Bring it to the Ballot! Ballot Questions and State Power

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Today we discuss ballot initiatives, the committee in the legislature that has now "dealt" with ballot initiatives, and the wonderful way they did so with a predetermined outcome. We're also talking about the end product, and organizers and advocates who ignore the rigged nature of the votes. 

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 47. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics. We​​ know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of all the people who live here.
And today we will be discussing ballot initiatives and the committee in the legislature that has now dealt with ballot initiatives and the wonderful way they dealt with them. We're going to talk about how they set up this new committee. We're going to talk about the predetermined outcome.
We're going to talk about people who organized and advocated as if this was a serious thing to do. We're going to talk about the end product. And if you've been listening to us before, none of this will be particularly surprising.
But hopefully you'll get reengaged with that little sense of outrage about how awful our state government is and how little work they do. So before we do that, I will introduce or let my co hosts introduce themselves. And today I will start with Jonathan.
Hi, Jonathan Cohn. He him his joining from Boston. I've been active in various issue, progressive issue and electoral campaigns here in Boston and Massachusetts for the past decade.
And Jordan, I'm Jordan Berg Powers. I use he him and I am a former runner of a C4 table in Massachusetts and worked on many ballot initiatives in my 13 years in that job. And I am Anna Callahan.
She her coming at you from Medford, involved in local politics kind of across the country for quite a while. And now also, what a pleasure to be chat and state politics with these wonderful people almost every week. So let's talk about these ballot initiatives.
And first, if somebody can just say what the ballot initiatives are, what stage they were in, and let's just start with that. So I don't know which of you guys wants to leave in. I'll just say really quickly, the ballot initiatives got signatures.
So the legislature does what it does, which is nothing. And so people then were like, well, we gotta figure out a way to pass these bills that the legislature will never actually to take seriously. So they went out, got signatures from regular people, and then by law the legislature has to consider those citizen initiatives, saying like they want to pass and the legislature can either do nothing and then automatically it goes to the next phase, which is more signature collection and then a review and on the ballot.
Or the legislature can act, pass a version of it or pass it directly. If it passes directly, that's the end of it. It just becomes law.
Or the governor will sign it, but you know, sort of passes that thing. If they act on a portion of it. Then the people on that ballot initiative can decide if they want to move forward with an AG review, or they can say like, yeah, we got part of it, we're good, we're going to move forward.
So where we were is a process that normally happens, which is the legislature does nothing. It just sort of like lets the ballot initiatives move forward. It doesn't do anything, it doesn't review them, it doesn't pretend to.
But this year they created a new special process. Wonderful. Jonathan, you want to jump in? Yeah.
The legislature created a specific ballot initiative committee with chairs, vice chairs and members of both House and Senate to hold these hearings, rather than sending them to the subject matter committee. Kind of along the lines of that you could easily have sent the ballot question about the MCAS to the education committee, which has heard related legislation before. You could send the one on ending subminimum wages to labor and workforce where it had been before, et cetera, et cetera.
But instead they created a new committee for the sole purpose of holding hearings on these, choosing their designated experts to talk to them and then inviting supporters and opponents. And what always ends up just feeling like a performative exercise where the outcome is predetermined. And so it becomes not surprising when the outcome was them just issuing recommendations of what's called ought not to pass, saying, yeah, we're not doing anything on any of these.
Good luck to you. If you collect signatures, we don't care. Which rendered the whole existence of the committee pointless, because why did they, why did they need to come to come into existence to hold a bunch like, as a separate entity to hold hearings and do absolutely nothing? Well, I mean, part of what I love about this is how these people, you know, the chairs and vice chair got paid to do this, right? This is the way that it works in the state government is by law, they must be paid the sort ofaverage wage in Massachusetts, which is calculated in a complicated fashion, but that is by law what they're supposed to be paid.
And yet they get paid 10,000, 20,000 extra dollars, 30,000 extra dollars per year by having a committee chair. And it used to be that there were like nine of these people who were paid extra, and then it was 15, and then it was, you know, 80, 75, and then it was,you know, 85. And now it's, you know, it's absurd because more than 50% of the state house is paid by the speaker, right? Essentially, the speaker determines who these people are.
So if you please the speaker, you get to have extra cash in your pocket. And this is, you know, a few more people who get to be corrupted by the speaker. Bravo.
Yeah, I just. I want to. I want to, like, highlight both those points again, which is.
So there's a constitutional amendment, and it's actually not that complicated. It's a family of four for state reps, so. Family of four.
The median income for a family of four in Massachusetts is what their pay is supposed to be constitutionally. We passed it and added it to the constitution, and they end around it by adding that if they have to do special work, which is otherwise known as work that you're paid to do, like, it's just their jobs, but they get extra money for doing their jobs. And I think it's important to note that no other state does this.
There's not. That's not a common thing. You don't.
Your congresspeople don't get extra money for showing up to their committee assignments. That's just called your job. But in Massachusetts, they get paid extra money to do this thing.
And. And it used to be that was just a few people. And then Finnerin figured out that he could be stay speaker by making it an almost a majority.
And then DeLeo was like, oh, well, I have actually no, I have no worry about beating this constitutional mallet, constitutionality, because I am totally lawless and don't care. And so then he added it, I have no moral compass and no worry that any sort of constitutional oversight will be done on this. And so he made it a majority, which I think even Finnerin was like, that feels sketchy.
Like, I'll go close to a majority, but, like, a majority feels like then we're under rounding the law. And DeLeo was like, I could give you a middle finger to the law. Like, I don't care.
I already. I broke the law to get this job. Like, I don't care.
So then they added a majority, and now it's almost. It's like, almost two thirds. I think it's.
It was 95, and then you had these two. So, like, 90. It's.
It's like, almost of 160. So it's just like, a ridiculous amount of them have money tied directly to the speaker. So we say on this podcast all the time that this.
That their actual boss is the speaker and not us, but, like, literally almost a majority of their pay, like, a good pay and more. And another employee to make your job easier, is tied to the speaker and the Senate president. I think it's also important to note it's also the Senate president.
And so they created another paid people for these things. And my two favorite things about it are, one, that it had that, like, just to highlight what Jonathan said, they knew what they're, there was never a chance that these things were going to pass. There was no reality.
So they went through the process of creating a subcommittee that, which they knew the outcome. And some of them voted against legislation that they themselves support or co sponsor. Just putting, again, one of the other things we talked about on this podcast , which is that they don't, it's just fake.
It's all like, they don't even support these things. They just pretend to support them, knowing the speaker will protect them or the Senate and the Senate president in this case, from ever voting on them. If you want to hear more about that, we have episodeswhere we specifically talk about, like, all the times that co sponsors vote against the bill that they, to sell their co sponsoring or acommittee, two thirds of the people are sponsors of the bill, votes down the bill.
Like, I mean, this just happens over and over and over. So don't believe it when your, you know, state rep says that they either cosponsor or sponsor a bill because it doesn't mean anything until they vote. I think it's, I just want to highlight the part that was the most galling for me and the most, I think, emblematic of just how broken our community, the progressive community in Massachusetts is.
I got asked to, like, are you going to go testify? Like, and people lined up to go testify and the media covered it. Like, this was a serious committee that was actually thinking about what, like the substance of these ballot initiatives wants to tackle with the seriousness that these things are arising from the total lack of action from our legislature to do anything at all. Right.
Like just a total failure on their half. And they just, and people cover it like that. And, but I think more importantly, people went to it.
They testified, they spent hours there. They lined up support for this thing. And I just would ask the same thing, why are you going?And I think it would have been more effective to not have a single person from the progressive community show up and testify on behalf of their own bills and make clear from the get go that this is a sham process.
Now, we could argue, I have lots of thoughts about the SEIU ballot initiative and lots of, I think it's not great and there's lots of other things. But at the end of the day, there is some, there was some hope that they might get a deal in the legislature. So I can sort of see that about that driver's license bill, you know, coming like they have a bill, other people have bills.
There's lots of things curling. The legislature has talked about maybe doing something. I can see maybe that one.
But like the teachers are never getting their MCAS bill passed to the legislature. It's not going to happen. And like why go testify for the one fair wage.
Why go testify? Like why be a part of this process that is rigged, that has a predetermined outcome that is not serious. It is not a serious thing. They are not taking you seriously.
And I think time is worth more. But it would have been a good thing to say that, you know, it would have been better to hold a press conference out front calling that out than pretending that what was happening inside was serious. Yeah, I was thinking that like rather than just avoid it, like having your own mock like hearing somewhere else that we are going to do this because this is going to be a better use of our time than showing up to these bozos when we know they're going to do nothing at all.
And then of course have the press there and all of that. You know, I mean just think of the fun. You could say like you must be on drugs to believe that they are going to pass it inside this building.
Like you can have it out front like or in their district hold a hearing in their district to be like people support this but your representatives don’t care. Sorry Jonathan. Oh I just want to underscore the one point you noted to highlight that there are that it's Senator Paul Feeney and Representative Ken Gordon who are both co sponsors of a bill that would end the use of the mcas as a graduation requirement.
Join the majority report saying we don't support the use of the mcas as a graduation requirement. And like how did we. It's fascinating logic.
Like listed all of the ballot measures. So somebody wants to go ahead, let's do list really quickly. Yeah, I forgot that we to do that.
So just really quickly. They had hearings on psychedelics which allowing psychedelics, I forget it's like medically and for. It's like lifting up the sort of oversight one fair wage is really important.
It's, you know, for those who listen to the podcast, they know that the US federal government created a sub, a sub minimum wage for industries that were largely done by black people to get secure votes for the minimum wage. Those jobs were farming and direct service, direct food service. Those jobs have now been taken over by children and women and latino folks and other folks at the margins.
And so the legislature passed, raised the minimum wage, but kept the subminimum wage the same. And it's inherently racist, that subminimum wage. And I think more importantly, or not more importantly, equally at this time today, what we're seeing, especially in the food service industry, is that the tipped minimum wage being so low enables customers to feel like they can treat their waiters and waitresses a certain way.
And especially waitresses face a lot of unwanted sexual advances and people literally saying, we're not going to give you a tip if you don't do this. And so that means they might not make their minimum wage for the day. So what we've seen is that the submitted wage has also led to rampant unwanted sexual advances towards waitresses in particular.
Oh, and then the other is the audit, which again, I don't know why she showed up to the legislature. She should have definitely given the figure. She knew.
She knew that they were not going to, uh, pass her thing, uh, to audit them. And, um, and then the other one. So, like, um, the state auditor.
Yeah, right. It's trying to get a ballot saying that she can audit those data. I mean, it's kind of insane, right? The whole thing is crazy.
So this is the ballot measure that the state house then took up and decided that they would not do anything with. Brilliant. Yes.
And then the last one is, uh, is Uber. Is Uber lyft, which has several bills. Um, so basically, uh, you know, despite what Uber says on tv, if you've been online at all, you've gotten their shitty ads.
Um, you know, they're like, oh, like, no, you know, we don't want to be a nine to five. That is not what this, what anybody's saying. Noone's going to make you.
No one's going to make you drive an Uber from nine to five and then quit at 05:00. That's not what anybody's saying. What they're saying is Uber is like a taxi company, and so therefore, it has workers and you have to, you have to treat them as such.
No. You know, your Walmart workers, your CVS workers work after 05:00. But they are employees of CVS, of Walmart.
They can work part time, they can come in and work a little bit and leave. Same thing with an Uber driver. They would still get all of those freedoms that they're talking about on tv, which is dumb, but what we would say is they function as an employee of you and they should be treated as employees of you.
And so that's what's happening through the legal, through the court system. Because it's clear that Uber drivers and Lyft drivers are employees of those companies, just like a taxi driver is an employee of that taxi company. But they.
But. So there was an attempt to try to create some legal frameworks to think about, like, how can we do that? I guess it's the nicest way to say it. That.
Yeah. And then to just quickly jump in there. Part of the issue of that Uber, why Uber and Lyft are targeting Massachusetts in particular, is because of Massachusetts labor law having what's called the ABC test, which is a three part test to kind of gauge situations of misclassification, which are all.
Like, which Uber is clearly in violation of all of them. That, like, one is that the work is done like, that you can be treated as an independent contractor if one. The work is done without the direction and control of the employer, that it's performed outside the usual course of the employer's business, and that it's done by someone who has their own independent business or trade doing that kind of work.
And Uber and Lyft and all similar companies are flagrantly in violation in those roles and are trying to head off a lawsuit from the eventual ruling of an attorney general's lawsuit by actually just changing the law itself so that what they're doing is no longer illegal because they've changed the law to make it legal, which, as people who've listened to this know, is galling to me because they already, you know, they're a bunch of. You know, they're a rich white corporation that basically functioned the sameas or as penny cabs, which were mostly black and liveries, which were mostly latino, and they function the same as those. But the black and brown people got the full force of the government to shut it down.
Uber and Lyft come in and do the same thing, and no one does anything to regulate that. No one. And they made billions of dollars.
They take so much out of the money you give that driver. And, yeah, they should get regulated. It's not.
It's not. Especially considering all the other things. So legislature had this process, and, you know, I think it's.
It's just really telling that they. That there's these that, like, for me, it's. You know, they could.
At any time we. They. There is endless studies that the MCAs is bad for our schools.
Right? Like, I had a size shirt. Teachers want to teach. Like you could.
You know, my daughter does not know basic geography because. Because the MCAs dominates so much of the thing. I put up onTwitter.
Like, how many hours of the day are dedicated to MCAs prep? And it's. I think it's like six of the. I think it calculated as 6 hours a day is on MCAs prep of her.
Of her school day. Every day. She, you know, she has MCAs.
She's not taking the MCAs. But because she. We.
She opted herself out. We were like, you do whatever you want. She was like, I've opted.
She's like, I want to do this dumb. So she opted herself out, but she would be taking the MCAs today. Um, and this is.
And so it. They. All they do all year round is prep for this test.
That's it. They just prep for this test. And it started in kindergarten.
She was learning basic algebra in kindergarten to prepare for the MCAs. I cannot stress enough how much you do if you listening,and do not understand how much MCAS has crowded out actual education to just do prep talk, especially for black and brown children. And the legislature knows this.
You could talk to every individual legislator and they would tell you they agree with this. If black Republicans, Democrats, they would tell you they agree with that. And yet the legislature will not do anything about it, will not act to do anything about it.
They know that the fit, that the minimum wage does not work, as it currently is stated, will not act to do something about it. Right.They know that Uber and Lyft are ending around in the laws.
They even said that they wanted to. They aspired to do something about it and still will not do anything about it. And they have the gall to then create a fake process to then pay themselves more money to do literally nothing.
They had four hearings, 123456 here, five hearings, 12345 in March, and put out a report that doesn't even make. I know no one has read it. I don't even think the legislators have read it because it makes no logical sense.
I had the misfortune of reading it, and it's stupid. It's just. It's just like.
Does not make sense. It's not. Doesn't have.
Through lines. It was clearly thrown together. I feel bad for the people who wrote it.
I don't know, it was, like, ridiculous and, you know, like, it does and like, what are we doing? And the media covered it. The media covered it. Like, this was serious.
Like, they seriously tackled these things and made a decision. We're all serious. People don't testify.
It's all serious. I love your impression of seriousness, Jordan. This is what it feels like.
We're gonna get suits in us right now. Yeah. We're gonna get in suits, we're gonna get ties.
We're all serious people doing serious things. It's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous.
It's the least productive state legislature in the country, I believe. It's like doing a version of a hearing where it's just like the on Peanuts, the adults being like, that's what the legislature is.
That's what it sounds like to me at this point, when they talk to me about the things they're doing, I'm just like, okay, are you serious? This is ridiculous. So, yeah, I just. I just think, like, anyway, so, Jonathan, if you have other thoughts about this, I'm gonna. I'm gonna save the last little comment for Jordan because I know he had something special. I wanted to just poke in there at the last. Yeah, I would just say that I think it does just speak to the way of which the legislature invents new ways to do nothing but hangout between us.
Be my. That's one of the few things that they're innovative about. Well said.
So, well said. Well, you are very excited about an award. So I got an email from the mass dems, which I'm always surprised that they haven't kicked me off their email list for their big JFK event, which at this point, it's just, again, galling, uh, where they're honoring former House speaker  deLeo.
Um, and though, for those of you, we have covered it on this podcast. And I just want to remind people, uh, that former speaker deLeo, uh, was an unindicted co conspirator. So if you right now are cheering that Donald Trump is being charged, finally in the crime for which he was named, an unindicted co conspirator.
The person the mass dams elected to speaker kept speaker for forever and then are now honoring, is also got that job through, reportedly in the courts, trading probation jobs for family members of state reps who he wanted to go vote for him to become speaker. And some of those state reps who were also involved in that, and you can easily google, are still in the legislature, and they were all unindicted co conspirators to the crime that lower level probation managers got sent to court for. So the federal government was like, we don't.
We're not going to charge any of you actually in charge people. We're going to charge you lower level people. Um, and the whole defense in the case was, we weren't in charge.
Your unindicted co conspirators made us do it. That was the whole defense that ended up winning in court. Um, so anyway, so speaker DeLeo was an unindicted co conspirator on a scheme to trade jobs.
And he is being honored at the same time that Trump is being prosecuted, uh, as, um, for his. For his role as speaker. And I thought I was really like, well, what is.
If I forget, what is. What is Deleo's legacy? And it's like, institutionalized authoritarianism, like, consistent mediocrity, chronic underfunding, pushing off all the big issues, killing the last remnants of democracy in our state house. Yeah, pushed off.
Pushed off all the big issues that are facing us. Right. Like, did not address unaffordable housing, did not address the t going on fire under his rule, did not, you know, consistently show corporations overworkers.
Yeah, I know folks in the environmental community who said that because the environmental community was behind, you know,some challengers and that won to the state house, that he literally, in a private meeting with them, said, there will be no environmental legislation for the next two years because you did that. I. No environmental legislative.
So, like, imagine, like, the dude is, like, in charge of the whole state house, and he's like, no, we're going to kill the planet. Because Idon't like the person that you backed for one state rest seat. I will say, in fairness to him, he also didn't pass any legislation anyway.
So it's sort of like one of the many empty threats, because they say this all the time, we're not going to pass this legislation. I was,like, opposed to the plethora. I know.
Opposed to the active, active legislating they're currently doing. I know, but there are people who argue about whether they're just horribly incompetent or, like, truly. And this is an argument for, like, that particular case was not incompetent.
I would like to say it's a little bit of both. A little column, a, little column b. And then the other thing I'll just say again is, like, there's.
And then on top of all that, like, he never stood up to the consistent and rampant cases of people reporting unwanted sexual advances from legislators to mail lobbyists. And there was a flyer that went around, somebody flyered every single office into the state house with a message about a state rep who was known for being a predator. And you know what happened? Not a thing.
A state rep made an unwanted touching of another state rep. And the only people who faced consequences were the women who talked about it. Were the women who talked about it.
So this is his legacy, right? Like, this is awful. I cannot, I just like it is, you know, if the Dem party had any, any sort, if there was any sort of just like self reflection, their relationship to DeLeo would be the Republicans relationship to George W. Bush.
Like, it would be shame. And let's pretend it didn't happen. Right.
He's a criminal who was, did nothing to address the major issues, who or should have been a criminal who did nothing to addressthe major issues that face this state and allowed sexual assault to be rampant according to victims in the state house. That's,that's the person that we should just. And what's going to be great about this is that people are going to go, they're going to saynice things to his face, they're going to say nice things in public, they're going to say nice things to the press.
And behind closed doors, they're all going to say the same thing I'm saying. Right. This is not things that, like, it's just me saying it.
They will. They will. They will say nice things to his face and the minute he turns around, say the exact same things behind his back.
And that is, I think to me, like, just endemic of what is the problem? Sorry, I'm not ranting over, ranting about the Talia thing. I was like, tell us how you. Jordan, tell us how you.
Ridiculous. Yeah, bravo. Democratic Party of Massachusetts.
It's just shameful. This is absolutely shameful. It's a shameful period.
We should be ashamed of it. Well, yeah, it was embarrassing. Particularly final comment in terms of, let's say, like, Deleuze tenure.
Is there failure to do anything meaningful to protect immigrants rights under his leadership? When you have the surge in attention,particularly amongst democratic voter, democratic electorate under Trump. Yeah. Given all of the attacks and like, just didn't care.
Yep, yep. Yeah, yep. Well, let's, uh, you know, let's recognize this is a low we're going up from here with all of our listeners helping out here.
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