House rules implement some transparency-related reform but stop short of embracing voter-approved audit

The rules packages the House of Representatives adopted along party lines Tuesday afternoon aim to address institutional issues flagged by Speaker Ronald Mariano, like the consolidation of power atop each branch of the Legislature and the trend of unwieldy omnibus bills that force take-it-or-leave-it decisions for many lawmakers. And they also highlight the House's new openness to public-facing transparency measures like making bill summaries, submitted testimony and committee vote details available for all to see.

The two and a half hours of debate in the House Chamber on Tuesday also provided an opportunity for Republican representatives to push, unsuccessfully, for a greater say over how the House responds to Auditor Diana DiZoglio's push to audit the Legislature using the powers newly granted to her by voters in November.

Both rules packages (H 2024 and H 2026) were adopted on 128-23 votes.

"Taken as a whole, I really do believe that these changes are historic, transformative and also provide the public with access to where a bill is at any point in time in legislative process, and how it got there," Rep. Michael Moran of Brighton, the House's point person for rules who last session was majority leader, said as debate began around 2:45 p.m. Tuesday. "After not having agreed on joint rules since [2019], Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful that this session, we can do that."

The rules dictate how the individual branches are run but also how the House and Senate interact and work jointly as one General Court. Though there has been plenty of talk from in and outside the building about transparency-focused reforms, legislative Democrats have been unable since 2019 to agree to a new set of joint rules. The calls for a greater openness have grown to the point that more than 70% of voters last year gave the state auditor the power to dig into House and Senate operations, an audit lawmakers have consistently resisted.

Under the rules framework adopted by the House on Tuesday, the joint committee structure that the Senate clerk has traced to back at least 1807 would remain, but the process for advancing legislation through it would change. Joint panels of 11 representatives and six senators (or in some cases 13 reps and seven senators) would continue to take testimony on bills during joint hearings, but only senators would vote on Senate bills -- those filed by senators or in the Senate, which are given bill numbers that begin with the letter S -- and only representatives would vote on House bills.

But the branches will have to iron out exactly how much time committees will have to act on legislation. The Senate approved a rules package that would move up the deadline for joint committees to report out legislation by about two months, from the first Wednesday in February of the second year of the two-year session to the first Wednesday in December of the first year.

The House package seeks an entirely different approach, one that Moran said Tuesday is projected to get 70% of bills moving ahead of the traditional deadline in Joint Rule 10. Joint committees would have just 60 days under the House-approved rules to consider the fate of a bill after giving it a hearing, and would not be able to seek bill extensions past March of the term's second year.

"So that logjam that everybody waits for Joint Rule 10 Day, we have a rolling Joint Rule 10 every 30 days," Moran told reporters. "Seventy percent of those bills are going to be put out prior to Joint Rule 10, which means they're going to get there soon, which means we can act on them sooner."

Joint committees often send a bill for a layover in the House or Senate Ways and Means Committee, from which it may not emerge by the end of the term. Ways and Means committees would not be subject to the same 60-day clock.

"The recommendation of the [joint] committee will have a lot to say about how many bills end up in Ways and Means," Mariano said Tuesday when asked about the potential for a new bottleneck to emerge in Ways and Means. "Some of the bills that will just go into a study where we can pull them out if we need them, if they need further work, or they need some attention of Ways and Means. So it doesn't necessarily mean that everything's going to be driven to Ways and Means."

He added, "We kept the flexibility for the reason that -- that's why we had a 30-day extension that the chairman can ask for. They may not have been able to do the work on the bill in 60 days. They may have not have been able to contact everyone they had to speak to. So we wanted some flexibility."

For bills that don't get heard until later in the session and for late-filed petitions, the House proposal includes what Mariano has called a "drop-dead date" in March of the second year by which time committees must act.

In addition to potentially hastening a bill's journey through the committee stage, the House proposal would also build in additional time for formal lawmaking. Controversial action has for decades been considered out of bounds after the third Wednesday in November in the first year of the term and also after July 31 in the second year.

The House-adopted joint rules package would add an extra month for serious business in the first half of the term by changing that deadline to the third Wednesday in December, and would allow for formal sessions after July 31 in the second year to consider conference committee reports, appropriations bills filed after July 31, overrides of gubernatorial vetoes, or a reenactment of a bill the governor returned with an amendment.

The weightiest debate of the day occurred around Republican amendments that sought to force the House's compliance with the voter-approved audit law.

Republican Rep. Paul Frost of Auburn called on his colleagues to "give the voters what they asked for." He pointed out that although top Democrats for months have described concerns about the constitutionality of an audit, they have not submitted a formal request for the Supreme Judicial Court to weigh in.

"So why not just go a step further and allow this audit to take place by the auditor, [after] an overwhelming number of voters had cast their votes in favor of doing so. Why not?" Frost said. "If we're not going to ask the SJC for a ruling, then why not give the voters what they've asked for? Let's do it. Let's set a solid message going forward."

Democrat Rep. Michael Day of Stoneham, last session's Judiciary Committee chairman, said that adopting the amendment that Frost spoke in favor of would "be honoring a vote, but certainly not the Constitution." He equated DiZoglio's attempts as a member of the executive branch to have oversight of legislative branch operations to the way that President Donald Trump's administration has tried to use executive action to control federal spending.

"We're witnessing in real-time what happens when a legislature fails to protect the Constitution. We're watching the executive branch, under the guise of auditing the government and finding efficiency, impose a political agenda upon the entire country without a whisper back from the United States Congress," Day said.

He compared a comment DiZoglio made to a legislative committee last year to Trump's statement to Maine Gov. Janet Mills last week that "we are the federal law." Day said that DiZoglio told the committee, "We can come up with different interpretations of the law, but at the end of the day, we know what's right and we know what's wrong."

"We know what's right and we know what's wrong. We are the law. Laws and statutes, we don't need them. We're going to rule by gut. Our Constitution be damned, we're going to operate this government through personalities," Day said.

At another point, after Republican Rep. Marc Lombardo of Billerica argued that the overwhelming support of voters for the audit law should be a signal to the House, Day rebutted him by arguing that plenty of other things popular with voters have been ruled unconstitutional.

"Look to segregation of children in our schools, segregation of lunch counters. Those were passed overwhelmingly by voters. And yet the courts in their role, in the separation of powers, weighed it and then opined that those laws were unconstitutional. The will of the voters, with respect to segregation, didn't overcome the Constitution," he said.

Representatives voted 24-127 to shoot down the Republican attempt to codify into House rules that audits of the chamber will be conducted by the state auditor's office. Only one Democrat, first-term Rep. Michelle Badger of Plymouth, supported the amendment.

During his introduction of the rules proposals, Moran reminded the House that the rules "are designed to help the majority party move an agenda through the process" and pointed out that every single amendment proposed to the draft that came out of the speaker's office was filed by a member of the Republican minority.

"I'm not saying that's a bad thing," Moran said. "In fact, that very same thing is happening in other states all around this country as we speak. The minority party in those states -- whether they be Democrat or Republican -- are filing amendments to the rules in hopes of putting their party in a stronger position as we move through the legislative process."

Jones, the House minority leader of more than two decades, had a slightly different take on it when he rose to speak Tuesday afternoon. He said he thinks it was the first time since he joined the House in 1995 that no member of the majority party offered a rules amendment.

"Maybe that's a testament to the rules that have been put out, maybe a testament to the fact that so many great ideas that we on the minority side have offered over the years have made their way into their proposal today, which we appreciate," he said.

And just before the House proceeded to reject nearly all of the amendments Jones and other Republicans filed (a Jones amendment that would require the House Journal to note which representatives vote remotely during a formal session was adopted), the minority leader said he hopes the GOP ideas will eventually win favor among Democrats.

"Hopefully, some of the ideas that we're talking about today may not make it this time, but maybe in future years they'll find their way into the proposals put forth by the gentleman from Boston or successive leaders down the road," he said.