Why Massachusetts Has the Least Transparent and Least Effective Legislature in America

0:00 These are some real initiatives that have had super majority support in Massachusetts but never been passed or even had a vote. A constitutional right to health care. [music] In 2003, a ballot initiative got enough signatures to get on the [music] ballot. Legislators sent it to study committee instead, killing the initiative without ever letting voters decide upon it. Mass Care sued. [music] The Supreme Judicial Court agreed that the legislature had a constitutional duty to vote yes or no on ballot questions. But because of the separation of powers, it could not force the legislature to do so.

0:38 A requirement that [music] sex ed be medically accurate. 26 states require that, but we don't. The Healthy Youth Act also required sex ed to teach about consent and be inclusive of queer students. The Senate passed it [music] five times, but the House has never brought it up to a vote. We don't know who is blocking. A wage [music] theft bill allowing the Attorney General to directly pursue wage and hour violations for workers. [music] Super simple stuff. Right now, if your employer is stealing your wages, your Attorney General can only address about 1% of cases, leaving workers to pursue expensive litigation on their own. It had a super majority of co-sponsors [music] but never even got a vote.

1:20 Since 2018, the Attorney General has recommended banning third-party electric suppliers, the ones that always send you spam postcards. The Senate passed it twice, but it died in conference committee again and again. Why? No idea. These policies have widespread support. We've been waiting to pass some of these for decades, but for some reason we cannot get them across the finish line. I'm Burhan Azeem, Vice Mayor of Cambridge. I'm running for State Senate, and let's talk about why the Massachusetts Legislature is the least productive in the country, can't pass [music] anything at all, and what we as voters can do about it.

1:58 Here's the situation. In Massachusetts, Democrats hold one of the largest supermajorities in the country, behind only Hawaii and Rhode Island. Massachusetts is 56% Democrat, the highest percentage of any state in the country. In every single legislative session since 2017, the Safe Communities Act, which would limit state collaboration with ICE, has been filed. It's never passed. This year, the House passed the Protect Act. Good news, but not really. It bans any new agreements with ICE, but it preserved existing ones. We are now the only blue state that has an agreement with ICE. And it's not just immigration. The pattern of doing the bare minimum is everywhere.

2:42 The MBTA has a 24 and a half billion-dollar deferred maintenance backlog. Housing costs have pushed working families out of every community in greater [music] Boston. Our legislature has been ranked dead last in legislative effectiveness [music] for multiple years in a row. Here are the statistics. [music] Last session, legislators filed about 7,500 bills. Of those, 463 became law. That's 45% less than the number of bills passed in the session before it. But it's not nothing, right? Well, about 85% of those bills were home-rule petitions, meaning they were actually policies that came from towns and cities and approved by the legislature. Take those out of the equation and you get maybe 50 substantive bills. [music] That's about 1% of all bills filed. What's worse is most of these bills got passed in a marathon session at the end of the term.

3:40 Maybe that's fine if you're writing an essay due tomorrow at the last minute, but that doesn't work for passing [music] actual laws that affect people's lives. So, how does the most democratic state in the country have the least productive legislature. And what if I told you it was actually by design? There's a saying, "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes." Let's talk about the design. >> [music] >> First, let's dive into how the legislature actually votes on bills.

4:06 There's a voice vote where the presiding officer listens to the vote and decides whether the yeas or nays are louder. So, the vote is actually based on vibes, literally. This is the most common type of vote and a lot of votes are unanimous, but even controversial votes can be taken by a voice vote. There's no way to figure out how your representative voted on these. We don't even know how many voice votes get taken in a session since none of it is recorded. If someone doubts the outcome of the voice vote, they can ask for a standing vote. People stand up and they get counted. A little bit more precise than a voice vote, but you still don't have a record of how each member voted.

4:41 And finally, there's a roll call vote where each legislator's yes or no is officially recorded and made public. You only get a roll call vote if enough members simultaneously stand up and demand one. In the house, that number is 20 people and in the Senate, it's a fifth of whoever shows up to work that day. Roll call votes are at historic lows. In the 2017 to 2018 session, the house held 313 roll call votes. By 2024, that dropped to 203 roll call votes. Legislators' positions on what gets passed aren't public and voters have less information about what their representatives actually believe.

5:19 Your legislator could tell you they voted a certain way, but you have no way to confirm it. The legislature made it even easier to kill bills by changing the rules. If a bill doesn't get voted out of committee after 60 days, it gets sent to study. The Boston Globe called it the bloodless murder of legislation. Let's follow the money. Why don't legislators want their votes to be public? It's because of the structure of incentives. Let's take a look at how state legislators get paid. They all receive $82,000 a year, but that's not all. They can also receive a so-called leadership stipend [music] on top of their base, which can run over $119,000 a year. That's a potential salary of 200,000 and more than double the actual base salary. 149 out of the 200 state legislators receive leadership stipends on top of their 82,000 base salary. Who decides who gets what stipend? The speaker of the house and Senate president. Together they control almost $5.3 million in extra pay and they assign it at their sole discretion. Legislators can have their stipend stripped for criticizing the speaker or talking to the media without permission. Their income depends on staying in the speaker's good graces, so they have to play nice. They don't push bills or ask hard questions, so nobody made a big deal about the Safe Communities Act for 9 years because that could cost them money. Let's say you have a job where if you keep the boss happy, you get more than double your regular paycheck. If you keep asking your boss about when he's going to do this or if he can do that, the boss gets mad and then poof that extra money is gone. Now also understand how bizarre that statement is. State House leadership isn't supposed to be a legislator's boss. That's supposed to be the voters, the constituents that they represent, but most of their pay comes from complying with leadership, not from the voters. So does this sound like a recipe for corruption?

7:08 You bet. Two of the last three speakers of the Massachusetts House were convicted of felonies. One pled guilty to federal obstruction of justice, another was of extortion, conspiracy and fraud after steering $17.5 million in state contracts [music] to companies in exchange for kickbacks. And the third, well, the next speaker was named an unindicted [music] co-conspirator in a probation department corruption case. He served until 2020. Scotia Hill, who runs the watchdog group Act on Mass, put it plainly, "When a single vote off from leadership can risk a significant portion of your salary, legislatures have to weigh their own livelihoods against the will of their constituents. So, everything happens with no oversight. The conference committee where the bills get written, the caucus meetings where the strategy is set. Voters can't ask questions about what they can't see. And none of this violates any law because a legislature said that it was legal for them to not comply with the very laws they wrote for the rest of us. The Massachusetts State House has exempted itself from the open meeting law and the public records law.

8:09 >> I've served on the Cambridge City Council for 6 years. I've cast maybe about 10,000 votes, all of which are public records. Anyone can request and read any email in my City Council inbox. If I want to discuss city business with a quorum of my colleagues, I have to post a notice 48 hours in advance. And that applies to every city council, every school committee, every board of selectmen across all 351 cities and towns. And somehow, we're still able to govern. I get judged for my votes, and [music] that's hard. I make a decision, I try to persuade people, sometimes I change my mind, and sometimes I get it wrong. And then voters hold me accountable. That's the job. The goal of politics is not to have a perfect record with nothing to attack you on. The goal is to make the case, explain your reasoning, and trust that voters can handle a grown-up conversation. [music] We have some of the most educated people in the country. We should not prioritize information vacuums over intellectual disagreement. That's the hard part of policy and governing, but it's also the gift democracy [music] gives us. People have this idea that good politics means consensus, and that conflict is a sign of something wrong. I [music] think it's the opposite. Conflict is how you get to a better answer. You shouldn't brush aside all the differences, all the pain that people are getting [music] through.

9:20 You think through all the scenarios and consequences, and you come up with solutions that are better. The Massachusetts State House has eliminated conflict. Leadership decides what to pass, and everyone just follows. The system is optimized for doing nothing. But the cost is a transit the falling apart, a housing crisis that gets [music] worse every year. And the polling shows us that only 28% of Massachusetts residents view the legislature favorably. [music] 51% view it unfavorably. 87% of residents said that government transparency is extremely important. And only 7% opposed [music] subjecting the legislature to the public records law.

9:58 But the legislature won't pass a bill that 93% [music] of voters approve of. So, what's next? When the legislature doesn't act, voters have no other option [music] but ballot questions. You can collect 10 signatures and the Attorney General reviews it for constitutionality. If it passes review, you have to collect 75,000 signatures, [music] then it goes to the legislature. If the legislature doesn't act, then it goes directly to voters. That's how we got the millionaires tax or approved legalizing marijuana. But the legislature did not do any of that. In 2024, 72% of voters approved a ballot question authorizing the state auditor to audit the legislature. The legislature refused to comply, forcing the auditor to sue. In the middle of this audit fight, the legislature sprang into action and passed rules limiting the audit before it could even begin.

10:46 The same legislature that takes decades to pass certain [music] bills. That's where we are now. And now look at what's heading to voters this November. There potentially 11 ballot questions on the table. A few examples, a stipend reform measure that would tie legislative pay to actual committee work and a public records measure that finally subjects the legislature to the same transparency of laws that the rest of us have to go through. Both went to the legislature first. Did they pass? No. Instead, the legislature asked the Supreme Judicial Court to declare them unconstitutional.

11:16 More than half of legislators typically face no point at all. That's changing. Primary challengers are running against incumbents across the state. The pressure is coming from the outside because it won't come from the inside. The State House can't fight Trump because it can't fight itself. [music] The same system that killed immigration protections for a decade is the same system that can't fix the T, can't build enough housing, and can't pass a budget on time. The lack of transparency, the corruption, the failures of productivity, these are all symptoms of one problem. Power is concentrated at the top. Accountability is designed out of the system, and the people who benefit will fight like hell to keep it.

11:52 The fix has to come from both directions. From the outside pushing in, from ballot questions, organizing, showing up, and from the inside pushing out, from people in the State House who refuse to comply with the status [music] quo. Without transparency, democracy is impossible. I spent my entire political career in the open, I took in thousands of votes, and had to talk with voters about why I did it. As a State Senator, I'll keep on doing that. Democracy only works when the people in power have to answer for what they do. You have the right to know how your government works.

12:22 It's time the State House agreed. >> [music]