In Wake of Roy-Barrett Tiff, Leaders Eye Breaking Up Joint Committees

Above, Mariano and Moran after enjoying an Aug. 4 breakfast meeting.

Splitting up the century-old structure joint legislative committees that vet bills into separate House and Senate panels is one of the major reforms the House's lead negotiator on a new rules package is "seriously considering," Rep. Michael Moran told the News Service in an exclusive interview.

House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka both pledged to pursue rules reforms in the new two-year term that would increase public access to legislative business, a response to increased scrutiny on Beacon Hill's centralized power and lack of transparency.

Mariano plans to appoint Moran, who chaired unsuccessful rules reform talks last term, to lead negotiations for the House again this term, according to the speaker's office. Moran served as House majority leader last term.

In addition to potentially recommending that longstanding joint committees be split, Moran said he is also considering changes to enable lawmakers to continue to take roll call votes on major, controversial bills in conference committees during informal sessions after July 31 of even-numbered years, and that transparency-minded reforms making written testimony available and committee votes public are "on the table."

Moran said he is "personally" adamantly opposed to pushing the joint committee bill-reporting deadline into the first year of the two-year term, a change favored by Spilka. Moving up "Joint Rule 10 Day" would require committees to make decisions on bills earlier in the session, leaving more time for bill sponsors to try to move their proposals through other committees and the branches.

Moran said he could not speak for the full House on that issue, but said that moving the deadline would take power away from committee chairs and rank-and-file legislators, and place it more squarely in the offices of the House speaker and Senate president.

The Legislature currently operates under rules agreed to in 2019, as lawmakers have been unable to come up with compromise interbranch procedures in the years since.

Moran said the House is determined to make changes this term.

"There's something that's -- I want to be clear, from a process perspective -- that's clearly not working. And we have to take a look at it," he said.

Moran said he believes press coverage of procedural disputes overshadowed the policy work the Legislature accomplished last session.

The press frequently highlighted that lawmakers missed their deadlines, that bills were hung up in interbranch disputes, and that the Legislature is one of the least transparent in the country. Mariano and Spilka pointed out that the Democrat-led branches passed the major bills that were on the agendas last session.

Among the reforms Moran says he's interested in looking at is splitting up the Legislature's decades-old joint committee structure. That way of doing business has been in place since at least 1925, according to the Senate clerk's office. While Democrats have long chaired joint committees, House and Senate Democrats often have different opinions on bills and approaches to public policy problems.

"When you separate committees, there is no longer any reason for a bill to get stuck in committee, and the public knows exactly where the bills are at all times," Moran said. "... With that one move, it gets rid of the entire logjam at the committee level, right? Then the public -- you want transparency? Then the public knows exactly where the bills are."

Mass one of three states...

Massachusetts is one of only three states in the country that uses joint committees, Moran pointed out. The panels that include both representatives and senators take public testimony on legislation and often rewrite bills to advance them in the process, or kill proposals by burying them in study orders.

The other states that use joint committees are Connecticut and Maine. Nebraska isn’t included in either category because it is unicameral. In the other 46 states, each legislative chamber has separate standing committees to consider legislation.

Telecom Fight Set Precedent for Split

Last session, the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy essentially split in two, over disagreements between House co-chair Rep. Jeff Roy and Senate co-chair Sen. Michael Barrett.

The split was triggered in May 2023 when Roy announced a committee hearing without the consent of Barrett and Senate members, according to Barrett. Senators are outnumbered on joint committees -- a longstanding sore point -- and Roy's actions were taken as further pushing out of senator's right to have a say. Roy argued that he scheduled the hearing without Barrett's consent because TUE was behind schedule on hearings, but Barrett decided to conduct his own "parallel hearings" with just Senate members.

The two sides of the committee then wrote their own -- fairly different -- versions of a climate bill. The full House and Senate passed related bills that differed significantly, as is often the case. Those bills were the cause of some angst on July 31 when the conference committee Roy and Barrett led still couldn't come to an agreement. The conference committee ultimately hammered out a compromise during informal sessions, and the branches passed an omnibus bill to reform clean energy siting and permitting last fall.

Moran pointed to TUE's story last session as an example.

"TUE did it last session, right? The Senate did that with TUE last session -- and, to use Donald Trump, 'They produced one beautiful bill,' " Moran said.

He added that Senate presidents have advocated for this reform in the past.

Former Senate President Stanley Rosenberg pushed for the Senate to set up its own bill-vetting committee structure and disengage the joint panels. At the time, senators argued that their bills too often languished in joint committees where they had less representation; though House leaders argued there was no problem.

Sen. Mark Montigny, rules chair in 2015, jumpstarted the conversation.

"Some have nicknamed it the nuclear option and others have said it's radical - all this funny stuff. It's hardly groundbreaking and it's hardly nuclear," Montigny said at the time. He said, "It isn't worth fighting at all over this. If we can't just come up with a reasonable alternative, it's better to move on and do it the way 46 other states do it... It's even difficult to negotiate with a straight face because it's so reasonable."

Then-House Speaker Robert DeLeo dismissed the Senate proposal, calling it an "impolitic and manufactured reaction to a non-existent problem."

During opening day this year, Spilka pledged reforms to address some concerns about missed deadlines and transparency, including reviving a longtime Senate push to make all written testimony to joint committees available to the public, as well as publishing how legislators vote on bills at the joint committee level.

Asked if the House was open to these reforms, Moran responded, "I think it's on the table."

Keeping Tabs

In tandem with those considerations, the House would want to look at publicizing committee attendance.

"If you're going to publicize votes, why not publicize attendance? One of the things that we're having an issue with in this body right now is in-person attendance. But the House believes, as in our rules from last session, that in-person attendance is crucial," he said. "Quite frankly, it's a little bit concerning. Members of the public take time out of their schedule and their busy lives to testify in-person at hearings and formal sessions, I don't think it's too much to ask that legislators show up in person too."

Attendance levels at joint committee hearings over the years have varied widely.

As for branch sessions, the House currently requires that representatives show up in person to vote during formal sessions, while senators may cast roll call votes in person or remotely.

Spilka also announced that she wants to push forward the bill-reporting deadline known as Joint Rule 10 day. The Senate's temporary rules committee has not yet announced what specific date they are targeting for when that reporting deadline should fall.

The biennial bill-reporting deadline was moved up six weeks in 2018, from mid-March to early February, a reform pushed by Senate leaders to get more bills out of committees ahead of the July 31 end to formal sessions during election years. By pushing that date forward again, Spilka said more bills would potentially become available for action earlier in the session.

"The reasoning behind some of the rules changes is to move things along faster, such as changing the day of reporting bills out of committee," Spilka said in an interview with the News Service earlier this month. "What can we do to move bills along faster? Get them out of committee... If we can move that along a little bit faster to report them out sooner in the first [year], say, the fall of the first year of the session, then the second year can be held for sooner deliberation, debate and vetting if needed."

Moran said that moving the date earlier takes power out of the hands of the committee chairs charged with vetting and sometimes rewriting the bills.

"I would actually move it backwards, quite frankly," he said.

With the current reporting deadline of February of the second year of session, lobbyists and activists have 13 months to make their cases to committees as to why certain bills should advance to the floors of the House and Senate.

Moran said if the deadline was moved to Dec. 31 of the first year, they would have significantly less time. With annual budget writing, hearings and debates taking up the majority of each spring, time off for summer break and holidays, Moran said, a Dec. 31 deadline would give committees only about "five months" to vet the hundreds of bills in their possession.

"The first writing of the bill is in committee. And that's where the hard work happens. It's the staff on Health Care Finance, the staff on Public Health ... they're working every day, researching, talking to people, setting up meetings to try to do the first writing of the bill," he said.

Moving the deadline would "take away the members of the House and the members of the Senate's ability to influence legislation," he said. After they are reported out of committee, those bills' fates lie with the House and Senate Ways and Means Committees, under the direction of the speaker and presidents' offices, he said.

"You're taking away the power of, not just rank-and-file, but chairman and vice chairman of committees," he said. "And then what does the chairman do? What do advocates do? They're all in line at the Senate president and speaker's office, waiting to get in."

Moran reiterated that he's talked to Speaker Mariano about his concerns, but described opposition to moving up the bill-reporting deadline as his personal opinion and said he believes that "it's a mistake."

Asked about continuing to allow votes on large-scale bills after the conclusion of formal business on July 31 of the second year of session, Moran said, "I think that is something that we should consider as well."

He added, however, that effective rules reform should alleviate some of the logjam of bills that need to be completed during that time period. Not all of it, though, he added.

"Honestly, the reality is that, whether you're a college student or registering your kids for summer camps -- I bring that up because it's a yearly thing in my house -- procrastination is in our blood. Nothing motivates like a clock," he said.

Last year, lawmakers met for a nearly-24-hour-session to try to come to agreements on all the unfinished bills left on their plates at the end of formal sessions on July 31 -- though it only resulted in a small handful of successfully passed compromise bills. The remaining major laws from last session were passed during the informal session stretch of fall into winter of 2024.

Moran added, "Do I ever think there'll be a rule that we could write that will stop that from happening? I don't. But what I do think is that if we put some reforms in the rules that force earlier discussion on these things in a meaningful way, that that hypothetical July 31 will not be as bad."