concept of power and retaliation in the building? But is that ever actually used? Right. And we have seen real cases of representatives who were who did get on the wrong side of the speaker. And then last the chairmanship accordingly. That was back back in 2015. was when was when the House voted to eliminate term limits for the speaker. You remember that? Because DeLeo, when he first became speaker, had promised had as a good government promise against those that had been concerned about his the possibility of him becoming speaker, I missed because the fallout from the last one said, "Well, I'll term limit myself see, this is kind of a nice, honest move. You'll have a nice speaker.
Anna Callahan 8:33
l promise!
Jonathan Cohn 8:33
Exactly, pinkyswear.
Anna Callahan 8:34
Pinkyswear [laughter]
Jonathan Cohn 8:36
And then when he was kind of hitting up against the term limits, just had everybody vote to repeal them. And representative John Hecht, who's now just retired this past- at the end of this past session, but was the state rep from Watertown was the only only democratic state rep to actually speak on the floor against repealing term limits. There were a few other Democrats to vote to vote against doing so he was the only one to speak. And he went from being the vice chair of the committee of elder affairs on the House side to not being the joint chair. And so that was literally because of speaking on the floor, like a last probably around like $10,000 I think it is of pay that just got docked from him from one year to the next for doing that. And there was also kind of a similar case. This is back in back in 2017. When when the Ways and Means chair at the time, Brian Dempsey decided to become a lobbyist instead, as they all seem to do when they leave that that representative Russel Holmes from Mattapan had spoken about how had-had expressed opinions about how the next Ways and Means chair should be selected and had criticized kind of the process around that to some degree. And when there was a shuffling around of seats that had to happen because of putting somebody in as a new chair of Ways and Means, somehow that shuffling of seats led to Russell Holmes losing his vice chairmanship on the Housing Committee. It just so happened that it had to work that way. not intentional at all.
Anna Callahan 10:11
Yeah, [unintelligible]
Jonathan Cohn 10:14
And that it's one of those examples when you're one of those cases where you don't need that many examples of that happening, to send a message to other representatives, that if you run afoul with leadership, we have no qualms about doing this.
Anna Callahan 10:30
Yeah. And the real in a really unusual, like, usually people don't talk about it. So we see these things, but like, this is not something you talk about. But Jay Kaufeen, actually went on Commonwealth magazine when he was no longer a state rep to talk about how when he was head of the the Revenue Committee, he had a, you know, a little diff with the speaker who said, Who told him that he would no longer be the chair of that committee if he didn't vote a certain way on a transportation bill. And one of the things I liked about that, that piece, and a companion piece that was also in Commonwealth magazine, is Cleon Turner, who will also another former state rep has this wonderful quote. He says, hey, that's how leadership works. You don't vote your own way and be a chair, like, like everybody knows that, but you don't vote on bills the way you think you should vote when you vote and be a chair. Like, that's ridiculous.
Jordan Berg Powers 11:29
Yeah, and it's, so for those of you who like, don't understand how this works. If you want to vote your own way, or often what happens is, you know, legislators will put on an amendment or try to push a conversation around a bill. And so what happens is that the the people in charge, so the people who end up being the enforcers for the speaker, something that, you know, the current chair, the current speaker, allegedly, was the person who did this, they pull you into a room, and they literally yell at you, I have spoken to many legislators who have been yelled at who have been told that they're, you know, the bad things will happen, that they're saying that their constituents won't get the things that they need, you know, you will get threatened by the people until you either pull the amendment or don't, you know, sort of don't bring it to the floor, don't cause complaints. Don't, you know, if you don't vote the right way. So they will literally threaten you, with yelling, with, with people, all sorts of, you know, all sorts of threats. And the other part of that is that that becomes then a culture. So you'll see people will talk, you know, they'll talk to each other, and they'll say, Oh, you don't want to do that you'll run afoul of the speaker Oh, you don't want to talk about that, that way the speaker will be mad. So you get this system, which police's itself through the culture, the culture of the speaker having absolute say, becomes so corrosive, because they enforce it on each other, right? The same way that all institutions of oppression, right, you know, a lot of you know, systems of racial oppression systems of gender oppression, right, all of those boxes that we put people in, it's often people with those same boxes that put the, you know, put the walls around us. It's the same thing here. A lot of the things that speakers even need to go yell, somebody else will enforce it for them, somebody else will be will do that work of making sure that they toe the line that they understand that this is how it works.
Anna Callahan 13:20
They may even be well-meaning. They might even be like, Oh, no, they're trying to protect that person, right? Oh, you don't want to do that, because you're gonna get in trouble.
Jordan Berg Powers 13:28
And so I joke that this is like the Prisoners' Dilemma where your legislator has only-- the only thing is they go to jail. Like there is no other option, right? The only position is you go to jail. And so that's the problem that a lot of these legislators face.
Anna Callahan 13:41
And what is Prisoners' Dilemma just for people who don't know?
Jordan Berg Powers 13:44
Yeah! So Prisoners' Dilemma is an economics-- a basic economics theory, that if two people are being-- if two people are interviewed, they don't know how the other person's doing. They can trade, they can say if you do this, you get free and the other person will go to jail. And what ends up happening in most situations is they both tell on each other to stay out of trouble. I will say just this last thing really quickly that I love. So one of the more conservative reps said to me once that he imagined that there's more freedom in China than there is in the Massachusetts State House.
Anna Callahan 14:13
[Laughs.]
Jordan Berg Powers 14:13
That's how much dictatorial power the Speaker has.
Anna Callahan 14:16
Yeah. Love it.
Jonathan Cohn 14:18
Um, the only the only possibility is to go to jail. Just made me think of like, what a terrifying a Monopoly board, where the-- no matter what what you roll, you somehow land on go jail.
Anna Callahan 14:34
Either-- you either "Go to Speaker" or "go to jail." That's it. Those are the only options, right?
Jonathan Cohn 14:39
I've noticed as well, sometimes getting people to people to change their votes. Just have a quick point. Make it that we saw that in action last session where you had people voting against bills that they were even the lead sponsor of or a main sponsor of that when those come up as an amendment whether it was Election Day registration last year, whether it was allowing municipalities to the pass the Real Estate Transfer Fee or to pass rent stabilization laws, people who had actually co sponsored those cells that self same taxed, suddenly decided that when I was told that this is a will not pass amendment, they voted to make sure that it didn't pass because of that incentive structure. The one thing of the prisoner's dilemma comment of the people who aren't able to really share information information productively, reminded me as well as how much that control over information helps helps reinforce that power structure in the building. Because representatives often don't know what they're going to vote on until the vote happens. One kind of wild example of that. So rather than think of this isn't this past session, but the one prior was a was a vote on withheld community benefit districts. So it was basically a bill that would allow in cities and towns, we had a group of private landowners come together and decide we want to create impose a fee on everybody and on our block, a kind of us as a private group, like impose that tax. And they got to sign off to do that. And so whether or not the people in that group had any actual democratic say over that happening, either or the expenditure of that happening, somehow you're able to like, then private, maybe, like, create that little private park or private other things without without really due process involved in that. And so it was reported out of committee, in the morning on maybe this is May 30, 2018, read and get gets a series of necessary readings, and then gets placed on the orders of the day for a vote. So all of this happening on the same day. So it literally gets out of committee in the same day that it gets voted on on the floor. So there wasn't really much of a way that unless you have like, have an in and have a sense that this is coming down the pipeline, that you learned about this bill that suddenly important enough for you to vote on that afternoon, in that morning, and don't have the time to figure out what's even what's even in it. It was a striking example, because after it passed, you had a number of organizations like the Common-Common Cause and the NAACP and the ACLU expressed concerns around like the privatization of public property or the kind of or restrictions on free speech that this bill would pass that although the bill had passed, but like almost no objections. I believe they're on the two representatives voting no, because they're like, Okay, this is this is before us I guess that's fine. If it's being rushed. I guess it's uncontroversial. And it just kind of quashes any real debate, and then just kind of reinforces that people will assume that they should vote yes. Because they don't have any information to the contrary, because they weren't given the time to find information to the contrary.
Anna Callahan 17:49
Yeah, or it sounds like, you know, with that, that one, that's where 63 Democrats switched their votes. Like, did they even know what they were voting-- Like what they were voting on? Probably not, right? Same with this one. Did they even know what they're voting on? Meh! Because it doesn't matter because they're just gonna vote the way the Speaker says anyway. So why should they bother? Why should they care how long they have to read the bill?
Jonathan Cohn 18:12
It's not like they have that much staff to do the research.
Anna Callahan 18:17
Mm-hmm
Jonathan Cohn 18:17
Also a result of the structure of the building that if you if you're aren't somebody high-ranking, you don't have many staffers, so you don't even necessarily have the people that you could task with doing the research on what you're about to be voting on.
Anna Callahan 18:28
Yeah. And the Speaker was the one who like said-- who determines who's the chairs of the committees, and those are the people determining like how fast something's going to get through whether it's going to immediately go to the floor. So like all that agenda setting has a lot to do with the power over the statehouse and the speaker controls all the people who set all the agendas.
Jordan Berg Powers 18:50
I've been joking more and more that we could automate most of the legislature and no one would notice the difference. And also they could learn about an issue that they're not currently dealing with, which is people's losing jobs because of automation.
Anna Callahan 19:06
[Laughs.] That can be a slogan that we have, like "Robot reps now!"
Jordan Berg Powers 19:11
Yeah, just streamline it for us. I mean, I think it's it's, you know, I've been saying a long time that there's there's this over focus on individual legislators and not enough focus on the actual Speaker themselves. I can't tell you how many times I have gone to events, where I was the only one booing DeLeo and I was just like, how do you not know that the things that we-- the things that we want to do, the things that get bottled up, there is one person who is deciding that! There's not a cabal, there's not like many people, maybe there's a few people here and there who help shape the Speaker's thinking. But there is one person who ultimately decides what happens in our state, and we don't have enough high expectations and enough ire for that peep-- for that person, right?
Jordan Berg Powers 19:54
So the new Speaker. I'm a generally like super hopeful person. And so like you know I have high hopes for the new Speaker, but also high expectations, right? So I think that-- I hope that he has a desire to do big things to get things done. But ultimately, we have to focus our energy on that Speaker, we should be telling the Speaker to do things and hold him-- because it's always been hims-- accountable for not doing those things, right?
Jordan Berg Powers 19:58
So we need-- if we're going to do all these things of setting goals for our reps and talking to them and lobbying them, what are we doing to make the Speaker role more prominent for people, regular people? What are we doing, as advocates as people who are in the press or talking to regular people to say, you need to be mad that if this isn't happening at the person who's most responsible, which is the speaker, we need to really focus our energy on that, because then that does two things that makes it so that people voters start to understand that it's about the allegiance to the speaker, that is bad, and you make that institution toxic, right. So that's basic organizing, you make somebody the target of your organizing, and you and you make it so that people then have to make a judgment on that. And I guarantee you that if we if people understood, people sort of understand, but if they really understood how much power the speaker had, they would spend all their time talking about the speaker, focusing on the speaker, messaging about the speaker thinking about how to and move the speaker, right, all of our organizations wouldn't be on Beacon Hill, they would be just move around to where the speaker's district is, right. Like that's what we would be doing with our time and energy. And I submit that that is something that we should be thinking about, especially for people who don't have the burden of having to worry about making sure that their members are fed making sure that their members can get the things they need, right, there are groups that need to have those good relationships, but not every person does. And so those people who are will who are able to have visible public conversations with the with the electorates across the state about what's happening, need to be really stepping up and making clear who can do things and the state who has power. And there is one person who has basically absolute power.
Anna Callahan 22:05
[laughter] Which is-- which is bad in so many ways. Like I think we've we've scratched the surface of how bad it is for our democracy, that this person-- It's a totally toxic workplace, right? Imagine being one of these state reps, right? People lobby you, people try to convince you. Meanwhile, there's this intense pressure there in the statehouse. You know, this is one of the things AOC talks about, right? Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But like the pressure that you're under from the other elected officials in that body is so intense, it is incredibly difficult to not sort of break just under that pressure. And and then what I hear sometimes I hear from people this question, "Well, why don't we just replace the speaker?" or, as you know, "we just had a speaker step down and we have a new speaker." And I know we all have a lot of thoughts on that one. [Laughs.] And I think this is something that we are going to cover next week, and I am excited to talk to you both about it.
Jordan Berg Powers 23:13
Yeah, thank you so much.
Jonathan Cohn 23:15
Looking forward to it.
Anna Callahan 23:16
Absolutely. Talk to you soon!