Mariano appears to be a lock for Speaker
It was the night before Christmas and all week through the House, Bob DeLeo was stirring. Want to know more? Ask the mouse.
After DeLeo’s disclosure last Friday that he would begin negotiating post-politics employment with Northeastern University, the speaker went silent, leaving Beacon Hill to guess how long before he steps down.
Hours? Days? Weeks?
Some people thought it was a sure thing that by the time Christmas morning arrived there would be a new speaker at the State House. Majority Leader Ron Mariano has been waiting in the wings, his bag already loaded with votes to succeed DeLeo and his only opponent, Rep. Russell Holmes, just hoping to force his colleagues to consider why that is.
“This is my lunch counter,” said the Black lawmaker. “So I’m going to fight.”
Holmes and some progressive lawmakers, including retiring Reps. Jonathan Hecht and Denise Provost, have blasted what has been unfolding over the past week as backroom deal-making at its shadiest. Others just want to get it over with.
People close to Mariano say the Quincy Democrat counts 119 votes in his column if the vote were to be held before Jan. 6, and the money has been moving toward that happening early next week. A full list of names was not provided.
Needing only 81 votes to become the next speaker, the support Mariano is banking on would be more than enough to withstand a few last minute defections to Holmes.
But for now, the leadership question hangs over the House like the Sacred Cod and it’s still jolly old Bob DeLeo overseeing a raft of budgetary veto overrides and the delivery of police reform and abortion access legislation to Gov. Charlie Baker’s desk.
Baker wished for one of those presents, but not the other.
The House and Senate rejected Baker’s amendment to the abortion measure, which would have kept the age of consent
for the procedure at 18 and tightened the language around when an abortion after 24 weeks would become legal.
Instead, the Legislature sent back to the pro-choice Republican governor an expansion of abortion access that Baker had issues with, but he has not been clear whether his concerns were serious enough to warrant a veto. A veto would set up an override vote, and while Democrats appear to have the numbers on their side, it would be close.
That was the present Baker didn’t want to find under his office Christmas tree. Meanwhile, it appears Baker won’t be refusing delivery of police accountability legislation.
The policing bill would require cops to be licensed and put restrictions on the use of force, but it has been trickier than most bills to push through the Legislature, and passed with an unusual number of Democratic defectors.
After filing his own version this summer following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Baker threatened to veto what the Legislature came up with after five months of closed-door negotiations and faced sharp criticism from political leaders on the left like U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
But with more leverage than he’s accustomed to, Baker was upfront about what he needed to see in the bill and what he would do if the Legislature balked. And the two sides appear to have threaded that needle.
After returning the bill with amendments, Baker worked with the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus to address his concerns regarding the curtailment of facial recognition technology and the training of police. Those talks led to the development of a new framework he said he could live with, and it was accepted by the House and Senate on Tuesday.
The final version, which Baker said he would sign probably next week, largely leaves the training of municipal police to law enforcement personnel in the executive branch, rather than the civilian-controlled Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission.
It also ensures that facial recognition technology will still be available for now to police investigating serious crimes.
Maybe it was the finalizing of police reform, or the ROE Act. Or maybe it was as simple as running out of time. But there were signs that the legislative logjam was starting to break up.
With those two pieces out of the way, the conference committee negotiating a telehealth bill reached a deal Tuesday night to cement tele
health’s place in the care delivery system by requiring coverage and payment on par with in-person services for at least two years.
The health care bill, incidentally, was negotiated for the House by none other than Leader Mariano, two years after his talks with the Senate over a measure to stabilize community hospital finances fell apart on the final night of the session.
Baker hopes one of the next conference committees to finalize negotiations will be the one led by House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz and Sen. Eric Lesser focused on economic development.
“The clock is ticking on the end of the session with respect to that, but the clock is also ticking for businesses here in the commonwealth that would benefit from those resources if we could get them across to our desk, sign them, and put them to work,” the governor said.
That quote was uttered one day before Baker announced a new round of business restrictions in the hope of preventing Christmas from spreading more than cheer.
Facing pressure to take more aggressive action to slow the surge of COVID19, Baker on Tuesday said that beginning Saturday businesses would be required to limit their capacity to 25%. He also dialed back outdoor gatherings from a maximum of 50 people to 25, and lowered the limit for indoor gatherings at private residences and event spaces to 10.
The restrictions will be
in place for a minimum of two weeks, but Baker said the idea is that they will be temporary as long as people follow the rules, limit Christmas celebrations to their household and prevent the type of post-holiday surge the state saw after Thanksgiving.
“It’s just for one year, and there are brighter days around the corner,” Baker said about the holidays.
To make sure those brighter days can be seen by small businesses, including restaurants, who have been getting crushed by the economic restrictions and public health precautions being taken by residents, Baker on Wednesday announced a $668 million relief fund for businesses hurt the most by the pandemic.
The sizable fund makes the $50 million in relief grants awarded Monday look like couch change. That first round of funding left thousands of businesses in the cold and about $350 million in requests unfulfilled. Those passedover businesses will get first priority, the administration said, and possibly a check for up to $75,000 by next week.
Baker said the financing behind the proposal relies in part on President Donald Trump signing a new $900 billion stimulus bill approved last week by Congress. While Trump is threatening a possible veto, Baker said the stimulus bill would give the state the “flexibility” it needs to make the math work for its own small business relief program.
The new federal relief bill includes a one-year ex
tension on federal aid from the CARES Act that otherwise must be spent by Dec. 30 or returned to the federal government.
Baker is hoping to repurpose $650 million in CARES Act funding to support his small business relief effort, though it’s unclear where that money was going to be directed before now.
Massachusetts is also expecting to receive tens of millions of dollars annually starting in 2023 by being one of the three states, as well as the District of Columbia, to get in on the ground floor of the Trans
portation Climate Initiative.
The regional compact to cap emissions from vehicles and require fuel suppliers to buy and trade carbon allowances was finalized this week with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2032.
Despite setting a more ambitious carbon reduction goal than contemplated just a year ago, the developers of the program said that at most it will add 9 cents to the price of a gallon of gas and generate $366 million annually for participating states to in
vest in clean energy.
Still, of the 13 jurisdictions that put the program together only Connecticut and Rhode Island saw fit to join Massachusetts and D.C. in the program right away. Other states will have time to think about it before the program starts in earnest in 2023.
“The price of doing nothing is very big,” Baker said.
STORY OF THE
WEEK: Seven months after George Floyd, Beacon Hill reaches watershed accord to hold police accountable.