In April 2021, we launched The People’s House campaign - a grassroots lobbying campaign for commonsense rules reform in the MA State House. This campaign was aimed at the adoption of three changes to the House Rules:

Make all committee votes public
Ensure reps and the public have 72 hours to read a bill before a vote
Reinstate an 8 year term limit for the Speaker of the House.

The House Rules debate took place on July 7, 2021, and despite months of advocacy and widespread support, our three amendments were voted down. We didn’t get anywhere near the 81 votes we needed to pass our amendments. You can see how your rep voted on these three amendments here.

However, July 7th also came with many victories for our movement, including a major concession that “no” votes in committees will be listed, by name, on the legislature’s website. This puts the House Rules on par with the anticipated Joint Rules (which have been in conference committee since February).

Read on to learn more about our wins, our losses, which reps voted which way and why, who spoke on the floor about these amendments and what they said, what the press coverage looked like, and our takeaways as a movement.

Vote Results at a Glance

Amendment #2 - Speaker Term Limits

Filed by Reps Uyterhoeven and Gouveia, cosponsored by Rep. Connolly
Lost 35 - 125
Democrats voting in favor were: Representatives Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, and John Rogers

Amendment #16 - Public Committee Votes

Filed by Reps Connolly and Uyterhoeven, cosponsored by Reps Gouveia, Sena, and Elugardo
Lost 41 - 117
Democrats voting in favor were: Representatives Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, Michelle Ciccolo, Brandy Fluker Oakley, Liz Miranda, Steve Owens, Dave Robertson, Adam Scanlon, and Dan Sena, and Chynah Tyler

Amendment #3 - 48 Hours to Review

Filed by Rep. Chris Markey
Lost 39 - 119
Democrats voting in favor were: Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, Natalie Higgins, David LeBoeuf, Chris Markey, and Adam Scanlon
NOTE: Amendment #17, the amendment for 72 hours to review, sponsored by The People’s House campaign and filed by Reps Connolly and Uyterhoeven, cosponsored by Reps Gouveia, Sena, and Elugardo, was ruled out of order because it was deemed too similar to amendment #3

Find the full vote results here.

Here’s How it Happened

The House Rules Package

At 1:30pm on Tuesday July 6 during an informal session, the House announced that the long-anticipated vote on the House Rules would take place the next day at 1:00pm - less than 24 hours later. The deadline to file amendments was set at 5:00pm that day, giving reps and advocates only three and a half hours to read the 115 page rules package and file amendments.

The new House Rules Package, H.3930, was very similar to the current House Rules. However, there were a handful of modest but encouraging changes:

Many of the accessibility-improving practices that were adopted under the emergency rules put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic were included as permanent rules. For example, formal and informal sessions will continue to be live-streamed, whereas only formal sessions had previously been live-streamed, and roll call vote results will be more readily accessible on the website. Additionally, committees may continue to accept public testimony virtually, although the rules do not require that they do so.
Representatives will be given a summary of substantial bills before the vote.
Committee votes would be posted on the website as aggregate tallies, i.e. 4 yeas, 7 nays, 2 reserving their rights, 1 not voting. Note that this language does not specify that votes against advancing a bill would be listed by name on the website, as the Rules Report had recommended, and as the Joint Rules proposal stated.

We were disappointed but not surprised to see that our proposals were not reflected in the Rules package. We understood the move to provide members with bill summaries as an answer to our demand for 72 hours to review a bill before the vote. While this change is certainly an improvement, it doesn’t eradicate the problem of representatives not having time to digest a bill and file amendments to it. Furthermore, it does no service to the public, the actual stakeholders of substantial legislation. Why not even go so far as to make these bill summaries available to the public?

We were particularly disappointed in their attempt to address the issue of secret committee votes. Recall that in the House’s Joint Rules proposal from February, they made a concession that committee votes would be partially published online: their proposal was to have the “no” votes, or members voting against advancing a bill, would be listed by name on the website. The other vote results would be conveyed by nameless aggregate tallies. This was also the recommendation made by the Rules Report, commissioned by the Speaker and written by Representatives Peake and Galvin. However - even this degree of transparency was not honored in H.3930. The language in the House Rules package stated that all vote totals, including “no” votes, would be listed as an aggregate tally. No names at all. We were stunned that they had backslid in their position, going against even their own stated recommendations.

There was no concession or reference to our demand to reinstate term limits for the Speaker.

Our Amendments

Given that none of our demands were fully met in the rules package itself, we moved forward with filing our amendments with the intention to have every representative’s votes on the record by requesting a roll call for each amendment.

Our three amendments were filed by ally representatives, as follows:

Amendment #2 - Speaker Term Limits, filed by Reps Uyterhoeven and Gouveia, cosponsored by Rep. Connolly

Amendment #16 - Public Committee Votes, Filed by Reps Connolly and Uyterhoeven, cosponsored by Reps Gouveia, Sena, and Elugardo

Amendment #17 - Adequate Time to Review, filed by Reps Connolly and Uyterhoeven, cosponsored by Reps Gouveia, Sena, and Elugardo

You can read the Fact Sheet for these three amendments, which was circulated to every state representative, here.

Amendment #2 - Speaker Term Limits

The first of our three amendments to be voted on was #2 - Speaker Term Limits. It lost 35 - 125. The Democrats voting in favor were: Representatives Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, and John Rogers.

Several representatives spoke on the floor in favor and against this amendment.

Rep. Tami Gouveia - in Favor

Representative Gouveia, the sponsor of this amendment, opened the debate by laying out compelling arguments in favor of speaker term limits. She noted that term limits would act as a guardrail to ensure a more democratic house and encourage more regular and predictable transitions. Most importantly, she spoke about the unchecked power the Speaker currently holds over the entire legislative body:

"The speaker decides how many staff we get, he handles hiring and firing of staff, he decides who becomes committee chair or vice chair, determining how much each of us earn to support our families and how much influence we have in the Legislature. The speaker's office is crucial in deciding what comes up for a vote, how long we can review it, and the opportunity for us as members to consult with constituents. Speakers achieve immense power instantaneously."

Rep. Gouveia is absolutely right that the speaker’s power in these capacities is nearly unlimited. With this power, the speaker is able to generate a strong culture of deference and conformity among the members. The longer a given speaker serves, the more power they acquire, and the unpredictability of leadership turnover stifles dissent. This is why a more regular change of power would promote legislative productivity and improved representation of the views of all residents of Massachusetts, not just those in the speaker’s district.

Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven - in Favor

Representative Uyterhoeven gave a brief history of speaker term limits in the MA House, noting that they were first adopted in 1985 during a push for good governance. They were removed in 2001, and reinstated by Speaker DeLeo in 2009 who then removed the limit in 2015 as his would-be term limit approached.

"This measure is about democracy, ensuring that voices of constituents are heard through their representatives fairly. Having a new speaker every eight years, like the presidency, is revitalizing to our democracy and brings much-needed perspective. This is not about any individual, but about this institution."

Rep. Uyterhoeven asserts that speaker term limits are imperative to promote more diversity in State House leadership, which is confirmed by a recent study by MassINC and Tufts. Long-term power concentration means that the same single individual controls the entire legislative agenda for a decade or more. A healthy rotation of power ensured through speaker term limits would promote more innovation and diverse priorities.

Rep. Jim O’Day - Oppose

Representative O’Day spoke on the sanctity of the speakership, claiming that the person chosen for the position is necessarily a strong leader who is well-respected by their peers in the House. He continued:

"Nowhere that I can recall here in the state are term limits qualified for, whether it's for our governor, lieutenant governor, Senate president, our constitutional officers, all of us in this body, all Senators across the body, none of us are faced with term limits. So my question is, why would we want to discriminate against the Speaker of the House?"

Contrary to Rep. O’Day’s claim here, the Massachusetts Senate President (the Senate’s equivalent position to the House Speaker) does indeed have an 8-year term limit. Neither this amendment nor Act on Mass’ position has anything to do with term limits for legislative terms. Further, we simply disagree that a commonsense democratic reform — one that applies to most executive positions running all the way up to the Presidency — would be in any way “discriminatory” if applied to the Massachusetts House speakership.

Rep. Christopher Markey - Oppose

Representative Markey laments the effort for speaker term limits as antithetical to the purpose of the body, claiming:

"The first vote we take is for Speaker. With that, it's the most important vote of the session. I can't think of a less democratic way that we as elected officials support our own communities to be the best and the brightest to say that we think this person, whoever it is, should be the speaker and then not be able to do that because of a term limit. Change for the sake of change is not good. It's not good for our society. It's not good for our communities that we represent. It's definitely not good for democracy if people don't want change."

Enshrined in U.S. law all the way up to the Constitution, term limits are an extremely common and necessary check on executive power like the speakership. Is Rep. Markey’s stance that the term limits on the State Senate President or the U.S. President are undemocratic? Perhaps so. If Rep. Markey is concerned about undemocratic practices, he need look no further than the speakership as it is now: constituents have no say in who is elected speaker (by many considered to be the most powerful person in the Commonwealth), speakerships are generally passed down to the retiring speaker’s closest friend and ideological ally due to uncompetitive elections, and most rank-and-file reps fall in line with leadership for fear of retaliation such as losing committee positions, pay raises, and budget earmarks.

Rep. Jack Lewis - Oppose

Representative Lewis, who voted in favor of Speaker term limits when they came to a vote in 2017, this time testified against the measure. Opening with a sweeping anecdote of knocking doors, he claimed:

"I've never once heard, ‘Jack, I'm concerned there are no term limits for speaker of the Massachusetts House.’ I ask my colleagues: have any of you ever heard a voter bring this up as an issue? I'm confident that nearly universally, the answer is no."

We know that Rep. Lewis did in fact hear from constituents about this issue. There was a team of constituents in his district that reached out requesting a meeting with him as a part of The People’s House campaign. Additionally, constituents across the Commonwealth sent over 1,300 emails asking their representatives to vote for speaker term limits in the days leading up to the rules vote alone. 95% of Representatives received emails about this, including Rep. Lewis.

But here’s the thing: it shouldn’t matter if Rep. Lewis heard from his constituents about this. Our legislature takes votes on matters they haven’t heard from constituents about all the time. Hearing a constituent concern on the doors didn't seem to be a requirement for Rep. Lewis when he voted in favor of Speaker term limits in 2017, nor was it a requirement for him voting in that same session to approve the lengthy "technical amendment" or even an amendment allowing representatives to vote from abroad during military service.

Amendment #16 - Public Committee Votes

The second of our three amendments to be voted on was #16 - Public Committee Votes. It lost 41 - 117. The Democrats voting in favor were: Representatives Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, Michelle Ciccolo, Brandy Fluker Oakley, Liz Miranda, Steve Owens, Dave Robertson, Adam Scanlon, and Dan Sena, and Chynah Tyler (who was not present for the vote but indicated her support later on).

Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven - in Favor

Rep. Uyterhoeven, who presented the amendment, begun her argument by referencing a ballot question asking whether or not constituents wanted their State Representative to support public committee votes:

"Actions speak louder than words, and the public is entitled to know how we act on their behalf. As it turns out, many constituents agree. I owe it to my constituents to bring this amendment forward because more than 94 percent of them voted in favor of publicly-available committee votes on a ballot question this past November. In fact 10 percent of the Legislature had this on the ballot, voting on average 90 percent in favor. Because holding us accountable and making our actions transparent is critical for a healthy democracy. I want to be clear, I don't see this as doing our constituents a favor. This is something that makes us better legislators."

Rep. Uyterhoeven is absolutely correct that this measure is overwhelmingly popular among the electorate. The full results of the ballot question are below, indicating a statewide average of 90% support for public committee votes.

Rep. Kate Hogan - Oppose

Rep. Hogan argued that constituents shouldn’t be able to see how their representatives vote in committee because that vote could change later on in the process:

"A committee vote is reflective of a specific proposal at a moment in time during the committee process and policy development stage. Support or opposition can - and should - change as the bill is refined and members learn more about the topic from colleagues, experts and the public."

While it’s true that a bill can and should evolve during the committee process, that doesn’t mean that constituents don’t deserve to know where their representative stands on a bill at any given point in the legislative process. If representatives are concerned that their voters might misunderstand their vote or position on a bill, why not invite them into the process and explain their thought process? Most state legislatures in the country manage this just fine. Why not Massachusetts?

Rep. Dan Cahill - Oppose

Rep. Cahill posited that making committee votes public would pose an undue burden on staffers, arguing:

"Our committee staff — I've learned this as the new chair of Human Resources — our staff are working tirelessly, especially as a result of COVID-19. To have them take on additional duties to get down to a granular level of information, to provide that would be unfair to our staff."

Remember that the Senate already makes their committee votes public; they use a software called LAWS that enables publishing votes to the website with ease. BeaconBLOC, a collective of State House staffers advocating for anti-racist systems within the Massachusetts State House, refuted this common anti-transparency argument earlier this year during the Joint Rules debate. “For all the #mapoli legislators suddenly worried about the workload and burden placed on staffers, we have a lot of ideas about how you can help us,” they wrote in a tweet. “None of them include advocating against transparency in the State House.” Several staffers have come out against claims like Cahill’s, frustrated that they are being invoked to argue against transparency by reps who don’t support policies that would actually improve working conditions for staff, such as increasing their pay and creating an Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Amendment #3 - Time to Review Bills

KEY -

Amendment #3

Filed by Rep. Markey
48 hours to read a bill
Received a vote, lost 39 - 119

Amendment #17

Filed by Reps Uyterhoeven and Connolly, on behalf of The People’s House
72 hours to read a bill
Ruled out of order, never received a vote

Amendment #17 (to ensure reps had 72 hours to review a bill) never actually received a vote. Rep. Chris Markey had filed a very similar amendment to ours, but instead of 72 hours to read a bill, his amendment would have given reps 48 hours. Leadership brought his up for a vote first, which lost 39 - 119.

After it lost, they ruled Amendment #17 out-of-order claiming it was too similar to the Amendment #3, which had already been voted down.

Because of this, the floor debate about Adequate Time to Review took place over the amendment to give reps 48 hours to read a bill, Amendment #3. The Democrats voting in favor were: Mike Connolly, Tami Gouveia, Erika Uyterhoeven, Nika Elugardo, Russell Holmes, Natalie Higgins, David LeBoeuf, Chris Markey, and Adam Scanlon.*

*This was a confusing moment on the floor. It was unclear whether #17 would or would not come up for a vote after #3. This is why some vocal proponents of 72 hours to review, such as Rep. Dan Sena and Rep. Steve Owens, perhaps others, didn’t vote for Amendment #3. In other words, some reps may have voted against 48 hours because they thought they would have a chance to vote for 72 hours. We believe it would have been best practice to vote on both, starting with the more extreme position, and then if that lost, move to the compromise position, i.e. they should have voted on #17 first, and then #3.

Rep. Chris Markey - in Favor

Representative Markey argued that more time to read a bill was necessary for representatives to succeed at their jobs. He explained that the amendment was a safeguard for community involvement and allowed representatives adequate time to review a bill that would impact their community, saying:

"When you have such little time to review a bill, it doesn't give people an opportunity to be heard. Yes it is uncomfortable sometimes, yes it slows down the process. But it's the process that allows people to actually trust us. It allows people to elect us and say we trust you as the representative."

Rep. Markey is correct: more time to read a bill will allow for representatives and their constituents to read, understand, and hear from each other before voting on it. This is crucial to ensure that constituents are heard and representatives are empowered to vote in the best interests of their district.

Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven - in Favor

Representative Uyterhoeven expressed skepticism about why the system in place is the way that it is. She asked:

"When a bill is in committee for several months, unavailable from public view, and then is rushed to a vote in a day, one must ask: why?"

Rep. Uyterhoeven raised a concern that so many advocates and constituents share. Rep. Hogan stated earlier that afternoon that a bill can change significantly during the committee process — therefore it’s safe to assume that when a bill comes out of committee there could be significant changes. The Rules vote itself was a perfect illustration of this rushed process. Representatives and the public were given a mere 3.5 hours to read the 115-page rules package and file amendments. Then just 24 hours after seeing the bill, representatives had to vote on it. As advocates, we dropped everything and scrambled to read the package and prepare our amendments. And as constituents, we were given almost zero notice to see the rules, understand what was happening, and reach out to our representatives to share our thoughts.

Rep. Sarah Peake - Oppose

Rep. Peake stood in opposition to the amendments for adequate time to read a bill, claiming that it would grind the legislative body to a halt and leave important bills in the dustbin. She drew an example of the ROE Act, saying:

"I don't know about all my colleagues but I'm not prepared to say to women in this state, “I'm sorry but while Supreme Court has cases making its way to you to take away your right to choose, because of a technical glitch and failure to get a two thirds vote, you have to wait for next session when it has a hearing again and comes to the floor for a vote.”

The language of both amendment #17 and #3 included a provision that would allow for the time requirement (i.e. 48 or 72 hours) to be waived with two-thirds vote. In other words, if a supermajority of reps wanted to vote on something right away, they absolutely could. In order to ignore this fact of the language, Rep. Peake posits a scenario where there’s a “technical glitch” and this mechanism somehow doesn’t work. Frankly, this seems unlikely, and does not amount to a substantive argument against the policy.

Far more to the point, Rep. Peake’s counterfactual scenario suggesting that a mere two day delay could have prevented the passage of the ROE act isn’t born out in reality. To respond to this, we’ll simply quote our friend and colleague Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass, as he notes:

“Even though the ROE Act was filed in January 2019 — a time when reproductive rights were under attack by a majority conservative Supreme Court and the Trump administration — the Legislature had left the bill on the table at the end of July 2020 when the session would traditionally end.

The bill gained new momentum after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (September 18) and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (October 26). The bill, in modified form, was passed as a budget amendment by the House (11/13) and Senate (11/18) several weeks after Barrett’s confirmation and two months after Ginsburg’s death — self-imposed delay. The different versions of a modified ROE Act were a subject of negotiations for the conference committee working on a final budget. That committee came to a consensus on December 4. Baker issued a veto on December 14. The Legislature had re-passed the modified ROE Act by December 18 and overrode his veto at the end of the month.”

The legislative session is 730 days long. Where in this actual timeline would a 48 hour delay have caused it to not have been passed?

Rep. Ruth Balser - Oppose

Rep. Balser also invoked the ROE Act in her argument against 48 hours to review bills, stating:

"All of us [were] shaking in our boots as the Supreme Court changed and this Legislature wanted to protect the women of the state. We remember the back and forth with the governor. If we had this rule in place, the future of women's health would have been in jeopardy. So too with climate action as the Legislature moved forward historic climate legislation. At the end of a session with COVID, the pandemic, the crisis, I would argue this rule would have, could have, jeopardized it."

Remember, the ROE Act was actually never passed as a bill, but rather parts of it were pushed through as a budget amendment, which wouldn’t have been subject to this 48 hour requirement. Finally, Rep. Balser invokes the recent Climate Roadmap bill. This bill, in fact, did not pass before the end of the legislative session, but not because of a burdensome 48 hour period to review. This bill did indeed get left in the proverbial “dustbin” at the end of the session, but it was because the House waited until the last minute to vote on it, as they often do of their own volition.

A Concession on Public Committee Votes

Late into the session, a technical amendment was filed by Rep. Galvin. Technical amendments are amendments that only leadership can file, and only after the filing deadline. They exist to add last-minute changes to the bill (or in this case, the Rules package). Included in this lengthy technical amendment (Amendment #18) was the public committee vote concession from the Joint Rules, and recommended by the Rules Report: “no” votes in committees would be listed by name on the website, and the rest as aggregate tallies. We can’t be sure whether this language was intentionally left out of the original rules package, but we are grateful to our allies for joining our public cries that made their way to House Leadership, who added this language at the end of the floor debate via the technical amendment.

Results of the Rules Debate & Takeaways

While we didn’t pass public committee votes, 48 hours to read a bill, and speaker term limits, there were many victories coming out of the House Rules debate.

House Leadership offered a major concession regarding committee vote transparency: as in their Joint Rules proposal, the “no” votes, i.e. the votes against advancing a bill, will be listed by name on the website. The other positions, i.e. “yeas,” abstentions, and members not voting, will be listed as an aggregate tally. We will continue to advocate for full committee votes, but this is still a massive victory for our cause.

Representatives will now receive summaries of bills before they come to a vote. This isn’t a replacement for 72 hours for reps and the public to review bills, but it’s a step in the right direction.

It will be easier for the public to view all sessions as they will now be live-streamed, and the public may also now testify virtually at hearings. These are incredible victories for transparency and accessibility.

The new House Rules will take effect October 1, 2021.

Plus, several representatives who hadn’t publicly committed to any of our amendments surprised and delighted us by voting yes on at least one of our amendments: Reps Chynah Tyler, Liz Miranda, Dave Robertson, and Michelle Ciccolo, and of course Rep. Markey for his 48 hour amendment. We applaud their bravery and welcome them into the movement.

These changes are the direct result of this grassroots movement for State House reform. Representatives, from rank and file reps all the way to the speaker, could not ignore the wave of voices calling for more transparency in the MA State House. In other words: our strategy is working, and our movement is growing. Over the course of our campaigns, over 4,000 people joined their District Teams, we held 100 constituent meetings with representatives, and our volunteers sent over half a million texts to voters across the state. We’ve made major progress on publicizing committee votes, and we’re just getting started.