By Act on Mass intern and endorsement committee member, Oscar Gillette!
Since its founding in 2018, Act on Mass’ signature priority was to make committee votes in the Massachusetts’ statehouse public. Massachusetts had long been one of the only states in the country where legislators took private votes in committee. Popular bills were constantly dying in committee where no one could know who killed them, and the positions of corporations had massive influence over committee results. Voters could not hold legislators accountable for their bad votes, because we couldn’t know how they voted.
Act on Mass launched campaigns to get the legislature adopt public committee votes in 2019, 2021, and 2023. In each of those years, legislators voted against public committee votes, arguing that the measure would “cause confusion among constituents” and create extra work for their staff. It is still unclear to me how constituents would be more confused by being able to know how their legislator voted.
In 2025, after years of organizing from Act on Mass and our coalition partners, the legislature finally passed joint rules with public committee votes. This was the greatest moment of progress towards transparency since Act on Mass was founded. However, when the language of the joint rules was put forward, Act on Mass flagged a major loophole in the public committee votes section, which could allow reps to avoid public votes, and argued for the loophole to be removed. As we look back on the last two years since the Joint Rules were created, this loophole and other compliance issues give us cause to push for greater reform.
After the joint rules were passed, a concerned citizen created a website to track compliance with those rules. The Beacon Hill Tracker found that a series of issues led to the joint rules seeing a dangerous level of noncompliance. Over 48% of all bills this session failed compliance with at least one of the new rules, and they found over 2000 cases of bills not receiving a public committee vote.
Indeed, despite the new rules, legislators are still able to kill popular bills without needing anyone to publicly oppose it. They just need to wait it out. When a bill is referred to a committee, the House members are given a rolling deadline to vote on it. If they do not vote on it by that deadline, “the House Chair shall file a study order forthwith.” In other words, when the deadline passes, the bill is automatically “sent to study.” Functionally, this is a nicer way of saying that the bill is dead.
Since committee votes were made public, this has been the fate of many bills: the committees just wait out the clock, the bill is dead, the industries are happy and every legislator can still tell their constituents that they would have supported the bill. When a bill meets this fate, its page on the legislature’s website says “Under the provisions of House Rule 27, matter timed out so no poll is required” where it is supposed to show the committee vote.
Many of Act On Mass’ progressive priority bills this session died this way. The State House Staff Union Act, the Safe Communities Act, the Right to Strike Act, the Abortion Access Act, the Same Day Voter Registration Act, the Voter Rights Restoration Act, the act to Raise the Age of Criminal Majority to 21, and the act to End Life Without Parole. This is the unfortunate treatment of many progressive bills in our state house.
With no vote, who are we supposed to thank for fighting for these bills? Who should we have primaried for stopping them? Regardless of how you feel about any one of these bills, in a functioning democracy, legislators should have had to answer to their constituents for their votes, in favor of or against, each of these bills. Fundamentally, when a bill can be killed without a vote, we do not have a democratic system.
We are not the only organization opposing the loopholes in the legislature’s joint rules regarding public committee votes. Jonathan Cohn, the policy director of Progressive Mass, called this loophole the “bloodless murder of legislation, where things die, and everybody has clean hands.” A quote so spot on it became a Boston Globe headline.
Of our priority bills that were not killed by the loophole of House Rule 27, many were passed through their initial committee, and sent to the House Ways and Means Committee. It seems that if a particular policy has broad support behind it, little opposition, and has built coalitions for years, then their bill will get the privilege of sitting in the House Ways and Means Committee. The House Ways and Means Committee has no obligation to vote on anything, and they can stall out bills until the end of session. This means that no one has to vote against the bill, no one has to take any accountability, and the bill goes away.
The rules for the 2027/2028 legislative session need to be built on a simple premise: in order for a bill to succeed, legislators must publicly vote for it and in order for a bill to die, legislators must publicly vote against it. We are not asking for every bill to pass, we just want a system in which voters get to know who the proponents and opponents of legislation are. Legislators who support our bills should have to defend that decision to their constituents, and legislators who oppose our bills should also have to defend that decision to their constituents. When legislators’ positions are out of line with their voters, their voters should be able to know that and organize to replace them. This process should allow voters to influence the decisions of the legislature. This is basic civics, it is the premise of representative democracy, and we do not yet have it in a state that should be a shining beacon of democratic values.
If you want to help us push the legislature to close the loopholes and adopt true public committee votes during the next rules debate in January, get plugged into the Every District Accountable campaign and our 2027 rules vote organizing through this form!