This article by Aidan Scully is published by Harvard Politics. Here is an excerpt:

Massachusetts, especially its legislature, views itself as better than other states. It claims to be above the struggles faced by the rest of the nation. It therefore only makes sense that one of the most common arguments against progressive legislation, whether on voting rights, police reform, or government transparency, is not that those proposals are bad, but that Massachusetts doesn’t need them. In their eyes, the status quo has become the ideal, and so long as major bills are passed by voice vote, the voters have no way of holding them accountable.

House leadership has successfully proven its power and its will time and time again. What it has failed to do is anything meaningful with that power other than consolidate it even more. Surely a leadership that can convince 66 of its representatives to kill a proposal taken straight from their own party’s platform can use their power to meaningfully improve the lives of their constituents.

Power for power’s sake inevitably corrupts. Recent history has taught this to Massachusetts. A Democratic supermajority not backed by Democratic policies is meaningless, and it’s well past time to bring meaning back to our state politics.

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