Last week, our state reps voted down three no-brainer rules that would have made our State House more transparent. Today we talk to Erin Leahy from Act On Mass about their work lobbying for these rules reforms for the last 9 months. Ironically (but not surprisingly), they sprung this vote on the reps (and on us) with less than four hours notice.
Jonathan Cohn and Anna Callahan and Jordan Berg Powers (away this week) chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on Youtube.
Join us Saturday July 24th at 11am on the Boston Common as we record live! Bring your questions.
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.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Last week, our state reps voted down three no-brainer rules that would have made our State House more transparent. Today we talk to Erin Leahy from Act On Mass about their work lobbying for these rules reforms for the last 9 months. Ironically (but not surprisingly), they sprung this vote on the reps (and on us) with less than four hours notice.
Jonathan Cohn and Anna Callahan and Jordan Berg Powers (away this week) chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on Youtube.
Join us Saturday July 24th at 11am on the Boston Common as we record live! Bring your questions.
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.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* 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 7/18/2021 @ 2038ET by CFH and 7/16/2021 @ 11:40ET by FL.]
Anna Callahan 0:01
Hey there. This is Anna Callahan. You're listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. This is where we really talk about state politics, trying to engage people. We want to help people understand why it is so broken. We want to let you know how you can get involved. And so we are here. I have my regular, Jonathan Cohn, and we have a special guest, Erin Leahy from Act on Mass. So if each of you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, that would be amazing. Jonathan, do you want to go first?
Jonathan Cohn 0:35
Jonathan Cohn, he/him. Based in Boston. I've been a volunteer with different progressive issue and electoral campaigns since moving up here almost exactly eight years ago. I'll give a shout out: regular co-host Jordan Berg Powers isn't here. It was just his birthday. And it his daughter, Ella's birthday today. Shout out, Happy birthday. And [INAUDIBLE'S] birthday was just recently too.
Anna Callahan 1:03
Amazing. Erin?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 1:07
Hi, everybody. My name is Erin Leahy. I'm the organizing director for Act On Mass, which is a nonprofit started in 2018, basically founded to be a watchdog to shine a light on the issues with transparency, accountability in the Mass statehouse, so extremely germane to what y'all are doing in this conversation, and really trying to merge the realm of good governance and progressive issues. So that's what we do. And I've been with them since just October, my background is in electoral politics. And now I get to live in a very fun world of the State House.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 1:44
Thanks for having me, guys.
Anna Callahan 1:45
Oh, yeah! Thanks for being here. And I am Anna Callahan, she/her, live in Medford. And I do want to mention, before we get started, that we're going to have a live broadcast of this podcast on July 24, at the Boston Common at 11am. So we would love to see you all there, bring your questions, we'll take questions from the audience, and it's going to be super fun.
Anna Callahan 2:07
But today, we are talking about the rules. There was a vote on the rules that was supposed to happen in January and then it got delayed, and it just happened. And a lot of people were working on it-- no one more than Act On Mass. I'm going to delay the moment you've all been waiting for, which is Erin talking, but I'm going to ask Jonathan a question about what are rules? Why should you care about rules?
Jonathan Cohn 2:37
So one quote that I'll use the lead into this that I always like invoking is a quote that Don Berwick, who ran for governor in 2014, would often invoke. I forget the guy who actually used this phrase, originally, but it was that "every system is perfectly designed for the results that it gets." And it's a great way of thinking of the rules for any chamber, since, for any chamber or any organization you set out rules, and if you're getting, let's say, less than ideal outcomes, that at least in part, will stem from how you're designing how things operate. That there will be with anything that there can be cultural things that exist apart from that, but if you're baking in a set of rules, and things are constantly not turning out the way you want, they're at least going to be part of the issue. And that's something that typically happens in January, and Erin is going to ask about, why that didn't happen, why they've existed without having to pass new rules for a long time. But to govern things like what happens in a committee, what happens on the House floor? What *can't* happen in either of those? How about how a vote happens? How, like, what committees even exist. All of that stuff, it has to be created somehow. Because it doesn't just simply exist. For any of that to exist, for any of those processes and procedures about how representatives and senators act, and how they act together, has to be set out. How those are laid out can reinforce the centralization of the chamber or they can chip away at the centralization of the chamber, depending on how how they're written. But that's just kind of a little bit of teeing things up. But we'd love to kind of pass it over to Erin. So why are they doing this in July? They've been in session since January.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 4:40
To torture me personally.
Anna Callahan 4:42
[laughs]
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 4:46
Oh, I don't know if that was explicitly Speaker Mariano's reasoning but it feels like it.
Sound effects Anna 4:52
[Boooooo! Boooo!]
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 4:52
So I mean even on paper he turns up-- Oh, the Boos!
Anna Callahan 4:59
[laughs]
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 5:01
Yeah, I'm gonna need some Yays later to pick me up. So just have your finger hovering over that.
Anna Callahan 5:06
Yeah.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 5:08
So speaker Mariano, in late January, sent out this big letter where he announced that he was moving the rules vote to July, when normally we expect it to be late January, early February. He gave a couple of reasons, one of which was just COVID. They wanted to keep the emergency rules they put in place because of COVID, COVID wasn't done yet, so bah bah buh bah. And then he also talked about the need to study the rules and have a rules review with a report due in early July. He also cited, without name, Act On Mass and our coalition of progressive organizations, who had been up until that point and continue to do so after then lobbying basically for a number of changes to the rules. Did he say outright that that movement and that pressure was *the* reason for the move? Not necessarily, but it was, I mean, it was a pretty big part of it. I think there was a lot of focus, we really had built a lot of momentum behind our rules changes and our amendments. And they didn't want to take that vote in the midst of all of that. So they punted it, partially using the emergency rules as an excuse, and then finally took up the house rules last week in July.
Anna Callahan 6:36
So before we go on, Erin, what were the rules that you guys were pushing for?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 6:49
There are three rules. The first campaign was a little bit different. But basically, we wanted all committee votes to be made public, because-- fun fact-- they're not! They're just not, which is wild. Mass is in the minority of states that don't make all of their committee votes public. And in fact, even the State Senate *does* and has since 2018. So it really is a bizarre fixture of the Massachusetts House of Representatives that they don't.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 7:17
And we wanted to argue to have bills be available to the public and to reps 72 hours before they have to vote on them. This is a really big issue where bills come out in 24 hours or less than 24 hours, popping out of committees where they've been hiding behind closed doors for months: six months, nine months. And then suddenly they...
Anna Callahan 7:38
changed in that time!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 7:39
Yes, exactly in some way. They come out of committee with massive changes, usually always bad changes, rarely do they come out being stronger, more progressive bills than they went in, and then they get rammed through with near unanimous votes in less than 24 hours. And those of us, in the advocacy community, and concerned citizens, who are the stakeholders of this type of legislation don't have any time-- what are they going to do? Drop their day jobs to go rally and lobby their reps and email their reps, and read, you know, 100 pages of legislation? So that was the second rule: having more time to review bills, so the public has more input. And then the third one for the first campaign was a little bit different. It was lowering the roll call threshold to make it easier to get votes on the record. We changed our tactics for the second campaign, and made it more about the concentration of power in the State House, which we really felt was missing from the first part of our campaign, the first part of the conversation. So that's why we started advocating for reinstating term limits for the Speaker of the House, just an eight year term limit, something that we had until 2015 when then Speaker Robert DeLeo, saw his time as Speaker coming to an end, and then insisted that those term limits be removed. So all of these things have a lot of precedent either in the Mass house or in other similar state legislators or even just the Senate.
Jonathan Cohn 9:08
What's interesting as well is thinking of speakers of the house and how we're just so not even used to having a just normal, boring transfer of power with speakers of the house because of how often that they, like how it was a rarity that DeLeo didn't end up like in a lawsuit against him. And that being like, the reason for him leaving.
Anna Callahan 9:30
Jail!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 9:30
Yeah, not just lawsuit, but indictment.
Jonathan Cohn 9:35
Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] And that's even like having it set but like you save this time, it's not something that you're going to be building up power forever, unless it gives a degree of regularity to it.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 9:48
Right. It's a powerful, powerful position. I mean, the Speaker gets to decide the committee assignments for every single member. So there are some committees that come with a lot of power. Some that come with basically none and basically see no bills. So he gets to decide that, and I say he because it's always been a white man holding the speakership. He gets to decide if people get stipends along with their chair positions or leadership positions. So he really gets to set the salary. And it's funny that I'm sitting in front of Anna Callahan, because I know this, because I spent time knocking doors for her. So it's like I feel very ironic in this moment, very grateful. And he also gets to control staffing, which is something that I've been told again, and again, we haven't been talking about enough at Act On Mass. Staffing is a huge carrot and stick for rank and file members of the legislature. Because if you have one staffer, you can simply not be as good of a rep to your constituents. And if you play nice, the Speaker will reward you with more staff, and you can literally do your job better and easier and endear yourself more to your constituents. So it's a cyclical, really broken system.
Jonathan Cohn 11:05
It is wild, when you realize how many of them do just have one staffer. Like they can be there for years and they have one staffer to handle all of the constituent requests.
Anna Callahan 11:12
Yeah. And that list is powerful. I talked to a stepping down state rep and they went on about 25 things that the Speaker controls about your life when you're state rep including your parking spot, and where you sit in the chamber, you can't sit in the chamber close to the people that you normally work with, because God forbid you be able to lean over and say, 'Hey, let's do this!' He controls things like when you're able to get conference rooms for a meeting. I mean, it's crazy.
Jonathan Cohn 11:48
Reminds me of a teacher breaking apart kids that the teacher doesn't want to sit next to each other in class.
Anna Callahan 11:53
The troublemakers. And we need more troublemakers!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 11:57
Yeah, and so yeah, and so I guess we put a little button on that. Yes, the Speaker has a ton of power, and no one should have that much power. We're not even saying with our rules changes to necessarily remove any of those privileges, which, you know, I think we do support removing some of those powers for sure. But that wasn't even what we went for. And, spoiler alert, it lost! That amendment lost terribly. That modest, modest check on what can otherwise be somewhat unfettered power, even that was a third rail.
Anna Callahan 12:36
All three of them lost.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 12:38
Yep.
Anna Callahan 12:38
And that is, that is not a reflection on Act On Mass. That is a reflection, as everyone who's listening to this podcast knows, that is a reflection on the insane culture of groupthink at the State House where everyone does what they think the Speaker wants without even being told. So I heard some of these from you before, and I would love to hear-- Act On Mass has been lobbying for, I don't know, 8, 9 months?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 13:10
So pregnancy term. It's like sad shitty baby [INAUDIBLE] the house rules.
Anna Callahan 13:19
You have heard all of the excuses that all these reps give. And we would love to hear them. We'd love to hear what are what are the excuses? What's the excuse? And why is that excuse baloney?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 13:33
Sure. So this is probably my favorite thing to talk about. I find that very fun and funny and interesting to hear the kind of mental gymnastics reps will do. And rhetorical gymnastics, we at Act On Mass we call it legisplaining or legislator explaining. And once you learn to identify it, you'll see it everywhere. And they really really lose their power once you can kind of know what the reps are doing.
Anna Callahan 13:58
And by the way, this is what people love about politicians.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 14:03
It's what they're famous for.
Anna Callahan 14:04
Giving you a bunch of bullshit!
Jonathan Cohn 14:08
With the Olympics coming up soon, it would just be fun. I'm gonna say like, 'Oh, are you trying out for the Olympics? Because the gymnastics in that statement were really impressive!'
Anna Callahan 14:20
The legislating Olympics, I love it!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 14:23
Yeah. Like a bunch of politicians in suits getting up at a mat next to one of the courses and rings and just be like, "Um, committee votes don't necessarily reflect a someone's position on a bill" and then just the audience claps -- 10 out of 10. Yeah. Yeah, so that's one of the ones I...
Sound effects Anna 14:46
Booooo booooo!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 14:50
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So public committee votes should be so uncontroversial. It is the letter of the law and followed by so many state legislatures and even in the Senate, but what we've heard some reps say really comes down to assuming that members of the public are gonna misunderstand what these votes mean. And we heard this: one of the reps during the Joint Rules (committee) held up a postcard that one of her constituents had sent her very earnestly saying, "Dear rep, I want you to support making committee votes public so I can know who votes for and against these bills." And she stood up there and she said, "This person doesn't understand the legislative process. It's not a vote *for* a bill. It's a vote to *advance* a bill."
Anna Callahan 15:42
Can you imagine being that person? Can you imagine being that voter and being told--
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 15:47
That constituent who...
Anna Callahan 15:48
...that you are stupid! What an insult! I mean, I'm hot and bothered. I'm personally offended by a legislator doing that to one of their own constituents.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 15:57
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohn 15:58
It's also an interesting thing that, if you're saying that your constituents don't understand the process, then why aren't you doing more to do civic education? And...
Anna Callahan 16:07
Yes! Yes!
Jonathan Cohn 16:09
but it's also just a weird concept that you're ever seeing a few reps on the floor trying to argue that voting yes to trigger a favorable report to a bill is not the same thing as voting for a bill, which is something that requires a certain type of absurd logic for anybody to believe. That you're like, "Yes, but this bill should go ahead and go on to the next committee to get to the floor, but I don't actually support it."
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 16:41
Right. We are literally moving into the process. Yeah. And...
Sound effects Anna 16:46
[cricket sounds]
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 16:45
...crickets! Yeah! But I think your point is right on! If these reps are so concerned about constituents' lack of civic education and understanding what the committee process really looks like and what it means and how things change, bills get rewritten as they move through committee. Yeah, that's absolutely all completely true, then why is your answer as a rep and the person in power to then just shut people out more? Make it harder...
Jonathan Cohn 16:47
Yeah
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 17:12
And have this legislative process work as opposed to putting the votes out there and if people say, I don't understand why you voted this way, or why you voted that way, saying, "Okay, let me explain it to you. Like this was my thinking behind that." But the truth is, reps don't want to do that. Reps really don't want to explain themselves to their constituents. They'd rather not!
Jonathan Cohn 17:31
One of my favorite excuses from reps and this was two years ago, when this issue came up was one state rep who honestly said to somebody about his reasoning for not supporting making committee votes public is, but then my constituents would call me more.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 17:49
Yeah.
Anna Callahan 17:52
Amazing.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 17:53
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohn 17:54
Heaven forbid!
Sound effects Anna 18:01
[crowd laughter]
Anna Callahan 18:01
[laughs]
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 18:01
I think we need to take that privilege away from Anna, you are abusing it!
Jonathan Cohn 18:06
And it was, it was kind of a wild thing as well, when you were seeing some of the state reps argue on the phone -- I believe this was Representative Kate Hogan who is saying this-- Uhh... Oh, well, like, it's kind of acting as though these are like totally uninformed positions that like, well, it's after we take votes and then people might talk with experts and different advocates and people. You had a *hearing* on this bill. But they're only taking these votes after they have a hearing, and sometimes these hearings can go on forever, of different people testifying For or Against. So unless you as a rep chose to not attend the hearing and not read any of the testimony submitted and not do any research, you should have an informed position on what you're voting on.
Anna Callahan 19:01
What are some of the other ones? Where are some good ones?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 19:04
Okay, for 72 hours-- which I will just put a little asterisk-- we didn't actually technically get a vote on 72 hours to read a bill during the house rules. There was a similar amendment filed for 48 hours, but otherwise, mostly the same. And they took that one up first. That one got voted down. And so they ruled the 72 hour one "out of order," but generally for more time to read a bill. Oh, Jonathan, I mean, you wrote so much of this in your piece! People gave excuses about bills that they left until the last day of the two year long legislative session to take up and vote on, saying if we had had to wait another day to vote on this, it wouldn't have happened. Nevermind they could have voted on it or taken it up two days earlier!? But they choose not to do that!
Jonathan Cohn 19:54
No, it's been a while. It's like you could just say like release bills on Friday and then like have a weekend and then vote on that Wednesday when you're in session. And it's not like I think we never talked about that one episode before about how so much of what the legislature does is push off everything to the last day or last two days of the session. And wouldn't it be nice if they just push that deadline a bit? They'll still have a time crunch when they push everything. Like off to the penultimate day of this session, like that whatever number penultimate day of the session, but at least that gives some time for people to know what they're doing.
Anna Callahan 20:32
This is what I chalked up to another piece of lack of leadership. We have a group of people that is called "leadership." And I wish we could agree on a different name for these people, because they don't lead. They don't have a vision for what policies we should be having. They don't have a vision for what the lives of people in Massachusetts should be like. They don't have a vision for how can we get bills passed in a way that allows people to read them, or that works on climate in March and healthcare in July, and all these things. Everything gets smashed up to the last second. And then people are frantically throwing in amendments to the budget because nothing got voted on.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 21:11
Mm hmm...
Anna Callahan 21:13
Total lack of leadership!
Jonathan Cohn 21:15
Like this love of that, I think, Erin is that you were saying, 'Well, if you moved up the deadline, then I wouldn't be able to work until the very last minute on the deadline that exists.' Makes you think!
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 21:31
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just...
Jonathan Cohn 21:33
That's a problem.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 21:34
I think there was actually a great editorial from the editorial board of the Boston Globe that came out on Sunday. Well, I'll just give a shout out to the Globe. Not that they need my shout out. But they've been really great on this issue and following this very niche beat, if you will. And the author said something like, 'it's almost like they're using their own lack of time management skills as a reason NOT to implement these reforms that would make it better.' And that's exactly what they're doing. Nevermind that-- I'll just also take a step back-- this language of the amendment has an emergency waiver! If two thirds of the state legislature wants to waive that requirement for 72 or whatever, 48 hours, then they don't even have to wait that long. And that is a supermajority, which is already what the Dems need to pass any controversial adjacent legislation so that it overrides a Baker veto. So the Roe Act, the Roadmap Bill, those are such pieces of legislation that already needed a supermajority. So if you have that to beat a Baker veto, then you have that to waive the 72 hours if you really wanted to.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 23:00
Yes. Yeah, like very on the nose as always. They announced that the rules were even going to be voted on with less than 24 hours notice. It was in an informal session, aka two members of leadership in the house chamber just kind of doing stuff, not a full formal session or a full quorum. And they just got up there and said, 'Hey, tomorrow, we're voting on the rules. Knock knock, it's done.' And the deadline to file amendments was three and a half hours from that. Oh, yeah. And the rules package was 115 pages long. So for me, I'm an advocate. I'm a full time advocate. Even I was scrambling doing an Adobe, side by side comparison, on the phone with the reps who were filing, scrolling through trying to see what the changes were, going to our relevant sections to see if they were changed, rewriting the amendments, because you have to include things like line numbers, and after this word after that word, so technically, things had to change. And doing that in three and a half hours was brutal. Nevermind people for whom this is not their full time employment. Totally cuts out the voices of everyday people.
Jonathan Cohn 24:18
Exactly. So for many people, by the time that they're even learning that something is being voted on, it will have already been. And even that type of rush also leads to just errors because didn't you had say, I think we were talking before then they made something less transparent than our own rules. Their own like report on the roll said and it was apparently actually not intentional, but because they rushed this. They didn't actually have enough and he didn't have enough eyes on it. You then make mistakes that you need to correct, that they need to actually rush to correct.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 24:54
Right. And leadership is afforded that luxury with technical amendments, but I can't file a ticket. I can't file a technical amendment to correct something. They'd have to do it on my behalf. So just a lot of power.
Jonathan Cohn 25:51
No, it's just funny, as we were chatting before, is like they love getting Republicans to sign on to their stuff. Like, it's something I remember having joked about. This is on the Senate side, rather than the house. But I remember having joked last year, it was theoretically possible that after last year's election, that the Senate would end up as 39 democrats and Bruce Tarr. That if every Democrat on the ballot had won in the State Senate race, and they still would have wanted Bruce Tarr's support for stuff. And at the same time that dynamic's in the house, where you often see that how they actively want, especially with anything with a hint of contrast in a bill. They actively want Republicans signing on to their bills. So it becomes ironic for them to say something that actually did have Republican Support and like, suddenly, that's bad to them, that Republicans are supporting something, although they they love it when it's their own legislation.
Jonathan Cohn 27:11
Yeah. And it's also speaks as well as because of what we were saying before in terms of the incentive structure and the building, that the reason that you'll have some of the most progressive Democrats voting with Republicans is they're they have the least fealty, like felt loyalty to the Speaker of the House. All that tests for others is not that oh, this is a bad thing, because Republicans back that it's like, no, it's that the Republican caucus won't feel 'Oh, but what will the democratic Speaker of the House do to me?'
Anna Callahan 28:59
Well, I tell you, we need more and more people, groups, everybody spreading the word about how broken the State House is, we need more of that. That's what we're here for. I know I remember, Jonathan, you had one comment about the about a tactic we can use with our reps.
Jonathan Cohn 30:26
Yeah. If they if they start feeling that they don't like responding to constituents at something they can offload to do for somebody else to post for them.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 30:36
Oh, that's another excuse. I heard I'm so sorry to go long. But um, the excuse that this would be burdensome on staff to post committee votes online could not be more specious. Literally in the Senate the way they record their committee votes is through a software called Laws. And they'll say it's annoying in the joint committees, because that means they don't use their normal software, they have to do things like old fashioned, they have to do things outside of that software, just so it doesn't go online. So I don't want to hear it.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 31:16
It is amazing. And you know, staff have been great allies to this cause. So yeah, I don't wanna hear none of that.
Anna Callahan 31:25
Right on. Well, we could talk forever about this. It's great work at Act On Mass. This is, Erin, the moment you've been waiting for.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 32:03
Thank you guys so much.
Anna Callahan 22:50
Yeah, and by the way, I think you mentioned before we started recording about how the rules vote itself had only like three and a half hours.
Anna Callahan 25:06
Okay, one more. I know you've talked about the Republican excuse. I would love to hear that one before we talk about next steps.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 25:13
Oh, sure. So this is kind of how you know, the reps are running low on reasons they didn't vote for these amendments. Because I've heard a lot of reps just saying, guys look at the vote tally. All the Republicans voted for this and not that many Democrats. So ergo deductive reasoning. Or inductive I suppose. It must be a Republican issue. This must be something that conservatives like, this must be bad for Democrats. I can't support it, because so many Republicans supported it. And I'm just gonna tee that up for Jonathan cuz I think he can respond probably.
Anna Callahan 26:48
Yeah, I think this also is just indicative of how much you don't have to be a Democrat, or right or left. Everybody hates corruption. Everybody hates the fact that there is a small, tiny group of you know, what do you want to call them? Elites? Or people in power, who make all the decisions. That is not how our democracy should work. And you don't have to be a Democrat to think that.
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 27:40
Exactly, this is not a left right issue. It's a top bottom issue. It's an issue of power.
Anna Callahan 27:49
Okay, so what's next rules were voted down? What's the plan?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 27:55
Um, so we're just gonna keep, we're just gonna keep fighting. It might not be in the same format as this campaign has been because it has been really exhausting to run a statewide grassroots lobbying campaign for nine months. So we have a little bit of time to regroup and strategize for the long term, but there's going to be another rules vote in 2023. I mean, there's gonna be an election cycle in 2022. We're trying to do everything we can to spread as much public awareness about this issue, you know, turn it into an electoral issue, right. I mean, that was already something of an electoral issue in 2020. But frankly, if, you know, people deserve to know how the reps are voting in the legislature. And they also deserve to know if they represent their values on the issue of good governance, so that's going to be our mission to go out there and spread that. Yeah, and what form that takes? Well, we'll see. Everyone sign up for email updates on ESA.org.
Jonathan Cohn 29:15
Oh, so one thing that people should do, and I'd say like props because I actually did a good job of bothering people last session about like with committees of asking your rep how they voted. Something that I was telling you before that if the house is like half measure and posting tallies and path posting who voted no. And so you see how many voted yes, but you don't see who they are. You see how many people didn't show up to vote but not who they are. You can just assume that your rep isn't showing up to vote if they're not telling you how they're voting. And just call them out for that until they agree to actually start telling you how they're voting. As well as offsetting I've seen that a number of reps are like oh, well, I didn't vote for this for like mumble mumble reasons, but I'll tell people my vote if they ever asked, I'm like, okay to do it?
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 30:03
Yes, yes. Especially now that, you know, no votes are going to be posted online, that might change the game a little bit, right? Now we're gonna be able to see if your rep is either in that column of no's or not listed in that committee. Ask your rep what they did. And then, I don't know, post that online somewhere. If they won't do it, maybe we'll do it ourselves. Guerrilla transparency.
Anna Callahan 31:11
It's a bigger hassle to not put the votes online.
Jonathan Cohn 31:15
Yeah, amazing.
Sound effects Anna 31:37
Cheers
Erin Leahy, Act On Mass 31:38
Are those children's voices? Do we have a big kid following for this podcast?
Anna Callahan 31:52
So yeah, incredible work. Looking forward to see what you do next. And thanks, everybody. We'll be here a week from now and on the 24th we'll be on the Commons
Anna Callahan 32:05
Thank you.
Jonathan Cohn 32:06
See y'all later.