Pity our poor, starving legislators

For the price of just one cup of coffee, you can feed one of our poor, starving legislators. Unlike the taxpayers of Massachusetts, they cannot afford to feed themselves. They’ve barely gotten a handful of pay raises in the last few years.

As our friends at the Globe reported in December, our poor House speaker is living on a pittance. “DeLeo, for example, made $157,500 last year, thanks to his base salary,” the Globe reported, in addition to “an $80,000 stipend, and $15,000 in office expenses. After the hikes go into effect, his total compensation will balloon to $169,100 — a jump of $11,600.”

Someone set up a GoFundMe account.

Asked Thursday about a lavish taxpayer-paid Chinese food feast for House lawmakers in April, costing the taxpayer nearly five thousand dollars, DeLeo explained, “People have to eat.”

People do have to eat. We thank Speaker DeLeo for shining a light on the human condition.

Yes, we are having a little fun with this issue, but in truth, Speaker DeLeo has personified the hubris and disdain for the taxpayer that has metastasized on Beacon Hill.

DeLeo dropped $4,745 of taxpayer money on food from the Hong Kong Dragon in Winthrop — the speaker’s district — so that lawmakers could chow down in style during the budget process. Most human beings on earth will never see a $4,745 Chinese food delivery order in their lives, but most people don’t work on Beacon Hill.

No matter what the speaker says, that is an exorbitant amount of money spent on a massive amount of food.

“At some point, you know, people have to eat,” DeLeo said Thursday.

No one doubts that people have to eat. People do not have to eat takeout from Winthrop that costs someone else nearly five thousand dollars. Everybody in the legislature gets paid well and some make a small fortune.

Almost all of them have received multiple raises in the last few years — have you?

DeLeo further contends that the delivery was needed to keep lawmakers and staff focused on the budget process. “It makes life easier in terms of trying to get things done,” he said.

“There’s no need to break for a longer period of time.”

Considering the secretive budget process was the longest slog in recent memory — making Massachusetts the last state in the country to approve a budget for the second year in a row — we’re not sure how well that worked

. Apart from the $4,745 of taxpayer money budgeted for Chinese food delivery, none of the other fiscal priorities appear to have been settled in such a timely manner.

Obviously, there is no good excuse for the needlessly costly spread, and that is why they tried to hide it. They hide everything: the perennial taxpayer-funded feasts, the publicly funded payouts (think hush money) to cover for bad behavior, the closed-door budget meetings.

The Legislature is exempt from public records laws and DeLeo intends to keep it that way. How else to shield public officials who have been accused of sexual harassment?

The Chinese food delivery is not the end of the world, but it is the tip of the iceberg and it is symbolic of the abuse of power those in leadership on Beacon Hill practice all too often.

We believe that legislators should abide by public records laws so the public can see what lawmakers are doing. Elected politicians work on behalf of the people. The people do not work on behalf of the politicians as financiers for their bad behavior behind closed doors.