With Several Bills In The Mix, Hard Deadline For Mass. Lawmakers Approaches

Of all the deadlines Massachusetts legislative leaders have missed or postponed during the pandemic, the end of the session will not be one of them.

With about six weeks left in the session, some lawmakers on Beacon Hill are facing the end of their terms. Others will be sticking around.

But for all of them, there is still a pile of bills that leadership has said they wanted to work through.

Matt Murphy of the State House News Service joins us to talk about the nature of that pile of bills.

Carrie Healy, NEPM: Are these incredibly complicated bills, or is lawmaking in a pandemic just really hard?

Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Yeah, we're in a very rare lame-duck lawmaking session, unseen on Beacon Hill, really, since the 1990s. And these bills that remain are the top priority.

I think the answer is, no, they're not abnormally tricky. They are dealing with a budget.

They started negotiations on that last week between the House and Senate, hoping to get that done very quickly.

The other pieces are the five bills that were in conference committee negotiations after votes in both the House and Senate.

I think what happened there was a bit of waiting for the election to be over.

There are some that are particularly controversial. Policing reform comes to mind as one of them. But there are others that are fairly routine, such as a long-term transportation borrowing bill, for instance, or an economic development bill that gets done every two years at the end of the session.

There are pieces in that bill — for instance, an expansion or legalization, I should say, of sports wagering in Massachusetts — that the branches are trying to negotiate. But they've been talking about this for quite some time.

I think now that the elections are done, Thanksgiving is over, the budget, at least the votes in the House and Senate, are behind them — and they're in these closed-door, final-stage talks over the budget — we could start to see some movement on some of these other larger pieces.

The state is operating under its third interim budget since the fiscal year began in July. Negotiators are working to settle the differences between the House and Senate versions with those other conference committees working on the other important bills. Does that work hinge on a final state budget, or can that work be done independently of budget constraints?

It shouldn't. That can definitely be done independent of the budget.

There's not much in the budget that is depending on anything in those other bills, or vice versa. There is some overlap, for instance, some of the budget conferees — the chairman of Ways and Means, and the Senate side, for instance. Michael Rodrigues sits on a couple of those other conference committees.

But these are things that typically take place not in face-to-face meetings, but a lot between staff, a lot over email, a lot of remote work. So it's conducive to this pandemic era legislating, and it is something that they should be able to work on simultaneously.

President-elect Biden tapped former U.S. Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry for a National Security Council seat, passing over Senator Elizabeth Warren for Treasury secretary. Do you get the sense any other Massachusetts residents might be headed to Washington to work for the new administration?

We don't know yet. Certainly, some of the big names that we've heard talked about early on after President-elect Biden secured his victory have not gone anywhere.

The biggest one, Elizabeth Warren, is not getting that Treasury post, and some of the other big positions are already being filled.

But there are certainly many more positions still to be filled in the administration, whether they are staff positions that could lure any of the many talented political operatives that we've seen Massachusetts export over the years to D.C.

The door has not closed on Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston or Rep. Stephen Lynch from taking a job in possibly a labor department or an ambassadorship, something of that nature. And you also have the Department of Justice, where the name Deval Patrick has been floated for a role, if not for Attorney General. So there's still a lot of dominoes to fall there that could trickle back into Massachusetts.

Keep up here with Beacon Hill In 5.