Term limits for Senate prez could go
A plan by the state Senate to change their self imposed rules and allow the body’s president to serve unlimited terms is being met with concern by a government transparency group.
“To see the Senate backslide on this critical issue of democracy and power-sharing is deeply troubling. The senate president has nearly unfettered control over the passage of legislation in that chamber. Allowing someone to hold this position indefinitely enables them to further concentrate that power and pass the torch to a hand-picked successor,” Erin Leahy, executive director of anti-corruption group Act on Mass, told the Herald.
After the House removed term limits for the powerful position of Speaker about a decade ago, it comes as perhaps no surprise that the state Senate, on Thursday, will attempt the same.
State Sen. Michael Rodrigues has proposed a rules amendment to remove the president’s eightyear term limit and said in a statement to the press the change would catch the Senate up to the House and executive, as well as both the minority leaders, who currently have no such limits.
Senate President Karen Spilka, a Democrat representing Ashland, was able to gain unanimous consent to take the reins of the 40-member body for a third full term this January.
Her first term started with the early departure of her predecessor in July of 2018, though, meaning she would hit the term limit not long before the end of the next Legislative session, in the summer of 2026.
Senators, on Wednesday, were meeting in private at the State House ahead of the rules vote. Support for the idea among the Senators leaving the meeting, who will vote on the plan tomorrow and then find out who gets the best paying jobs, seemed mixed.
Rodrigues currently chairs the Senate Ways and Means Committee which has long been used as a springboard to lead the Senate — that’s where Spilka and many past presidents were before taking the helm — and though the rule change would seem to help him least of all if he was planning to make the same jump it would benefit whoever does have the top job, Leahy says.
“This creates a lineage of legislative leaders that are more like royalty than they are truly democratically elected. The cost of eliminating this term limit for Massachusetts voters is clear: the more power in the hands of the senate president, the less power their senators have to represent them,” she said.