Legislative Amendments

Please donate to the show!
 
Today we discuss the legislative cycle to remind you of what happens in Massachusetts every two years. We will talk about a little bit about a few specific amendments that have been announced and then pulled, and we'll talk about why this happens.

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 56. 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.

To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to the podcast (https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com)
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/podcast
* Donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state and a legislature that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And today we will be talking about amendments, why there are so many that all get pulled before they can get voted on.
We'll talk a little bit about the legislative cycle just to remind you of what happens in Massachusetts every two years. We will talk about a little bit about a few specific amendments that have been announced and then pulled, and we'll talk about why this happens. So we look forward to the conversation.
Before we do, let me have my illustrious co hosts introduce themselves. I will start with Jonathan. Hello, Jonathan, He him his I'm an activist joining from Boston in the south end. I've been active on different progressive issues and elective campaigns for over a decade now. Thank you.
And Jordan, I’m wearing a James Baldwin shirt today, “I can't believe what you say because I see what you do.” Criminal Legislature. And so I am Jordan Berg powers. He him I live in Worcester, Massachusetts. I have the misfortune of having 14 years experience working in and around the Massachusetts state legislature. And I am Anna Callahan coming at you from Medford.
She her mostly spent a bunch of years doing like local politics, politics, local political organizing, but also love working with these folks on helping people understand state politics. And today I'm pretty excited to talk about the process of amendments and how bizarre it is in Massachusetts. I would love for us to start off by talking about the difference between Massachusetts and our legislative cycle and other state legislatures and their legislative cycles with just a quick intro of saying we sort of force this very structured series of abilities that the legislature is sort of allowed to do at different times.
There's a portion of, there's a very short window of time to get in anything you want to be considered over the session. Then there's a window of time where they have hearings. There's a window of time where things go to committees.
There's a window of time when, you know, X, Y and Z happens, and these guys are going to talk about it more in depth and also about how strange it is because it really limits people's ability to pass legislation that may come up at the wrong, quote, unquote wrong time of a two year cycle. And it's not impossible to introduce it, of course, but it really, the system we have doesn't lend itself to just introducing and passing legislation at the appropriate time for that legislation rather than at this structured, regimented time that the leadership sort of hands down who would love to jump in on this topic, I'm happy to say, some of you things, and then jordan definitely tag in. So Massachusetts is one of ten states that has at least nominally full time, full time state legislature.
Many states that people follow, other states that are part time legislatures, typically they're like in session for three months, they do a bunch of things and then they're out. So there'll be like flurry of activity during that period and that they would have to call a formal, like special legislative session to do anything else. Massachusetts, however, with being, it's like nominally full time, but that exists with both a formal legislative session and periods of what I quote, unquote, called informal legislative session, which means that there's no actual, like, bills being passed in that at least no bills passed in an informal session.
Unless it's anodyne, nobody's objecting to it. It doesn't need the same degree of process. But as Anna, as you're noting before, it's a very structured process where they just simply don't pass bills in the first few months.
January is reserved for filing bills. February is reserved for getting committee assignments, and those months are also kind of dedicated to passing rules. I also give a shout out to the fact that we will likely end the legislative session without joint rules being passed for the session they've yet to actually decide upon agree, so that we just live in the joint worlds that were last passed, and they stay on autopilot until they change them.
They haven't done. And then you have to have hearings, and every bill needs a hearing. And so then it pushes everything back, because if they're always busy with something else in the legislative cycle, as well as even the way in which the budget happens at set months, that all of those self imposed restraints on time lead them to punch everything up at the very end of the session, which leads to where we're in the midst of, when we're recording this now, it's the day before the last day of the formal legislative session, which ends on July 31.
And then suddenly things start, like actually being passed in a flurry of last minute activity, when they've been at this since last January. And they could have done many of these things at any given time. And most bills shout out to any new and exciting bills filed for the first time.
Many of them are not new. And so it's not as though they needed all of this time to be hard at work. They've done it in past sessions.
Where do they ever get, like, one thing just quickly? And I'll kind of tag over about how rarely they ever leave one line. I think one of the former heads of Massfeld used to use the acronym RAID to describe the only ways that legislators ever seem to leave retirement, appointment, indictment, or death. Oh, yes, the old indictment.
Excellent. That's my favorite story. That's my favorite one.
You got me. I love it. I used to love when he would say that.
It's my favorite. Yeah, he's the best. I just want to say, yeah, that just the same thing that just, like, it's, the things they will tell you is, look, we have to go through our processes, but they don't have processes.
They're not working in the committee rooms. And what do I mean by working in the committee rooms? In most legislatures, information comes into the committee rooms, and either the committee will work to form a bill based on said testimony and things, and then that will get workshopped with staff, and then that staff, and then the legislators and the staff will craft a bill, and then that bill will try to kick around to their colleagues to figure out what to do. So a lot of times, especially in republican legislatures, they'll have pre made bills from activists,corporations, or ALEC, and they'll go through there and they'll go into the legislative process to get a sense of,like, where are people in the legislature? In the committee, and then they'll work it in the committee, and then they'll pass it through the thing.
Um, we don't do any of those things. We don't do either of those things in our legislature. Our legislature staff is not working on the finite details of bills.
Very rarely. Occasionally, um, mostly they're doing constituent services. They're working on trying to understand maybe the bills.
They're maybe getting answers from the government agency who might oversee the bill. So they are doing a little bit of work on it, but they're not sort of taking in testimony. The testimony process has no purpose in the Massachusetts legislature.
It doesn't inform what they end up doing. It doesn't change how they look at it. It is just to rack up numbers and have press hits so that the press will cover it.
Right. Like, that's its only purpose is outward. It's not inward.
It's not to affect the process inward into the building. And then, you know, so they don't do that either. And then ultimately, only the speaker decides and maybe a few people around him, the, you know, Aaron Michael and the speaker, those are it that's the people who decide they're not shipping it.
You know, could, are there bills that get to the forefront because a bunch of reps ask for it and it starts to get shipped around occasionally, but almost never. Right? Like, that's why I say it's akin to winning the lottery. So, like, the normal makings of a process where, and, you know, they'll say, but what about this, Jordan? And they'll have one example of that where it went through one of these normal processes.
But that's the exception. The rule is that none of this other stuff is happening through regular processes. For every one time they pass a bill of something of some substance or consequence, there's 50 other bills waiting on the landslide, waiting on the side for some normal legislative process that just aren't getting attended, aren't getting attended to or aren't moving through.
And so they're not doing anything with their time. And I think that that's the important thing. It's a make work job by the definition, but most of them aren't making work.
You'll have some who definitely take it seriously, who definitely are professionals at it, but not all of them. I like your, I liked your slip up of saying they put it on the landslide, which, like, is like nothing ever happens, and they just slide right down the mountain and into the track, you know, to study, which means death. It is such a fascinating thing, especially to contrast with how things happen in Congress, which, like, Congress doesn't need to be praised as a model of anything.
However, like when Congress takes up a large bill and like, sometimes this will, this process will be evaded. Butwhen they take up a bill in standard order, you have a committee markup process. That means that the committee actually meets in a room, and then there are amendments offered.
Those amendments get voted on. Some committees share those votes. Some don't.
Like, I think it should be better, I can't remember if there's, like a standard process for that, but, like, there are votes that they take about what should happen, about what to do to the bill, they actually have, it's like less of a thing. The fact that we have a democratic supermajority than it was in Congress. That's like, typically hotly divided on a partisan basis.
But you have minority reports where the minority party can quickly prepare something up, that this is about why they object to a bill that's being passed by the majority. If it's something on the partisan basis, you also have, in a way that exists, again, because of the partisan contrast at the national level, you have whips for both.The part that, like the title of whip, the person's in charge of getting people in line for votes actually have websites that detail, this is what this bill does.
This is what these amendments do that we'll be voting on. And like, which, there is nothing so organized that exists in a public foundation to say what people are voting on outside of, like after the fact press releases from the Senate president's office. So I want to talk about a little bit before we actually talk about the amendments and what happens to the amendments about where are we in the legislative cycle right now? We said it's the day before the end of the session.
And so what happens in the, there's like the budget, right? And the budget is gigantic. And these are amendments to the budget because the budget is one of those few things that actually has to get passed at some point, right. All these other bills, like, they can not end up being passed.
And I love Jonathan, I'm so excited a little bit later to talk a little bit about how productive our legislature has been this cycle. But the budget is one of the only things that actually passes every two years. And so these are amendments to the budget.
And what does it look like over the last, like couple, few weeks? Like, what does that timeline appear to be? When do these amendments get proposed? Like what, what is the shape of this, this amendments process? Yeah. So the way that, and Jordan can put a tag in on this. So typically when a bill comes out of a committee,whether we're talking about the budget, when that happens in the respective chambers, because the budget process is always kind of an April for the House and the Senate, for the May Senate in May, or when a bill comes to the, when a bill gets out of the ways and means committee, executive chamber, and like scheduledfor coming up, legislators typically get like two days.
And then sometimes they might get more, but it's often just about two days. Sometimes it's less. It's like an 800 page bill.
They have to read it, come up with amendments like figure out what to change. Exactly. So, like, they need to figure out what's in it and what's nothing based on what they've been told, and then file amendments to seek to change it.
And because of that very compressed timeline that exists that you just simply from like an advocacy perspective, it's very difficult to create meaningful change when you have that compressed of a window that you're operating in, that if something does not already command a majority support as well as the support of those in charge. Two days are not likely to change that just because of how compressed that window is. If You're sending out an action alert to your supporters via email, somebody might be on vacation and only learn about this even happening after everything is already over.
So it requires very kind of quick turnaround of a process and, like, have a mad scramble that ends up largely leading to most things not, not even getting. Jonathan, as someone who runs, like, is involved, deeply involved in progressive mess, which literally is an organization with grassroots groups on the ground, and that mobilizes people to organize in favor of or against bills at the state level. Like, talk about the ability for an organization that is trying to mobilize people.
When you have 48 hours and it's an eight on a page bill, like, how long does it even take you just to understand and, like, figure out and then to mobilize people? Is that even possible? Exactly. That's the thing. Cause, like,when a bill drops, you need one, like, even figure out how to get access to the text.
Oh, my God, talk about that. You need to figure out who's, which organizations are actually analyzing it to see what's in it. And then people see who's even filing relevant amendments the groups are getting behind.
And then it becomes a question of, is there an actual hope for this amendment to get in? Do you know that, like, in the way in which the process is, if people are already opposed to something, two days of advocacy will not change that? I would love for it to be otherwise. Your best bet is for something that was, let's say, look,overlooked in the process, or something where there are weakly held positions around, or something that has been bubbling in, like, bubbling in momentum and that might finally tip over. But for so much of it, it ends up being a flurry of activity, only for a bill to remain largely the same.
So let me ask this question. We're specifically talking about this last, last second amendments to the budget, which is like the biggest flurry, if we'll move to, like, this moment in time where it's the budget and there's all these amendments. One of the things that, because we did cover amendments a couple of years ago, and one of the things that surprised me was the idea that a lot of the amendments that come up in the budget are bills that were sent to study or didn't end up going anywhere, and that bill will just end up as an amendment to the budget.
That's a thing that. Exactly. A lot of the budget amendments being a mix of earmarks for the people's districts,or that somebody takes their bill that hasn't passed yet and they filed as a budget amendment, but they don't actually, like, expect the bill to pass via the budget.
They're not interested in spotting their colleagues by making people vote on it. Spotting, let's remind people,we mean by spotting, by spotting the colleagues, by actually forcing a roll call on something to make other people take a vote on it to show how they, whether or not they support, support it. Like, they're not really interested in doing that.
They don't think that the bill is going to pass through the budget. They just do it. And I've never fully understood the rationale, like, the rationale behind that.
What I've often said is that, like, if you believe that the, if you're doing a series of asks for other legislators where you want to see who is willing to do a thing for you and I in the way that you can see on different campaigns and that you do a series of escalatory asks and you include it in that perspective, I can understand that. But I,so many, they're not that good of shadow not doing so I can actually talk about the history of how this happened. So this comes from our broke, so this comes from the broken aspects of the Massachusetts Progressive community.
So in the past you've been, and in the past, I mean, in the distant past, there were abilities to get things that couldn't muster. They couldn't get to the floor through the regular process, but you can get an amendment on the floor to a budget in a way that you don't have to go through committee. So the speaker would hold a bill in committee and the advocate would get it amended to the, to the budget, and then they couldn't keep it bottled in the community by the committee chair.
And so they did get, and then they would call for a vote. And then all of a sudden, these people who wanted to vote for it because they didn't want to not look like they weren't voting for it would go vote for it, and it would get added as an amendment to the budget. And so that used to happen, that used to be a thing that happened is advocates would ask people to add it as an amendment to the budget.
The legislator would call for a vote for it, and then legislators would vote for it because they saw I can't not vote for it. Like, this is popular, and that's the outing that we're talking about spotting. That's the outing.
And so what the. And so, and so that's what they call spotting. Right.
Or scarring, as Russell Holmes recently called it. And so because, as Jonathan has rightly said, not here recently, but many times online, that it's an incumbent protection agency bracket. What happened is the leadership basically said, we will protect you at all costs if you also protect each other and never allow actual policy to be debated or voted on in the public.
That if you all keep rank, we'll all do our best to keep you together. That only works if the thing you care most about is keeping the most conservative democrats in power. And it makes your own job sense if your biggest thing is your own job but not your own job, because this is the thing.
It actually not. What it does is it puts the progressive legislators at risk and protects the more conservative legislators because it doesn't even protect them. Jeffrey Sanchez is out of a job.
Jeffrey Sanchez would be in a job if he forced, if he forced votes on things. He claimed he believed it. So that's the best thing about it is progressives are so stupid that the progressive legislators are protecting their conservative people and they're the ones taking the hit for that decision.
That's the, that's the upside down of this whole thing is that the protection racket has done a thing where the people paying the cost are the most progressive legislators or the ones who profess to be progressive. Inreality, they're not because they're not willing to actually do things for these, these, you know, ethereal beliefs.It's something that might be progressive, but I won't do anything to make them happen.
You know, so they're the ones that hold that, like reap the costs and the conservative members don't pay the costs. They don't face challenges. Right.
People in, in Norwood and, you know, all these conservative on the south coast, they're not getting challenged on a regular basis from other democrats. Right. So you're protecting them at your own peril.
And that's what's so stupid about this whole thing. Well, let's be really clear, though. I think we haven't put the nail on the head, which is to say it used to be that they would, you know, propose these amendments and make people vote on it, but that is not what they do now.
And what we really wanted to talk about today was how people will propose an amendment and then they'll pull the amendment. And pulling the amendment means you don't allow anyone to vote for it. You just say, oh,no, we're not, here's my amendment, but I'm not going to have anybody vote for it.
And the thing that is most, well, I feel like as an example of this, recently, when the House took up their climate bill recently, there were 107 amendments filed, 91 were withdrawn. Wow. And it's just kind of a wild thing when you realize that they had staff draft these amendments.
Some of them you're just pulling a bill, checks and plopping it in, but others you're changing a line or something. So you had to do actual work of writing this amendment? Yeah. Advocates had to do actual work to try to do some degree of advocacy around this.
And all you did is just, you just withdrew it. I mean, at the slightest, the slightest bit of pressure. And even more absurd than the way they all get withdrawn en masse is the fact when some of these times, the legislator who's holding the amendment will go up, they'll deliver an impassioned floor speech about the importance of their amendment, and then they will ask for unanimous consent to withdraw it, and it will be withdrawn.
And I've never understood, like, what they think that they're accomplishing by doing that. Because you don'tneed to speak those words to your colleagues. If you haven't said those words to your colleagues, what wereyou doing for your own bill or amendment? Like, they're the ones you needed to be lobbying.
If you're speaking to the people at home, guess who watches the legislature's live feed all the time? No one. Like, unless paid to do so. Like, it's not like you have all these, like, TikTok teams with, like, memeing clips of Massachusetts legislators floor speeches, if only.
Yeah, yeah, it's bonkers town. And just. I think so.
I just want to say, like, this is, it's just so perverse. So I want to, like, highlight what Jonathan is saying. They are so there used to be this tactic which would work, which was to force through the amendment process your colleagues to vote on things they didn't want to vote on.
Sometimes they voted and passed terrible. Like, sometimes that ended up where there would be really bad things in them and the budget, and sometimes it would be really good things. But they used to do this thing that they did it, and now they no longer do it, but they go through the motions of doing it for only the sake of pretending to care, to work on an issue.
Like, that's the thing. It's all pretend. It's just to pretend to be doing things on the issues.
And these are not small things. These are things that we literally need to make things more affordable, to have health care that's better, to have education that works these are real. To have transportation that allows people to transport a route.
Right. Like things that we need, they just go through the pretendness of it. Like, they're, like, it's make believe and it's my child.
Right. They're playing at being legislators while not doing the actual work of forcing, pushing and cajoling that it takes to get these things. And that's why you have a legislature that does that.
Good. You know, I like to joke with, with my colleagues that, like, congratulations, you had 1990s ideas finally passed. Like, this is like, you know, like takes eight years, ten years, twelve years for good ideas to pass the legislature.
And then it's one of the 14 good or twelve good, right. Ideas that have been around for 14 years. And so, you know, this is the problem with this process is we are the people who pay the cost.
And I think that's why it gets me so mad is because it's, it's not in reality a good thing to do because it doesn't affect this. But in their minds, like, why did they do it? They do it because they want to tell us that they're fighting for us without actually fighting for us. That's a really perverse and sick thing to do because these are real policies that need to pass, that have real things that we need them to do.
And going through the motions of pretending is awful. And I want to say also, not just for the legislature, it's really frustrating that the people you give money to, the people you volunteer with, the people who will email you at the last second and say, hey, call your legislator to say, tell them to support this amendment for the budget. They know that it's not going to get voted on.
And were it to actually come up for a vote, they themselves are going to tell the legislator, pull it from the floor. We don't want to piss off the speaker. Well, then don't ask for my time.
Don't ask for me to sign it if you're not going to, if you're not going to fight for this for me, if I'm going to pay you money, give you things, send you to the legislature to fight for this thing. And your thing is to like, pretend to work on it so you can send me a letter saying, like, hey, we got it to the floor. And like, look at us.
Like, look at the thing, but not actually in any way forward this issue on my behalf. Then, like, you're, that's,that's, but that's how broken this system is, is that our own advocates, our own progressive community is a part of this absolutely atrocious thing that happens. That's only, that the only upside is how ineffective and stupid itis.
It would be worse if it actually convinced people that it was working on things. It would be worse if it got covered in the media as, look, they actually think the only upside is how ineffectual its actual ineffectual it is at meeting its own goals. Well, I would love to talk a little bit more about the ineffectual nature.
I think it would be nice for us before we do that, just to, let's, if we can just throw around, like, what are some, I mean, there's been so many amendments proposed and then pulled. Jonathan, you were talking about the climate legislation. There were amendments, you know, proposed.
I mean, one person, at least one would propose like four amendments, pull them all, you know, and then there are housing amendments that are getting proposed and pulled. You know, there are, and you, you already said,like, how many amendments there are that are being. Can you remind us of that number? It was, oh, the, like 91 out of 100.
There you go. This just all reminds me of, this is like years ago that I ended up like making this one knock knock joke to mock the state house of like knock knock, who's there house leadership. I've withdrawn all of my amendments.
That's what I operate. It's good. But in terms of the ability of the legislature to actually pass things, Jonathan,you did some amazing research to look into this session compared to previous sessions.
And just, I really want our listeners to hear this because it's kind of. Yeah. So I was curious to see this in terms of, and like, the numbers will obviously change with like, whatever happens in the rest of this session.
There's still 24 hours. Right? There's still a day. A whole day.
Exactly. And obviously, all of these numbers get bloated with home rule petitions and other things that they legally have to pass. But I looked out of curiosity going back a decade and a half to see how many bills did get signed into law in the difference, like kind of two year periods.
So if you go back to 2007 and 2008, 860 things were signed into law, 2009 and 2010, 680. So a little bit of drop there. Not quite sure then, but it kind of stays around here.
So that then 2012, 2011, 2012, you get 690, 2013 2014 701, 2015 2016 635, 2017 and 2018 626. So all of them, they're kind of like the same, like with enough of a range that like, it's basically, this starts dropping a little bit 2019 and 2020 to 529, 2021-2022 564.
Again, they're basically the same number in the scheme of things. But then where we are now we have 227.And so if they want to even catch up to the low, like the mid five hundreds of the last two, they better get on, like sending things out faster because if not, that's a stunning drop over the course of time.
Of how many things? Both a combination of fundamental, like, I'm just like destructive inertia and inaction as well as, like, that combined with the tendency to just bundle everything that they might possibly do into the same few bills so they can just negotiate them altogether. But even those aren't, there aren't that many of those either. It's wild.
Yeah, I have to, Jonathan, hit us with this stat beforehand, and I've been feeling that way. But to get it in such stark numbers, and I think the other thing to remember is that those other years where they were starting to decline, those are also, this isn't just this legislature. We've been going in this direction for some time, slowly but steadily eroding the job of state legislators, of the committees, of staff.
Right. It's not, it hasn't always been like this, but it's like moving in that direction. So even those other times were bad years.
You can also see that, like during COVID there was a drop and, you know, look, I understand everything. You know, that that makes a lot of, they try to get the feet underneath. But, like, if we go down now, like that, we should be going back up now, not down.
Yeah, exactly. Like, I understand why the 2019 2020 session, like, you were literally not there for some of that time and people were trying to figure out how to, and people were trying to figure out how to do the job virtually. We could end up.
Just half of that is crazy. I just, yeah. And again, I think a lot of this gets put into, this gets put into just complaining from leftists and all these things.
But I, again, want to focus on what is this meaning for you and I and regular people? What does this mean? It Means that right now my daughter does not know where most places in the country are. She has no sense of geography. She has no sense of civics.
She does not understand how our government works. And the reason is because all of the time in her classroom is put up on the MCAS. Everyone knows that this is a problem.
Everyone. There is not a single person who can look you in the face and say, this makes sense. And yet the legislature is literally not even trying to move anything on this issue.
We cannot afford to live here. People are leaving this state because they cannot afford to live. Young people are peacing out if you, the normal things that happen, which is like you, you meet someone, you get married,you want to move in next to your parents, you cannot do that.
You're just now maybe living in their basement and hoping they're dying like that. Reality, we could fix that.There are actual policies we could be putting in place to give people tools to fix this problem.
They are not doing that. They are, they are finally passing the bare minimum, maybe. I mean, I don't know if they'll get it over the line for prescription drugs.
And they, and they're not even attacking the major cause of it, the major driver, which at least the Senatepassed, the House won't even consider because of how bought and paid for they are by corporations. They're not addressing any of the underlying symptoms for the broken healthcare system at all. In the state.
We have the least amount of care and the most amount of cost, but everyone's covered. They're not addressing the fact that we can't get around easily. Right? Like, I'm planning to go back to school.
I can't get from my house to the school in a reasonable amount of time on public transportation. That's Bonkers, right? You can't, like, that is like, these are the things. Like, it's not just, it's really frustrating because they will say, look, we passed this thing.
We helped these people. We did these little things. We got 20,000, 30,000 people at a time, and there's 8 million people here, right? 7 million people.
We are. These things are, it is the titanic sinking. We are not addressing these things that are happening in your life on a day to day.
And they could, there are lots of bills out there that they could be pushing in a supermajority. And I think that's the frustration when you go, when you see these numbers decline. Don't just think of them as numbers.
Think of them as opportunities to make your life better. And they're doing half as much as they were already doing, which was too little already. And the thing that I like to, like, I have friends and family from out of state and the thing that I like to point out to them because they're always like, well, but Massachusetts is better than,like, your average state, you know? And I'm like, yeah, but Massachusetts, the residents who live inMassachusetts are wildly on the left, like, compared to a red or purple state.
We have different values and different desires and different opinions on things. And so the legislature is just not in step. It is decade, a decade, two decades behind what the constituents in Massachusetts want.
That to me, is why, you know, we talk about all these, you know, progressive policies and like, sure, this is our opinion, but the legislature is very much out of step with the constituents. And they can be because of our unbelievably broken system at the state house, where the speaker and their leadership team control the entire process. And they are able to determine which bills can pass and which bills won't.
And we basically, like, we have a legislature that does almost nothing compared to states. We passed very few bills. We are now passing even fewer.
And I'm going to make a little pitch. First of all, please donate to the show because you don't hear this kind of stuff often. We need far more progressive voices in the media.
And your donations really allow us to make sure that the messages, the quotes from here, the social media and all that stuff can get out to as many people as possible. But I'm also going to pitch next episode, which I really want you guys to tune into because we are, since tomorrow is the end of the session, we are going to betalking about this session and everything that happened. We will be giving you guys a lot of information that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
So please do tune in next time. And on that note, unless there are closing comments from either of you, what a pleasure always to talk about the legislative cycle, to talk about amendments, to talk about the crazy way that we do things here in Massachusetts and how broken it is. And we thank you all for listening.
Thank you for forwarding the show to your friends, and we look forward to chatting with everyone again next week.