The Massachusetts State House appears to have no agenda at all, and passes small reforms for haphazard reasons. Our state Democratic Party Platform is far ahead of the State House and its veto-proof majority of state reps, who seem to not even be aware that it exists. We look at other states who have narrower margins and pass life-changing policies.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 6; you can watch the video version on YouTube.
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.
Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
The Massachusetts State House appears to have no agenda at all, and passes small reforms for haphazard reasons. Our state Democratic Party Platform is far ahead of the State House and its veto-proof majority of state reps, who seem to not even be aware that it exists. We look at other states who have narrower margins and pass life-changing policies.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 6; you can watch the video version on YouTube.
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.
Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 6/2/2021 @ 1700ET by AH and @ 1942 by FL.]
Anna Callahan 0:00
Hello, this is Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics, to investigate why it's so broken, to imagine what we could have in our lives if we fixed it, and to report on how you can get involved. I have here, my super amazing co-hosts, Jordan Berg Powers and Jonathan Cohn.
Anna Callahan 0:21
Jordan Berg Powers. Who are you?
Jordan Berg Powers 0:24
My name is Jordan, I use he/him and I have 11 years experience in Massachusetts politics.
Anna Callahan 0:30
Jonathan Cohn!
Jonathan Cohn 0:31
Hi! Jonathan Cohn, he/him/his, and I've slightly shorter than Jordan-- eight years working on different issue campaigns and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts, based out of Boston.
Anna Callahan 0:40
Anna Callahan. She/her. I'm in Medford and among other things, ran for state rep and did a bunch of stuff so, interested in, involved in state politics. And we today are going to talk about the complete lack of an agenda at the State House. You would think that at the State House, where you have a super majority of Democrats, that there would be some kind of agenda of what they want to accomplish. But that appears to not really be the case. I know, Jordan, something that you mentioned to me recently is that it appears to be pretty, totally random, what gets passed and what doesn't get passed. That in the same legislature, the same, you know, the same session of the same legislature, we got, finally, some rights, civil rights for trans people, and also the ability to turn in your undocumented neighbor. Just terrible! You know, it seems like there just is no- there's there's no agenda for the Democratic Party in the State House.
Jordan Berg Powers 1:51
Yeah, it's the weirdest thing, right? Like you think about other places, other places that have elected Democrats or bring in Democrats or places that bring in Republicans like elect Republicans, they go into power, and then they pass things, they go in with things that they promised voters that they will do, and then they go about doing those things. But what you'll see in Massachusetts is:
Jordan Berg Powers 2:11
One, most of our elections, the legislature doesn't promise to do anything, it doesn't really have any concrete policy agendas. And then it goes about doing about as little to nothing as possible. So you know, you get this random thing where it just is because it's up to one person to decide what will and won't happen. And it's always based on some like really perverse, not-understanding-of-the-world politics, like this idea that we need to protect people, in one of the most blue states, it means that you get this random assortment of elections.
Jordan Berg Powers 2:46
So, many years past when, when the legislature passed the first time, the first civil rights bill, for trans folks even which included an exclusion, which was really terrible, around bathrooms and public accommodations. It also-- that same legislature in a budget, passed a hotline that you could turn in your undocumented neighbors. It ultimately was killed in when it was when the two houses and the Senate met together. It was killed in conference committee, but like, this is the sort of just random assortment of things: you get something super progressive, and then something not right. And there's no rhyme or reason, because it's up to just one person to decide what's best for everyone. And everyone just falls on line.
Anna Callahan 3:29
We think that that one person, right, who has a leadership team, they're the Speaker of the House, they're supposed to lead and they might set an agenda. Does this ever happen? Does the Speaker like set an agenda? Or-- Or is it seem almost like they're, they're there to stop things instead of to help it happen?
Jonathan Cohn 3:51
Let me just chime in really quickly, because what's striking to me about having this discussion is how it dovetails with elections. So before when we were we had some discussions about both of the national elections last fall going into January, or even in other states. And often when you see like a democrat versus republican state happening, some democrat election happening in other state, there's a very clear sense of, if you elect me, we will be able to pass X or if you elect me, we will be able to block X from the other side wants passing, Or some clear set of policy stakes. Whereas often in the general election battles in the legislature here, there are real policy contrasts between the people and there are often better ones than other ones. But given the sizes of the super majority, it's a less-- it's not really going to be messaged like this person is going to be the deciding vote about whether or not not we can accomplish this. And so there's kind of a weird way in which this-- where you have kind of perceived lower stakes, and any of this that can somewhat kind of muddy the way that it's discussed because there's no, there's no agenda being discussed that people are running on, a kind of united platform that is like we need this person because the party is trying to pass this and needs and needs their vote to do it.
Anna Callahan 5:14
Yeah, we never hear that. Like you hear about Joe Manchin and Kristen Synema, that's just not a thing here. And even the individual legislators, seems like they don't need to hardly run on anything. I mean, we have the lowest rate of challenging incumbents of any state house in the country. So they're usually not even challenged, and they don't have to run on anything.
Jordan Berg Powers 5:35
Yeah. And so you get this and in fairness to them, it's because they also can't control it. Even if they do have agendas, you have to be vague about what you can promise, because there's only one person who ultimately gets to decide, as we've discussed, right? There is, you know, unless you're in the State Senate, where there's more collaborative process whereby they are interested in legislating and passing things. When you're in the statehouse, in Massachusetts, you are under the thumb of one person, you know, so there is so I understand a certain level of like, why promise things you literally can't deliver, unless, you know, you strike out. But I think it's important to know, because it doesn't mean that nothing progressive passes, it means that it's random. Like that's the thing that's weird about it is that you will get one thing every year or so that's on the on the progressive agenda, to make the state better. But it's a lottery ticket. You know, you need to have the right circumstances at the right time, with like the wind being a certain way and the right person talking to the speaker, or the speaker's people at the right time, right. It's a lottery. And that's the problem with it is that it's just this random thing, but it doesn't need to be this way. Right? Like, there are things that people know could make the state better. And people want to do them, right. Like people want them, the public wants them. And if you ask legislators, they have ideas. They would like to pass things to make the state better, but they just die under this system of you know, of unilateral rule of authoritarian rule.
Anna Callahan 7:05
So both mass Alliance and Progressive Mass, right, these are the groups that you guys are with, both of them come up with their own agendas, which are incredibly similar. So there is-- and and, you guys do this every you know, two years, you have an agenda. It's very detailed and elaborate, and it is pretty clear. On many, many issues, everything from union rights, and by the way, let's have a shout out to the workers at Pavement Coffee Shop, who are unionizing! Yoo hoo! Fantastic. So everything from workers' rights, environmental stuff, transparency at the statehouse, the you know, immigrant rights, gender rights and trans community, LGBTQ rights, progressive taxation, everything right, very comprehensive.
Anna Callahan 8:07
And, oddly, even the party platform of the Democratic Party is much, much more progressive than what the State House passes. So just a few things that are in the Democratic party platform: becoming a sanctuary state, we can't seem to get that these are all things that we don't have-- the State House cannot pass, right? Same Day voter registration, single payer health care, high speed broadband for rural communities, a progressive tax system. The-- here's here's a nice one in both the House and the Senate: selection of committee members and committee leadership, through democratic mechanisms. Free high quality public education from preschool through college. I was talking to somebody in the the, you know, free higher ed sphere, and they were saying that a bill that would, you know, put a lot more money into higher ed and make it a lot less expensive for people was in committee, and the vice chair was one of the sponsors of the bill, and two thirds of the people in that committee had co-sponsored the bill, and the bill died in committee. [laughing]
Jonathan Cohn 9:26
That that just quickly, quickly reminds me of a friend of mine who used to work in Massachusetts politics, who noted the time that one committee chairman said to him, "oh, I don't know if I have the votes in committee" as a joke because if they want them- if something's going to pass through the votes, it's not because the outcome is always predetermined by somebody above you.
Jordan Berg Powers 9:47
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's it's by contrast, right, like when you look at like what other states are doing, Virginia, you know, it was a Republican state for so long and then it becomes a Democratic state and it goes about passing, as we mentioned in the last podcast, several important progressive legislation that like changes the fabric of the of the state, and therefore gives people impetus for continuing to vote for people who are currently in power by saying, like, Look, you elected us and we did things for you, to make your to make your life better. You know, New York recently, it's had Democratic control, but it hasn't had real democratic control. There was Republicans for a long time. We talked a lot about what happened when they got control. They recently passed an undocumented immigrants pandemic aid. So they're giving money to people who weren't covered by the Federal federal stimulus to ensure that they are also included, right? We can't pass driver's licenses, things that are bipartisan, right, Republican states, blue states, we did nothing to push back on the Trump agenda on immigration. New York's passing money, they're giving money to their undocumented communities, because they are not covered by federal aid, right. Like we can't do basic things. And they're doing they're going much further.
Jonathan Cohn 11:06
Jordan, they sent a letter to Trump, if you remember. The House leadership sent a letter to Trump, telling him that he shouldn't do the things that he was doing.
Anna Callahan 11:16
Oh, *that's wrong*!
Jordan Berg Powers 11:17
I'm sure he- I'm sure he enjoyed putting his diet coke on it. You know, we should have put pictures on it in fairness, maybe then he would have read it. You know, 400-- Washington State has recently finished up their legislative session, they passed a slew of progressive things. Again, Washington State, a state that used to be very blue, started to trend red, and is now moving blue again. And so they're interested in passing things to make people's lives better. 465 million in relief for immigrants. They paid-- they did a strong wage theft. So if you don't know, if you like, most people don't realize this. If your employer doesn't pay you, right, but just straight up, stops paying you, you have very little recourse. If you were to, if you were to go into work, and steal from your boss, they would arrest you. If your boss doesn't pay you, nothing happens to your boss, it is perverse, it is perverse. And in Massachusetts, you have to hopefully get to the Attorney General, who will then, if you're lucky, sue your employer, and then maybe seven to eight years from now you will get the money back.
Anna Callahan 12:29
Right.
Jordan Berg Powers 12:30
It's a perverse system--
Anna Callahan 12:31
You've been evicted from your home, and-
Jordan Berg Powers 12:33
Right. So Washington State has a Wage Theft-- they passed a Wage Theft Law that puts a temporary hold on your employer's assets and give you-- you know, so that way you have access to money, and they can't make you-- they can't just go about their business. Actual consequences! I still think should-- if you like, if we're gonna have jails, like they should go to it, but whatever. You know, like that, while we're still doing it. But at least there's some consequences moving in the right direction, right? They expanded free legal work, legal aid to all Washington residents, regardless of immigration status. And they have a first in the nation law for tenants facing eviction guaranteeing legal representation. Again, like these are basic things like that, like, are core to the platform that the Democratic Party [INAUDIBLE] says, that's core to the things that people want, you know, and again, they just they have no agenda. They don't really it's just like a, it's like a ping pong thing. It's just a little bit everywhere. With no rhyme or reason. or, or, or like vision, like what is what is it they want the state to look like? What is their governing philosophy? What are the ways in which they hope to improve people's lives here? How are they preparing us for the future? They can't answer any of those questions, because there is nothing.
Anna Callahan 13:48
Because there's a because all they'd have to do is what they all feel they have to do is they have to please this one person, they have to please other people who want to please that one person. And that's the primary goal of being in the statehouse.
Jonathan Cohn 14:00
As well, this is this speaks to the lack of countervailing pressure that like when you think of a say, in a place like Washington or Virginia where there's a where there's both in both of those cases, there's a governor who at least plays a role in setting that agenda. But there's a way in which we've often seen in Massachusetts that the democratic supermajority, use the republican use Republican governors, as kind of a nice thing to have, because they're opposed. Charlie Baker can't force an agenda on the legislature. He doesn't have-- there are three Republican senators. He's not pushing through an agenda, right? And so if he if he doesn't have the ability to formulate, push an agenda around the votes, and allows them to kind of to be content to do whatever, like the mood moves them to do at a given time, and that leads them often to be very reactive. As you can see, last session, like what do you think about last year, a lot of the things and there are good things that happened although they should have gone further. If you think about the police reform bill, I think the kind of narrowed version of the Roe Act, they were reacting to specific things that happened that in an alternate way, like with the with the Roe Act, that was a limited version of the Roe Act have passed. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had not passed away when she did, probably not. They probably would have ran out the clock on it. And in the same way you kind of remember the police reform bill, many things that people had filed, things related to them for a while, but in no movement was spawning, specifically to events, rather than be having the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, but no actual kind of proactive, what are we doing now? Just kind of just steer where the state is for the coming years?
Anna Callahan 15:41
Yeah, I want to bring up now you're talking about reactive versus proactive? I want to talk a little bit about lobbying. Because, you know, a lot of people, certainly nationally, and I think, even statewide, spend a lot of time lobbying their legislators. And, you know, I have a particular opinion of lobbying, I kind of fall on the extreme end of that, I think that lobbying does not work. And really, the way that I see it is when you understand what happens inside the statehouse, and you understand that it is people's job to whip votes, right? Whipping votes, if you don't know, whipping votes means just counting, right? You're just counting how many votes you have for or against a certain bill. Now, if the speaker or a chair of a committee or whoever, if they are going to vote on a bill, they're going to count the votes they have on the bill and have private conversations that are not that we cannot hear. They're going to talk to people, state reps, and find out, not find out, they're going to probably *tell* them which way they're going to vote. And for me to say that they're going to hear like, Oh, you know, there's a lot of pressure on me or like, oh, there's nobody running against me, it really doesn't matter. And, you know, I hear people wonder like, oh, wow, so this person, cosponsored my bill last session, but they're not co sponsoring it this session. Why? I wonder why? And they, like nobody ever thinks about the fact that they're being whipped, right? I mean, that sounds terrible. But the fact that that someone is above them, determining whether they are going to be allowed to cosponsor or to vote for or against a certain bill. And we think that we can do something based on lobbying, but like, we lobby people, and if they get permission, then they're going to go ahead, and they're going to co sponsor the bill. And if they don't get permission, then they're not going to, and we won't be able to explain that.
Jordan Berg Powers 17:38
There's a legislator to this point, that had expertise on this issue, and wanted to be on a committee, and basically was told by (Speaker) DeLeo that like, No, you know, you have too much knowledge about this policy. So we're gonna put you on something like that, because and the implication is that I can't control you, if you start, if you start to do you know, if you start to try to do a thing about it.
Jordan Berg Powers 18:01
Another legislator that I really like, got on a committee that this person knew nothing about, they went and digged into the issue. They then created a policy to fix the problem for which the committee that they're on, and they lost their seat on that committee, and was told explicitly that the bill would never go anywhere, for the nerve of learning about the topic for the committee there on proposing a solution to the problem and proposing it out of the committee without the say, right, like, how dare you try to move something and it wasn't-- the implication was it wasn't from like, the, you know, those crazy rabble rousers on sides, we have to like pretend to care about it. You like tried to legislate and DeLeo was like, No, we don't do that, essentially, to this person. And it's just like a it's like a, you know, like, where else is this? Right? Where you put where you purposely don't allow people with expertise on the committees?
Anna Callahan 18:56
Yeah, I mean, that's even worse. We talked about it being like, like a toxic work environment, but like, Can you imagine a work environment where like, you actually try to accomplish something in your job, and you're, and you're fired? Like, you're moved to another division? It's like, forget it, man. You're getting something accomplished. Forget that, you know! It's like, amazing.
Jordan Berg Powers 19:16
It is. It's just a place that that does not you know, it does, it just confounds the thing. And you know, this is like, this is why I always say, you know, things are going really well, unless you care about getting around the state in some sort of timely fashion. Want your health care to be relatively affordable, want your child's school to have been built more recently than the last seven years? Right. Like,
Jonathan Cohn 19:38
I've been in that Mrs. Lincoln? Out of this Way.
Jordan Berg Powers 19:41
Right, exactly. This is terrible. This just doesn't make any sense.
Anna Callahan 19:45
Yeah. And that's, and as we said in an earlier podcast, the thing about having a vision in a state like Massachusetts, is that our people are for all these things. So if we only had a legislator that-- legislature that had vision, then we could be leading the whole country. Right? We could be passing these policies that then other states sort of dominoed about, you know, and we could be the ones getting *national* policies passed.
Jonathan Cohn 20:14
And then kind of building off some of the discussion that we were making earlier. The one thing that's kind of a striking dynamic in Massachusetts, so like, just like the national national parties have platforms. Here in Massachusetts, there is a party platform, I think you were noting before about how like it is a very progressive state Democratic party platform, people in the legislature don't view it as a thing, as you were noting, Anna, before, that many of the things in that platform would make, like if passed would make Massachusetts that's the the most progressive state in the Union, are things that have overwhelming public support. But it's a striking disconnect when, if you were to ask people in the building about what the platform actually means, you probably get maybe they'll roll their eyes, they'll be like, wait, there's a platform? As though that was something they should even have to pay attention to. And like on the national level, we do have a sense that what gets into the platform in the presidential year, even if they don't enact all of it should give you some guidance about what they're going to try to enact. They might fall short, the priorities might change. But it's kind of a policy vision guiding the elections. And that's why like when republicans literally had no platform with Trump's reelection, it was a very meaningful statement about that, like about the Republican Party. Whereas-- and you can even track the evolution of things. And it's interesting, you can track-- I remember before looking at when full employment as a goal left the Democratic party platform and that can be an interesting thing, because it actually did have a direct correlation with the party as manifested in Congress. But there's no real connection between the party as manifested in the platform and the party as manifested like in the state house here.
Anna Callahan 22:06
Yeah, it's amazing.
Jordan Berg Powers 22:07
Yeah. And I guess I'd say since the current speaker has inherited this system, with total control, my like hope always right, is that we have a system that's more collaborative, makes more sense, is actually democratic. But in the absence of that reality, because I'm dubious that that will happen. My implication is you should pass things. You should like, do things to make people's lives precipitously better, and not just sort of tinker at the edges of Massachusetts. You know, it's really great when things pass that helped 20,000 30,000 people, but like, we're 7 million people, and we need to be legislating additionally, not just like, not just for that, right, like we do need to do these things that affect communities, in those in those 10s of 1000s. But we also need to be legislating for the 7 million. We need to be passing big policy agenda items to make people's lives better, because things are going in the wrong direction in Massachusetts, as well as right? Like we are there are things that we need to do as a state if we don't do them, it will catch up to us at some point. So I'm always hopeful, right? Like, that's always my advice. It's like pass *something*, like do *something*, like have an agenda have a clear vision of what you want the state to be.
Anna Callahan 23:16
Yeah. And so we're going to wrap this up. I want to mention that next week, I want to dive a little bit more we you know, we kind of-- at least I dissed lobbying a little bit today. I was like, lobbying doesn't work. So but the question is, and yet we here are saying we need for the public, for the people, to be more engaged. And so that question of like, well, Anna if you don't believe in lobbying, and you want people to be more engaged, what do you want them to do? Right? And I just, I've been immersed in this, you know, this tiny, little micro cosmic world of a few cities where they have a totally different way of engaging with the public. And I'm, like, super thrilled to talk about that. So that is something that we will cover next week. It's sort of what's the ideal relationship between the people and your elected officials? Thanks, both of you. Excellent as always to talk to you and yeah, we'll chat soon.