Gun reform lawmaking in Massachusetts will continue with urgency behind closed doors.
We get the scoop on that and other stories from State House News Service reporter Chris Lisinski.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Happy April Fool's Day.
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: Yes — the best holiday of the year, clearly.
Today is the day that take-out cocktails, expanded outdoor dining and some nursing student reforms that have been in place since early in the COVID-19 pandemic are no more. It's a prank that Beacon Hill is playing on all of us, because lawmakers could not agree on whether or how to extend those measures. Most of them are probably going to come back in some fashion once Democrats figure out a path forward, but — for now — they're back to being temporarily illegal.
That's something. And no joke here, a process that was looking unusually transparent for a state House and Senate conference committee retreated to talks behind closed doors by late last week. We're talking about gun legislation here. The move into executive session was put out there by Rep. Carlos Gonzalez of Springfield. That action drew criticism from Republican lawmakers and the chair of the state GOP. Chris, do you get any sense of what's going on here?
A couple of different reasons seem to be at play all at once. Some of it is lawmakers’ personal interaction with the topic. This is obviously a really politically fraught issue with some public safety concerns attached. One senator, Joan Lovely, told her colleagues about some harrowing experiences her own family had with a gun owner, and wanted to have deliberations take place in private to minimize exposure.
Another factor is that some lawmakers are worried that doing these negotiations in public could fuel a potential lawsuit against the eventual compromise. And then, of course, there's the one that lawmakers don't want to address themselves, but is obviously true: It is just easier for the House and Senate to get on the same page when they're talking candidly behind closed doors, rather than in public view for everyone to see.
That is the way that almost all conference committees have worked in recent years. So even though it's a shift for this one, it's kind of a return to form based on how things go up here.
One thing that is hardly ever a priority on Beacon Hill is a proposal to update the state's bottle bill. Of course, the current carbonated soda nickel deposit law was passed in 1982. Voters rejected a proposal to expand it a decade ago, but environmental activists say that they're hopeful. What's under consideration and what's the chance that it passes?
So this bill would actually increase the deposit paid on bottles from $0.05 to $0.10, and it would expand to cover more kinds of beverages that are being sold today that were not around when the law passed, something like four decades ago.
This is something that has been weighed many, many times and has never really picked up steam, as you said. It cleared a committee in the Statehouse, which is a preliminary step that's not insignificant. But getting out of committee really doesn't tell us anything about how legislative leaders, the speaker and the Senate president feel about this. And, as is the case with so many things, that's really what will be the ultimate deciding factor.
Following Gov. Maura Healey's announcement of a mass clemency of cannabis possession convictions, the body that evaluates such executive actions, the Governor's Council, has decided to hold a hearing before approving the measure. So is this due diligence sort of a normal next step to take, or is it indicative of some skepticism from the governor's councilors —specifically the western Massachusetts representative, Tara Jacobs?
No, I think it's pretty standard for the Governor's Council to hold a hearing to explore, whenever there is a clemency motion by the governor for an individual, there's usually a hearing where that person gets a chance to make their case.
We should also note that, I think, the hearing and the vote are scheduled for only about 2.5 hours apart, which says to me that it is due diligence, but maybe a bit on the cursory side to get some information out into the public air rather than an actual serious deliberation that councilors are going to need to sit on for days and days before they're ready to make a decision.
