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Massachusetts House Session Extension Advances Amidst COVID-19, Bill Crunch

The empty Massachusetts House chamber.
State of Massachusetts
The empty Massachusetts House chamber.

Massachusetts House lawmakers on Wednesday took a key step towards striking from their calendar a Friday deadline for passing major bills, which legislators have been working toward for the past year and a half.

The House on Wednesday unanimously agreed to scrap the traditional July 31 deadline and continue meeting in formal sessions through the election season and the rest of 2020, raising the prospect of lame-duck sessions after the Nov. 3 elections.

Senate President Karen Spilka put out a statement indicating she agrees with the intent of the plan, although the Senate did not immediately take up the order.

Citing the continued threats posed by COVID-19, House Speaker Robert DeLeo announced that he was seeking to extend the session "so that we may continue to meet in formal sessions for the remainder of the year and ensure that the pressing matters debated by July 31st are resolved."

The House then adopted, on a 159-0 vote, an order that would allow the House and Senate to "meet in formal sessions and conduct formal business subsequent to the last day of July 2020." The order (PDF) does not specifically limit what matters could be taken up in future formal sessions.

In response to the House's action, Spilka said in a statement, "The Senate is pleased that the House has agreed with us to extend the session to complete vital legislation and stand ready to act as required by the COVID-19 crisis." The statement did not say if the Senate would agree to the specific wording of the House's order or give a timeline for when the Senate might consider it.

The order comes as the House on Wednesday debated health care legislation and teed up a climate change bill for debate on Thursday. The Senate has previously approved bills covering both major policy areas. The House and Senate are also scrambling this week to pass sweeping economic development proposals.

Spilka has previously said she believes the legislature can complete most of its work by July 31 but that the Senate would be ready to go beyond that date if needed. Last week, Spilka told the News Service, "If we do not get all of the work done by the 31st, if we need to work through that date in these extraordinary circumstances past July 31, we will come back."

The typical rhythms of the two-year legislative cycle were disrupted this year by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which — in addition to its public health concerns — forced the adoption of remote voting systems, led officials to close the State House to the public, created a host of new issues for government to respond to, and sparked a collapse in state revenues.

It's not clear how an extension will affect the legislature's workflow in the two full remaining days before the deadline -- if lawmakers would still try to reach deals and work through a flurry of bills, or if agreement on additional time would prompt them to pull back from an expected full schedule of long sessions.

While it is not entirely unprecedented for legislators to extend their time period for formal sessions, it would be unusual for them to allow formal lawmaking business to run into what is traditionally their campaigning season.

Joint Rule 12A, which sets the last day of formal sessions for each year of the term — the third Wednesday in November in the first year, and the last day of July in the second — was adopted in 1995. Since then, the House has never extended formal sessions past July 31 in year two, according to the House clerk's office, though there have been three instances where the House and Senate agreed to suspend the rule in the first year of a term.

In November 1999, lawmakers suspended the rule to consider the late fiscal 2000 budget, according to House Clerk Steven James. In November 2001, it was for the budget and Congressional redistricting, and the third suspension, in November 2005, allowed lawmakers to consider pending conference committee reports and any potential vetoes of those bills.

Suspending the rule requires a two-thirds vote in each branch.

Over the years, lawmakers have strictly adhered to the July 31 deadline to insulate policymaking from the political pressures associated with the election season.

The legislature usually meets in informal sessions between August and December in election years. During such sessions, which do not feature a quorum, any lawmaker can halt the progress of any bill, a situation that can force the ruling Democrats to address concerns raised by Republicans.

"While the rule to end formal sessions on July 31st in an election year typically serves an important purpose, we are facing unprecedented public health and fiscal challenges that were unforeseeable as recently as last January," DeLeo said in a statement. "No one can predict what might happen over the next 5 weeks, much less the next 5 months. While we are cautiously optimistic that we will maintain the gains we have made here in the Commonwealth since the spring, we must remain prepared to address critical issues related to the health, safety and economic well-being of the Commonwealth when and if they arise over the next 5 months."

One major unresolved issue is the fiscal 2021 budget. As they continue to hope the federal government will agree to more relief aid to the states, lawmakers on Tuesday sent Gov. Charlie Baker a $16.5 billion interim budget intended to fund state government operations through the end of October, suggesting a need to return sometime in the fall to address appropriations to cover the eight remaining months in fiscal 2021.

House-Senate conference committees are negotiating a police reform package and borrowing bills to fund transportation infrastructure and information technology investments. Other major bills moving in the legislature this week deal with health care, climate change and economic development.

Spilka said the extension "does not affect the urgency of enacting" the police accountability and racial justice bill and said she is "confident that our colleagues in the House share our commitment to acting on this matter by the end of the week."

Rep. Joseph Wagner, a member of DeLeo's leadership team who spoke in favor of the session-extending order, said there are "major policy issues that require our attention and we will certainly endeavor to deal with as much as we can prior to the current deadline of July 31."

Wagner, a Chicopee Democrat, said it is hard to find words that adequately "capture the changed world in which we live."

Before adopting the order, House Democrats defeated two amendments proposed by Minority Leader Brad Jones. One, which failed on a 51-108 vote, would have required any committee polling a bill after July 31 to give its members at least two hours to vote.

The other, which garnered 33 votes in favor to 126 against, would have required 14 calendar days notice for any formal session called after July 31.

Jones, a North Reading Democrat, said he respects the need for an extension but believes there should be greater transparency, and that the advance notice was important to allow legislative staffers time to plan their schedules. Wagner, speaking in opposition to the amendment, said lawmakers will need the ability to be flexible.

It was in a December 1994 lame-duck session when lawmakers approved a 55 percent pay raise for themselves, which was immediately followed by the quiet passage of a capital gains tax cut, giving the impression of a quid pro quo for Gov. William Weld, who proposed the pay hike. That turn of events stirred the legislature in 1995 to approve a major change to its joint rules.

Paul Craney of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance urged the Senate to "put forward an approach that is not an open ended invitation to tax increases and other legislative mischief, with no end date in sight.

"Speaker DeLeo wants the public to think he has their best interest at heart by extending the legislative session, but this is a power play to exert power over the Governor and bypass common sense good government rules that have been in place for decades," Craney said. "The move will only bolster the power of the Speaker’s office and increase DeLeo's ability to pass a tax increase over the next 5 months. Lawmakers, who have spent much of the year dawdling, will now have the option of putting off a tough vote on tax increases until after the election."

Gov. Charlie Baker, who served in the Weld administration, said Monday that legislators "need to make whatever decision they think makes the most sense for them."

"As a general rule the lieutenant governor and I try to stay out of giving the legislature advice about what it should or shouldn't do with respect to its own activities, and that's where I'm going to stay today," Baker said. "I will say that, you know, we still have to figure out how to deal with whatever comes out of the federal budget discussion to create and sort of finish our own budget activities, and there are a lot of things that are still in process that I think are important to many of us.

"The economic development bill and Housing Choice is one, there's a transportation bond bill that has a lot of really important elements in it, that's another. The whole debate and discussion that they're currently still in the middle of with respect to policing and law enforcement is still going on. I mean, there's a bunch of things that I think we would believe would be good things to get settled, whether or not they can get settled in due course. I mean, the end of the session is always a little bit of a traffic jam. And I guess we just have to wait and see how it plays out."

Sam Doran and Michael P. Norton contributed reporting.

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