What Passed in 2024?

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Today we talk about the legislative session which is ending in a few weeks and the 121 bills that passed. Don't get your hopes too high, though. We will talk about the many things that have not passed, and those will include things like pay equity, gun safety, prescription drug pricing, plastics and climate bills, childcare, the transfer fee, a many housing bills, and, of course, the budget.

Anna Callahan, Jordan Berg Powers, and Jonathan Cohn chat about Massachusetts politics in our latest episode. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 53. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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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 legislature that truly supports the needs of everyone who lives here. And that is what we are here to do, to help you to do.
And today we are going to be talking about the legislative session, which is ending in a few weeks. We will talk about the 121 bills that passed. Don't get your hopes too high, though.
We will talk about the many things that have not passed, and those will include things like pay equity, gun safety, prescription drug pricing, plastics and climate bills, childcare, the transfer fee, a bunch of housing stuff, as well as the budget, of course, which also hasn't passed. So we're going to go through all of those things. We'll have a nice deep dive into affordable housing at the end.
So I hope you'll stick with us. But before we do, I will have my fantabulous co hosts introduce themselves. I will begin with Jordan.
Jordan Berg Powers. I use he him. I'm in western Massachusetts.
I have many years working in Massachusetts politics and Massachusetts policy. And it's, you know, I'd say it's nice to have all three of us here again. It's been a while.
That's right. And Jonathan, Jonathan Cohn. He him, his.
I've been a progressive activist here in Massachusetts for a little over a decade now on various issue and electoral campaigns. And joining from Boston, hi, I'm Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford.
Done a lot of local, a lot of local stuff, kind of around the country, advising folks on local politics for a while. And then with these guys doing state politics for the last few years. Super, super interesting.
And today we are talking about the legislative session and we were having so much fun right before we hit record. Jonathan, we love your way of putting this all together. Tell us about the 121 bills that have so far passed this session.
Okay. And after a quick update, I was just checking 122, but like, it's also a good line. So they've been so, so far in 2024.
So not the full session, but just the second that we're in, there have been 122 bills signed into law. So of those 122, 116 were either about one city, one town, one person, or in one case two towns. And by the way, like for people that don't know, sometimes these are things like we will allow the city of, you know, Glaustonburg to hire a, to spend $30,000 to hire a dog catcher.
Right? Like that's the kind of thing that we're talking about allowing a city or town. Town to, like what some of them were even, like,ratifying town meeting results from a town or allowing, like, a city to change from, like, a board of selectmen to a select board. Talkabout, what do they call it? Helicopter parenting.
Like, they just can't let cities and towns, like, do their thing without the state having to stamp approval on everything. Exactly. It's Like, seriously, all of these incredibly basic municipal activities that the state shouldn't be taking up its time with anyway.
So what are the other six that got signed into law in 2024 today we became the 49th state to make revenge porn illegal. So, like, go Massachusetts. 49 out of 50.
Oh, that's so embarrassing. I'm very proud of that, too. They're taking a victory lap on it–49th.
The supplemental budget that was passed that had a kind of just fundamentally cruel limits on this amount of time. Somebody without housing can stay in emergency shelter when they raised funding for it, but when they, Democrats, argued with Democrats to decide how best to keep people out of emergency shelter rather than in exchange for raising the funds authorizing the state to borrow $400 million over the next two fiscal years for municipal vote and bridge repair. And then another bill about the terms of those bonds establishing a mitochondrial disease awareness day and a week in a mitochondrial disease awareness day, which no shade, I learned about mitochondrial disease from that. So at least it accomplished something in terms of increasing awareness. And Then the new one, which is the 122nd, was them passing a one month budget to account for the fact that they haven't passed the budget on time.
It is. It is truly amazing how little our legislature does. It is amazing.
I just. I think it's. Oh, I just want to say really quickly, they just.
Because they were. They were also just so. They did so much last year.
They didn't have to do anything last year, which is they passed two bills of substance last year's and with the whole cycle. That They enforce. That is unnecessary.
That they enforce where, like, all of the first term is always. The first year of the term is always spent having, you know, proposing bills and having hearings on bills and putting things into committee and whatever, whatever. Like, they never, ever plan to actually pass bills in that first year of the legislative session.
They could pass bills anytime they want. And especially because the. Especially because the hearing process, the committee process have no purpose.
They don't. They're not doing anything in that time to prepare for passing. They just do that to do that because ultimately the only process is the speaker wants to pass it, and it passes.
So at any point, they can pass any legislation just for people listening. Like, there's no. It's not like a regular legislature where they're, like, taking in information from experts and making changes accordingly.
That's not how it works. It's lobbyists. Go lobby the speaker, and that's how changes happen.
Somebody should go to one of those hearings, be like, so great to see everybody again. It's been too long. Years ago.
You were there, and you were there. Your haircut looks great. I'm gonna do that the next time our job here is done.
But it's damning with a full time legislature that there are so few things in the second year, which we are less than one month out from the end of the formal legislative session, that so few things have become law in 2024, when, if you were to talk to your legislature legislators at a July 4 parade, they will probably tell you how productive that they've been. But so few things have actually become long. And I just want to just, you know, like, thank you to Jonathan for doing all this research and for having progressive mass, which you could go to to find out some of the other things that they haven't done.
But my other favorite one that Jonathan pointed out is that they passed the House passed a gun safety bill in October, the Senate In February, and that still has not passed. Yeah, like, that's. It's been months.
And that they still have not passed that. It's wild that that stone company, like, they passed, like, pay range disclosure legislation back in October. Both of them passed again.
They did it before they went on break. They have a conference committee. Nothing.
Yeah. So now we're entering all the things that they did not pass. So these are all the things that they have passed but have been finished individually because each chamber has passed a bill and they have yet to actually.
And the way that, as folks may remember, listeners might remember that we're in a conference committee. Whether or not the conference committee is even meeting is not public. So a conference committee was created a long time ago for all of these things.
There's a conference committee as well to negotiate. Found details for the budget that, as I noted, is already late. Do we know that these conference committees are meeting and hard at work to, say, figure out what the details are and why they can't just, like,where they both have good things, why they can't just, like, pass everything.
It's unclear if they're doing anything at all. And they just don't acknowledge the fact that July 31 is when they'll probably just pass the final version of everything anyway. Yeah, if we're lucky.
Yeah, right. We can only hope if they somehow don't even manage, as has also happened in the past, where they run out the clock and end up with nothing. Yeah.
So I think. And the other thing, you know, so some of the other things that they, you know, some of the other things that they. Onechamber like has passed is the, you know, they don't have any real plan to address healthcare.
They try to take this victory lap on this very small, tiny hospital oversight and reform, which is really just to fix the fact that they were doing no oversight over a system that has now collapsed. And the collapsing is when they finally acted. But the nurses were sending alarms when this system was closing.
Beds needed beds, and there was no oversight. There was no reform. There was no, like, hey, we should do something.
They would call the corporation and say, don't do this. And the corporation would be like, we don't care. Like, we're gonna do whatever we want.
But, you know, your state reps would all set. They'd say, hey, well, I, you know, they'd get on. It was printed in the press and on thelocal news.
I called the CEO and said, we need to keep these beds. And they would be at the rallies for the nurses and, like, nothing would happen because they didn't do the thing they actually have, which is oversight through legislation. So they finally, at that, now that it's collapsed, they're finally like, we should do some oversight.
And they're saying, can you let people know? Let people know a little bit about what you mean by collapse? Give us some context for folks that don't know the system is a for profit. It's a for profit hospital system that relied on federal money from COVID to,because it was taking so much money, it was trying to make so much profit, it was still profitable. I think that's important to note.
It was profitable, but it wasn't exponentially profitable. So if it made a little bit of profit and it made a little bit of profit, it wasn't making even more profit. And so therefore, it wasn't meeting investors demands.
And so they. So they are filing. So they filed for bankruptcy.
I'm also going to give a little bit of just Covid context here because my sister's a doctor, and what she talked about is that early in Covid, when no one was going to the doctor anymore for anything except for Covid, because you did not want to go there and catch the disease so what happened was they weren't doing any optional procedures anymore. They weren't getting people to come in for checkups. They weren't getting people who, you know, really should have been coming in to check on their, you know,sort of the diseases that they had that were ongoing and to get the care that they needed.
Even those weren't happening. And this is how they make money. And so what was happening in these.
These clinics and hospitals is they started furloughing people, and they started firing people. And so during COVID there was like an insane sort of mass layoff of nurses and doctors and administrators because there wasn't the profitable art, the most profitable part of medical care in America, which is these optional or semi optional visits.
They collapse. They were not happening anymore. And so they fired a bunch of people.
And then we were in a huge bind because obviously Covid is happening, and now we don't have doctors and nurses, and the pipeline wasn't big enough. And so we were in a bind. And then they started being crying and asking for bailouts.
And now the federal government had stepped in at some point to provide them with some funding so that we weren't, like, completely without enough doctors and nurses for the healthcare needs of the community. Does this sound like, you know, this is my understanding of it just through the lens of my sister, who works in a private clinic. And so this is, again, like with the schools that we talked about last week, just having a total inability to fund what they need right now because of the federal funding is ending.
It's a similar phase that, because of COVID there ended up being a bunch of things that happened, ended up being a need for federal funding. Federal funding came in, and now we are in, you know, a real problem as federal funding is starting. But I do think it's important to note that stewards, a lot of the money is going to executives.
It's a for profit system. So that's also what's different from our schools, which are totally dependent on dollars from the tax dollars.Like stewards, if it was managed well and wasn't a for profit, was a non profit or owned by the government, would be fine.
It's the. It's the private ownership, ultimately, of something that should. That's healthcare.
That's ultimately the problem in this process. Right. Like, which is also why they were, like, firing everybody, you know, at a time when we obviously needed to have doctors and nurses, like, they were just like, no, yeah, don't have the profit, get rid of them.
Right, right, exactly. So it's, so, so they, so they have some oversight of this, which is a good, it's a good oversight. It's a good change, but it's not the sort of change to the system that any of us would imagine when they again, are going around in their press releases and so forth talking about how they're doing.
You know, though they don't say we're doing a steward hospital oversight review after we failed. That's not the bill they say. They'll Say we're doing health care reform that's going to impact healthcare, and people will, might mistake that for saying, oh, I'm going to get better healthcare or it's going to cost less.
And it's important to note that neither of those things will happen in this process. What will happen is if a system is on the verge of collapse, there'll be better systems in place to stop that from happening. That's basically it.
The Senate has again passed a good prescription drug bill to lower pricing, and the House will not pass it. It will never pass it because Ron Mariano is owned by corporations. We might as well put.
We might as well put. He might as well have a suit with all the NASCAR logos of all the people he's bought and sold by and he's bought and sold by pharmaceutical corporations. So that will never leave the chamber, even though my guess is the majority of the people who you've elected would like it to pass, this one person will make sure it never does.
And I think that that's important to tag in as well. The issue of things having majority support and not passing, I feel like a great illustration of that recently, is with the fate of the real estate transfer fee, particularly in the Senate, where despite the fact that so as folks may be aware, we've talked about the housing bond bill from the Affordable Homes act and other episodes, and that even though the governor included, and it wasn't a great version of it, but it was still kind of a local option for communities that want to put small tax on high end real estate transactions with money dedicated to affordable housing to be able to do so. And even though it got out of committee, the House ways and means and Senate ways and means stripped it out at the last minute before their vote out of an out of like a deluge of real estate industry lobbying.
And what was wild is I had heard from a number of people in the state Senate that there was a majority support in the stateSenate, that there was a vote count and it had more support than it didn't. But because of a few people who are high ranking, not wanting it, because the real estate lobby talking points were especially essentially resonant for them, the thing got stripped out entirely. And none of this is actually on public record, I presume.
Exactly, no. And so this is one thing as well that speaks to a quick aside, is many of the times in the US Congress, people may occasionally hear of a committee in Congress doing a markup of a bill, and that means that they are actually in a room and they're voting in committee on the amendments to the bill. Democrats will have amendments, Republicans will have amendments.
There will be votes. The votes. The committees aren't always great about making those votes public, but like, it is something that can be reported on, there will be also a, like, available report from that committee online in which you will often have a minority dissent explaining like, we're rejecting this because of this, this and this not making it in the committees are a black hole inMassachusetts.
So despite the fact that something had majority support, there was no markup where they then took it out. Like, decided to take something out that had passed the prior round. It just happens because of a few decision makers deciding to make a call.
Yeah, I'm going to jump in just to remind folks that this kind of analysis is what you are not going to hear hardly anywhere else. Andwe hope that you will donate to the show. There's a link below.
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If we can touch on those last few things that I think we would love it if they had been, you know, passed. Got passed. In one chamber but not another.
You know, things like the climate bill and the plastics bans and other stuff like that. Just feedbacking on what you said. The Senate Passed the climate bill.
It doesn't go far as much as it doesn't go as far as it needs to, but it still does a number of important things around, like helping accelerate a clean energy transition, of discouraging the expansion of gas infrastructure in the state among a number, like electrifying the commuter rail and a number of other steps. And there's no commitment from the House for even taking up a climate bill at all, which is just kind of disgusting. Right.
Like, in other words, and the Senate also, plastic reduction, combination of a plastic bag ban kind of statewide. A number of cities and towns have done it with a number of other steps to reduce the use of kind of. To reduce single use plastics, as well as, like,having better systems of recycling, of kind of reuse, et cetera, of.
Of plastics that the Senate has also passed in the past in previous sessions. With the Senate not taking up, the House not taking up, but the House Senate passing in the House not taking up. Same goes for the Senate passing a bill to kind of formally codified recent executive order about making gender neutral state ids available.
They passed that and sessions passed, and the House is yet to do so, making it easier for unhoused people to get state issued ids. They passed that previous sessions. The House has yet to do so.
The Healthy Youth act, which is just like, if you're teaching sex ed, maybe it should be medically accurate. The Senate has done that yet again and again. The House is refusing to do so.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. And just to name some others, really easy stuff. Time off for voting.
Oh, yeah. One of my favorites, too. The House pass it.
The Senate hasn't gotten around to it. Just easy stuff that they could do. And of course, I think the big one that we're going to talkabout is the housing bill.
Yeah. Housing bond bill. And we.
Oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say we covered this in a prior episode. We talked about Governor Healy's housing bond bill.
We went over a bunch of the things that were in there. Each of the House and the Senate, they each have their own housing bills that they have been working on. And, you know, it's a little bit sad to see that some of the stuff that was in the Healy's bill, which was first, is not going to make it.
So if we want to cover some of that stuff, that would be. Yeah. And so, like, just quickly, I'll note one point about what's in there and why it's even hard to get fully excited about what some of the good things in there is.
That two of the things that are likely to be some of those, say, like the progressive victories in the housing bond bill, or let's say, like the tenant victories in the housing bond are creating a process for stealing eviction records and for what's called tenant opportunity to purchase, where the tenants in the building have the right of refusal to try to buy it when it goes on the market and there's a growth. Good policy, and that is the local option for cities and towns. Both of them are good policies.
Both of them are great. House passed the tenant opportunity to purchase the Senate eviction ceiling. Likely they both didn't do the other one because they like having bargaining chips, which is pathetic.
But they passed between the Democrats and the Democrats. They love to have bargaining chips. Exactly.
But the problem is they've already passed these in 2020. So folks might remember that in the housing bond bill that passed, the economic development bill that passed on January 5 of 2021, I always remember the last day of the session because the next day was January 6, but on January 5, 2021, when they passed it and then Baker vetoed them. But they've already passed this andthey've already said that they supported this in 2020, and it has taken them the kind of three and a half years since to actually just pass things again that they've already passed.
And so it's hard to really do, like, feel like having a victory lap on the legislature taking multiple years to pass something again.Yeah. Well, then also killing a widely supported provision backed by the governor to allow cities and towns to, like, maybe pass some of their own laws.
I do. I'm going to say, like, I love that piece of it. It's like what we're not going to do is allow duly elected officials from cities to appropriately address the things that are happening in their cities.
What we're going to do is we're going to do what all the red states do and continue to just preempt any democracy at the local level. Like that is, drives me crazy. Yeah, it's a wild ride.
And I just, I just think that's the thing. Because they'll say, you know, because in the things, it'll say the transfer fee, but it's not the transfer fee. They're not passing a transfer fee.
They could pass a transfer fee. They're not passing a transfer fee. They're saying they won't even allow municipalities to pass a transfer fee, which is what we're talking about.
It's not a transfer fee. There's no transfer fee in this bill. There is the availability of local activists push really conservative, the most conservative aspects of our politicians to maybe consider a tiny percentage on them, on the, on the most ridiculously priced housing transfers, a tiny percentage to go to affordable housing.
The one place it will have a huge difference is Boston. We're like, that's clearly a place that's already passed it. It would have a real impact.
Cambridge and Somerville also. Right, but they're not passing a transfer fee. That would be great if they pass a transfer fee.
They're not even doing that. That's the worst thing. It's also the thing that's particularly jarring whenever legislators said, oh, well,this only would help some communities.
Do you want the money to go statewide? pass the transfer fee? Well, they could, they could literally do some sort of transfer fee that goes to the state that specifically targeted flippers. Right.
They could be like, hey, if you're going to flip within three or four years, then we're going to have like a 20%. They could do anything. But, but they're, but we're talking about just allow democracy to happen at the local level and they can't do it.
We all agree that housing is like one of the most pressing issues in the state. And I just want to remind people that they call it the affordable housing bond bill, but it is not doing that. And I just think it's really important that we just highlight that it is a public housing bill.
It is a bill mostly to allow Morahili to take out credit at the time where, where interest rates are the highest they've been. We're Going to take out more debt rather than just taxing at a reasonable level and spending money accordingly. Right.
Like this is what they should do rather than doing the grown up thing. We're going to max out credit cards to pay for public housing because they have not done that in so long. And the public housing piece is critical because what they've done to poor people living in public housing should be a crime.
The way that they've disinvested and allowed this to get as bad as it is. So they're going to put money into that. That's the majority of the bill.
There was these other pieces that were going to help fix some of the problems and they've stripped. The things they put in were either things that they had already passed, which are good, but like already passed and should just pass. They shouldn't be in a bond bill.
And then on top of that, is this allowance of municipalities to do the. Do this sort of legislating, again, of small technical changes to taxation to get at the spending that we all agree we need, which is more affordable housing. They won't even do that.
They won't even do that. And instead, they were like, we'll let. Maura Healy was like, we'll let the local people do that in some very small occasions.
Can't do that. And then on top of all of that, they're still taking a victory lap, calling it affordable housing. And it's a lot of just, like,technical support money into things that already exist.
These are not things that will trickle down, which is really what they're talking about to the realities of affordable housing in the ways that we think we need. Like, I'm not gonna say, yes, you will get. You'll get a project here.
You'll get a project here. You'll get a couple. You know, you get 20 houses here, ten houses that really.
It's not gonna be nothing. But it is not the sort of biggest policy we need to affect this big problem we have, which is that it is wholesale unaffordable to buy, rent, or live in Massachusetts. It's why it's particularly jarring when I've seen people talk about it being like a generational, transformative bill.
It's like, totally fine bill. It is not generational. It is not transformative, and the housing sector does nowhere near enough.
It is not doing. It is doing a mix of decent policies that will not go far enough to address the unaffordability Massachusetts. And just to be clear, one of the parts of the victory lap that the Maura Healey did was around her rich people tax bill that she did, where part of it was to create housing.
So she's like, we're gonna create 40,000 new housing. And for those of you don't remember, it was a tax cut. Two developers,these same people who are now bemoaning the transfer fee, a tax cut to developers to allow them to gentrify black and brown and poor people neighborhoods.
And the reason we needed it, we are told, is because no one would want to live next to me, because we're just two terrible people and no one would want to build or create housing in these sorts of places. And so we needed this thing. And so one of the project,because this fund already existed, um, it is.
They just expanded it. They put more money into it. One of the projects that took that tax credit in the city of Worcester, I am being,um.
It is being listed. The sort of rental rents that are being listed are three times what I charge in my three decker. Three times.
That's insane. That's what. That's what they've given free money, your money.
Yeah. Developers to do. And that's what they're claiming.
Right. And they're saying, like, oh, look, we're building affordable housing. Housing.
When thinking about that, right. Is the way of seeing the legislature's rejection of a transfer fee in their, like, almost unanimous love of the HDIP program, which is what you're talking about is the HDIP program is how do you bring people with high incomes in lower income communities? And they love that. But a transfer fee, which is about how do you allow middle or lower income people to be able to live in rich communities? No, it's this and real estate self interest at the same time with a transferee because real estate industry doesn't want to pay any more money and nimbyism that doesn't actually want to see any of those people nearby allowing, rejecting a transfer fee.
And I just think, remind people again, it's racism. What you're talking about is racism because they hate, you know, we're like, youknow, people like, they clutch. They're just like, you can't call us.
This is racism. This is how structural racism works. What you're talking about is fundamental structural racism.
This is how it looks. This is what it looks like. This what it feels like.
This. What our democratic legislature is doing is it is enacting structural racism in that sense. It is generational.
It will certainly have continued to have a generational effect on people in this country and in this state. Well, I'm going to let people know. We promise we will keep our eyes on the session, which is going to end at the end of July.
We'll have a. Well, yeah, we'll see, right? We'll see if they're late on everything, as they sometimes are. But we will be back.
We will talk again once the session has ended about what? You know, things got swept up at the last second and give you an update on that. But we appreciate so much you being with us. So thank you, everyone, for listening.
Please pass this along to your friends. Please donate to the show, and we look forward to chatting with you all next week.