UP HILL BATTLE
Holmes churns up Speaker race as DeLeo college-bound
State Rep. Russell Holmes is running for Massachusetts House speaker, with the Mattapan Democrat vowing to end “backroom deals” that he says have plagued the House for too long under Robert DeLeo and his predecessors.
“We need to uproot this poisonous tree,” Holmes said, referring to the criminal corruption under previous speakers and the norm of secrecy under the current one, the reportedly exiting Robert DeLeo.
Holmes said DeLeo, who confirmed rumors a possible departure when he told the State Ethics Commission Friday that he’s eyeing a job at Northeastern University, has consolidated power far too much. The 51-year-old Holmes and said he doesn’t want the speakership to just pass to DeLeo’s top deputy, Quincy’s Ron Mariano, without a fight.
“I didn’t think we should just roll over and let this happen,” Holmes, a financial planner who was elected from Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood in 2010, said in a phone interview Friday morning. “It can’t just be more backroom deals.”
He said he’d hoped the No. 3 Democrat, Pat Haddad, would run, but she told him Thursday night that she’s not going to. Haddad, of Somerset, confirmed that, saying in an email she doesn’t see “a path forward” for herself.
Holmes said he’d look to decentralize power, bringing the speaker’s pay back down toward the level of the other reps and making the processes for everything from getting parking spaces and staff members acquiring committee chairmanships more transparent.
“It’s all just so consolidated, financially,” Holmes said. “Politics has become our careers and life experiences — and that’s the opposite of
what the founding fathers wanted.”
Holmes, who’s Black — and would be the only speaker of color in the state’s history — decried the lack of people of color in DeLeo’s leadership team and among committee chairs.
“It makes my district and other districts like it have less of a voice,” Holmes said.
Mariano, a longtime rep, has been at DeLeo’s right hand as majority leader since the Winthrop Democrat took the speakership. The 74-year-old Mariano said in a statement Friday that if DeLeo leaves, he does plan to run, and sources have told the Herald that Mariano appears to have the votes necessary.
“We have a white guy handing the speakership to another white guy,” Holmes said.
State Rep. Claire Cronin, D-Easton, told the Herald on Friday that she doesn’t see a race for the speaker “being any possibility” because she’s “confident that Leader Mariano has the votes to be the next speaker of the House.”
Holmes acknowledged he faces an uphill battle. He said that when he started calling people Thursday night, he spoke to reps who said they pledged support to Mariano years ago.
“I’m a praying man,” Holmes said. “I’ll be working the phones over the weekend, calling all 160 members.”
DeLeo, 70, is set to be the first speaker in this century to leave to top job without being ousted by criminal charges — unlike previous top Democrats Sal DiMasi, Tom Finneran and Charles Flaherty.
DeLeo and Holmes have been nemeses for years. Holmes once called DeLeo a “dictator” and the speaker stripped him of a vice-chairmanship.