Strings attached

DiMasi spent much of 2008 trying to fend off a steady stream of allegations of ethical misdeeds, including a string of newspaper stories suggesting improper dealings with his personal accountant and longtime friend, Richard Vitale. Although the speaker denied any wrongdoing, his credibility came into serious question a month before the leadership vote, when Attorney General Martha Coakley indicted Vitale and directly contradicted DiMasi’s previous claims of having had no conversations with Vitale about pending legislation.

Coakley’s assertion seemed to deliver a harsh blow to DiMasi’s already shaky standing, but not a word of that could be heard as lawmakers overwhelmingly elected him to a new term as speaker. A total of 135 of the 143 House Democrats offered DiMasi their stamp of approval, with just seven Democrats voting “present” as a sign of opposition to his continued rule and another representative voting for himself.

Less than three weeks later, with fresh questions swirling around his relationship with Vitale, DiMasi announced his resignation in a speech to members that was most notable for its lack of any reference to the controversies that had chased him from power. “I will hold my head high and be proud of everything we did,” DiMasi told lawmakers as he became the third straight Massachusetts House speaker to be driven out of office with an ethical cloud over his head.

Several House members say they and their colleagues were deeply conflicted over the vote for speaker, acutely aware that the public image of the Legislature, not exactly glowing on a good day, had sunk to new depths as ethics allegations engulfed not only DiMasi but several other House members and two state senators who had been forced from office and were facing criminal charges.

“Believe me, I was absolutely tortured over this thing,” says one Democratic lawmaker, who, like nearly all of those speaking candidly about the leadership vote, asked not to be identified. “It was not anything I’m proud of.”

But the inclination to follow the leader and stick with the crowd has become an increasingly powerful force in the Legislature, and the embattled House speaker made it clear to members in the days leading up to the vote that he wanted a strong show of support. Not only were all the leading reform voices in the Legislature backing DiMasi, two of them, Ellen Story of Amherst and Jay Kaufman of Lexington, were even selected by DiMasi to make nominating speeches on his behalf, part of an orchestrated show to dispel any idea that process-minded liberals might be losing faith in the speaker.

“The fact that virtually every self-professed ‘good government’ Democrat voted to reelect DiMasi just days after the attorney general shredded his credibility was, to be kind, an embarrassment,” says Jim Braude, the one-time liberal activist who now hosts an NECN television news program and co-hosts a radio show on WTKK-FM. “The sense was, ‘Unless he’s indicted, convicted, and jailed, he’s our man.’ I’m not troubled as much by DiMasi’s self-delusions as I am by how utterly compliant legislators have become. They just get in line.”

Indeed, not just on the speaker’s vote, but on nearly everything that transpires in the House, legislators seem to endorse the leadership position with little dissent or debate. The high tolerance for troubling questions about the ethical conduct of the speaker was bad enough. But it only serves to underline a broader point about the state of democracy in the House. Though they are elected to speak out and exercise their best judgment on matters facing the Commonwealth, state representatives all too often operate like loyal foot soldiers in an army where the speaker serves as the top general.

DiMasi’s replacement as speaker, Robert DeLeo, has shown some early signs of opening up the House to more of the debate that ought to characterize a vibrant legislative body, and there is at least a glimmer of hope for a turn away from the top-down model that has prevailed in recent years. But even good intentions could easily be dashed by a go-along culture that has firmly taken root, and the near disappearance of Republicans from the Legislature and an ever-shrinking Beacon Hill press corps only make it easier to maintain the speaker-dominated status quo.

Power central

On a dank Wednesday in mid-March, people crowded the House chamber and visitors’ gallery to attend a memorial service for George Keverian, the former House speaker who died on March 6 at age 77. If there was a House leader who represented the fullest expression of the freewheeling democracy that has lately been in such short supply, it was Keverian.

The genial Everett lawmaker led the only successful toppling of a House speaker in state history when he ousted Thomas McGee in 1985. Keverian vowed to bring a dramatic infusion of democracy to a House that had been dominated by McGee’s autocratic rule. “I believed that a 160-member House meant 160 members fully contributing,” Keverian later said to John McDonough, who was writing an appreciation of his former House colleague for CommonWealth (“The Speaker Who Believed in Democracy,” CW, Winter ’02). True to his word, Keverian’s reign was marked by lengthy debates and lots of involvement by rank-and-file members.

As Massachusetts fell into a deep recession and the state faced a huge deficit in the late 1980s, many criticized Keverian for not applying a firmer hand to his unruly chamber, where democracy sometimes took a turn toward anarchy. But the House ultimately did sign off on unpopular tax increases and budget cuts, the first steps on the road to getting state government and the Massachusetts economy back on their feet.

Since then, a succession of House speakers have tightened the leadership reins. Charles Flaherty, who followed Keverian, struck something of a balance between total control and his predecessor’s discipline-free style, in which even some of Keverian’s committee chairs voted against the tax increases the speaker supported. Committee chairmen under Flaherty exercised a great deal of latitude over issues under their jurisdiction, but Flaherty wasn’t afraid to let them know when they were expected to fall in line on a key vote. However, the leaders that followed — Tom Finneran, who was in control from 1996 until 2004, and then DiMasi — moved to centralize power to a far greater extent, with debate discouraged and committees marginalized as important bills were often written in the speaker’s office.

“I’ve been here 15 years, and there’s been a pattern over that time that individual members have had less and less input and less and less involvement in the final decisions,” says state Rep. Harriett Stanley, a West Newbury Democrat. “The trend has been toward consolidation of power, and if you were not part of that trend, you were considered part of the problem,” she says of those who stepped out of line.

When DiMasi followed Finneran into the speaker’s post, he had the backing of nearly all the small group of 15 to 20 liberal Democrats who had regularly battled Finneran on everything from his tight-fisted control over House procedures to his more conservative policy agenda. DiMasi rewarded several of Finneran’s leading critics with committee chairmanships, and he pledged a new era of openness in how the House would do business. It was not the most natural posture for the longtime North End lawmaker, known more for his affinity for hardball politics and backroom power plays than for any kind of reform impulse. DiMasi did tilt the House to the left, championing the state’s landmark health care expansion in 2006 and helping to defeat an effort to put a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the ballot. But when it came to his approach to the workings of the House, DiMasi’s talk of a more open process was mostly just that.

“Sal’s overall liberalism served to buffer him from any criticism over the fact that he had a very top-down management style,” says Stanley.

“The people who were most vociferous [about centralized power] under Finneran were co-opted by the fact that those public policy matters that they cared about would be brought to the floor,” says Frank Hynes, who gave up his Marshfield–based House seat last year after 13 terms in office.

Even one of those liberal DiMasi loyalists, Lexington’s Jay Kaufman, who served as chairman of the Public Service Committee under the former speaker, concedes that the flourishing of democracy that some had hoped for did not exactly blossom under DiMasi’s watch. One measure of democratic vitality is “whether chairs of the various committees are actively engaged with the speaker in vetting issues and establishing priorities,” says Kaufman, as opposed to the speaker making unilateral decisions. “I would have wished Sal did that more consistently.”

No checks, no balance

All sorts of dynamics, large and small, have helped to concentrate power in the speaker’s hands — and keep House members out of the loop. Among them are things as seemingly mundane as uncertainty over when the House will be holding formal sessions and what matters will be taken up. Even when such sessions are set, the established starting time is often not honored, leaving lawmakers in the lurch for hours, wondering when the House will get down to business.

And when it comes time for business, the speaker has well over half the votes he needs simply by turning to those who owe their higher standing — and pay — to his benevolence. There are 53 Democratic representatives who earn extra pay, ranging from $7,500 to $25,000 on top of their base salary of $61,440, by virtue of appointments by the speaker as committee chairs, vice-chairs, or other leadership posts. That means the speaker needs only 28 votes outside his designated leadership team to assemble a majority in the House.

Playing further to the speaker’s advantage is the virtual lock that Democrats enjoy on seats in the Legislature. In the 160-member House, there are now just 16 Republicans, six fewer than their already anemic number at the start of the decade. The almost complete disappearance of Republicans from the House means there is no built-in check on the power of the Democratic majority.

“It’s embarrassing, our number right now, it’s unacceptable,” says Rep. Lewis Evangelidis, a Holden Republican. “There’s not enough discourse [on issues], and part of the blame for that is us.”

Not only does the one-party tilt mean the handful of House Republicans are easily ignored, it has the same effect on rank-and-file Democrats, whose swollen numbers mean that none of them hold much sway over the actions of the body.

“If the speaker has 146 reps in his caucus, he doesn’t need all of us to get things done,” says state Rep. David Torrisi of North Andover, one of the seven House Democrats who voted “present” in the January vote to reelect DiMasi, and the only member to do so who held a chairmanship under DiMasi.

The paucity of competitive legislative elections — Massachusetts ranked last in the percentage of seats contested by both major parties last year — removes another check on the default position of deference to House leadership. “Accountability and who one has to answer to as an elected representative comes from two sources: the electorate itself and the leadership within the legislative body, and there is [now] greater fear about being held accountable by the leadership than the electorate,” says Paul Watanabe, a UMass–Boston political scientist.

There is also a lot less to fear from the press. Local television news stations long ago pared back regular coverage of Beacon Hill. But the State House is now witnessing a withering of the ranks of print journalists, the mainstays of state government reporting, as newspapers contend with a freefall in advertising revenue. The Boston Globe, which once had as many as five reporters in its State House bureau, now has just three. The Boston Herald is down to one State House staffer. Many smaller papers have pulled up stakes from Beacon Hill altogether, the latest being the Cape Cod Times, which laid off its State House reporter in March.

“When I first became a rep, when the editor of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune called you, you shivered in your boots,” says Torrisi, whose district includes sections of Lawrence. “The Eagle-Tribune doesn’t even have a reporter up here anymore. The decline of newspapers and the media in general has a big impact. It prevents us from getting our message out, and it makes us less accountable.”

Member moxie

Against that backdrop, it’s no wonder that the workings of the Massachusetts House have veered so far from John Adams’s concept of a place for vigorous debate of ideas. One factor making it difficult for members to have substantive input on legislation is the practice in recent years of releasing the details of a bill to the members in a closed caucus and then moving directly to the House floor for formal consideration of the legislation.

“We would routinely get a bill the day we were voting on it under Sal. That was just standard operating procedure,” says one House Democrat. “You did not get information in a timely way, and lack of information allowed Sal to control the outcome a lot more.”

“There are often questions asked on the House floor that are so elementary to the bill we are considering that it is clear people have not had time to prepare,” says Evangelidis, the GOP lawmaker.

And once a bill gets to the floor, says Hynes, the former Marshfield lawmaker, pushing for a vigorous debate on its merits can almost seem like an act of insubordination. “The less debate you have, the more [it is that] when you have debate, you have this sense of tension,” says Hynes. “And it becomes a vicious circle. That’s why when there is debate, it’s almost like some in leadership say, ‘What the heck is go-ing on here? Why are you causing this stress and tension?’”

John Quinn knows something about causing stress and tension in the House. The Dartmouth Democrat caused a stir last year when he lit into DiMasi on the House floor for inserting a last-minute amendment into an energy bill that would have smoothed the way for a wind farm in Buzzards Bay, where a close friend of the speaker’s, Boston developer Jay Cashman, was aiming to install 120 offshore turbines.

“It was total disdain for impacted members,” Quinn says of the maneuver, which took place after a deadline had passed for submission of amendments. “It was to me the most substantial piece of that whole bill, and it wasn’t subject to any vetting. It was never part of any hearing process at any level.”

The House unwittingly signed off on the amendment by voice vote, but under pressure from Quinn, other South Coast lawmakers, and environmental groups, DiMasi later agreed to a reconsideration of the bill. The Legislature ultimately agreed to language that softened any unilateral right to locate wind turbines in Buzzards Bay and along other areas of the state coastline.

Quinn ripped DiMasi for his legislative tactic, quoting from the speaker’s address to members upon taking the leadership reins in 2004, when he promised a new day of openness and transparency in the House. The State House News Service called Quinn’s diatribe “the most mutinous floor speech of the DiMasi era,” and reported that some members quipped afterward that the House would that day “adjourn in memory of John Quinn,” an honor usually reserved for public servants who have met with corporeal demise.

That such a challenge to the speaker’s position would elicit a round of gallows humor was at least partly a function of the harsh tone of Quinn’s attack. But it also may have reflected the fact that it has just become so unusual to have spirited debates in the House at all, especially those in which Democrats question their leaders.

That reality came as something of a surprise to Carl Sciortino, who was elected to the House in 2004 and took his seat three months after DiMasi became speaker. “Obviously the policy outcomes were different than under Finneran, but it wasn’t quite what I expected,” says Sciortino, a liberal Medford Democrat who ousted a conservative Democratic incumbent. “It wasn’t as healthy a small ‘d’ democracy as I hoped.” But neither, he says, was the potential for a vigorous give-and-take quite as limited as some may believe.

“It was a self-fulfilling prophecy among members who felt it was safer to lay low and go with the flow at times,” Sciortino says of the tendency not to raise questions. He says there were plenty of forces working against a true deliberative process, including the simple lack of details about bills that cleared committees and could wind up before the full House. Sciortino and fellow House member James Eldridge decided earlier last year to try to fill that information gap — and promote progressive policy initiatives — by starting an informal caucus of liberal-leaning members that they dubbed the Democratic Study Group. The group holds sessions to discuss pending legislation and to hear from experts on issues ranging from taxation to environmental policy.

Last spring, as DiMasi was pushing a bill that would close a loophole in corporate tax laws but also lower the overall tax rate for businesses, the sessions wound up serving as an information clearinghouse and organizing base for a countereffort to close the loophole without as steep a decrease in the tax rate. Sciortino, Eldridge, and a group of like-minded colleagues assembled fact sheets on the corporate tax issue, shared talking points with each other, and aggressively lobbied fellow House members.

By the time lawmakers gathered in an early April caucus to discuss the bill before it went to the floor for a vote, Sciortino and his allies had enough votes to prevail. “In the caucus DiMasi said, ‘So, Sciortino, that’s your amendment?’ I didn’t know whether to say yes, it was, or duck,” says Sciortino. He confessed to it being his handiwork, and was then somewhat surprised by the speaker’s reaction. “He said, ‘Well, congratulations,’” says Sciortino, who took the remark to be “a moment of respect for the work we had done.”

For Sciortino, the experience carried an important lesson. “Whatever power the leadership has in debates in the House is only the amount of power we give them,” he says. “It literally is the job of every member of the House to ask questions, to engage in debate, to push back when we have a disagreement. If things move too quickly or people don’t have enough information, it’s because we let it. I think it’s our job to change that culture.”

Change at the top

When Robert DeLeo, the Winthrop lawmaker who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee under DiMasi, was elected to the speaker’s post in late January, the media pounced on the development as great news for proponents of expanded gambling in the Bay State. DiMasi, who vehemently opposed expanded gambling, delivered a knockout punch to Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal for three full-scale casinos last year, leading the effort that killed the bill with an overwhelming 108-46 vote of the House. DeLeo, whose district includes both the Wonderland greyhound track and the Suffolk Downs horse-racing track, has been a strong supporter of licensing slot machines at the state’s racetracks.

“Isn’t it odd that casinos were dead because DiMasi was speaker and didn’t like casinos? Now with a new speaker there’s all this talk about gambling,” says Barbara Anderson, the longtime director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. “What happened to the other 159 House members?”

All the talk about the suddenly changed odds for gambling legislation was a quick reminder of the degree to which big policy matters in the House can rise and fall based on the whims of the one member who holds the gavel.

Still, DeLeo is showing some signs, in word and deed, that he is ready to see a little more give-and-take in the House. Lawmakers who backed DeLeo in the leadership contest with former majority leader John Rogers describe him as someone who does as much listening as talking and whose low-key style is well-suited to sharing some of the stage with colleagues who are serious about digging into the work of the House.

“I want every issue to be dissected and redissected in different ways and to hear from everybody,” says DeLeo. “We have a lot of talent now in the chairmanships. I hope they’ll use that talent and energy to create good legislation.”

DeLeo has put in place a roster of committee chairs that includes several lawmakers known for their sharp grasp of policy — and a willingness to speak their minds. Among them is DeLeo’s most important appointment, Rep. Charley Murphy, who was tapped to chair the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Though the Burlington lawmaker’s politics are centrist, he made waves during Finneran’s tenure when he joined with the band of liberal lawmakers who regularly challenged the speaker’s tight rule over the House. After two straight speakers who maintained an extraordinarily tight grip on power, Murphy says it is time to have “the pendulum swing a little the other way.”

Further encouraging that pendulum swing may be the fact that DeLeo had the backing of many of the same “process liberals” who supported DiMasi five years ago — and hoped for a more democratically run House.

DeLeo has already made one small, but significant, move that suggests he’s serious about providing a little breathing room for input on bills before the House. The new speaker has said that legislation will no longer be rolled out in a House caucus and brought to the floor for formal consideration on the same day.

“We’re actually going to have time to read bills, file amendments, have debate, so we know what we’re doing,” says one Democratic lawmaker who was a DeLeo supporter in the speaker’s contest. “We’re going to have more of a role to play. But guess what? That means we’ll have to do more work,” says the lawmaker, adding that some colleagues have been content to defer decision making, and all the heavy lifting, to leadership.

DeLeo seems mindful that he has set expectations of change in motion, and perhaps he is even a little uneasy about that. At a lunch forum in early March sponsored by a Boston public relations firm, John Henning, a longtime Boston television news reporter who was serving as moderator, suggested to DeLeo that he seemed to be turning toward a more decentralized leadership style. “We don’t want to change that too much,” DeLeo joked, according to State House News Service. “Calm it down a little bit, John.”

DeLeo, a moderate Democrat with an everyman demeanor, hardly seems to be a guy bent on leading a revolution. But even a few steps in the right direction raise hopes at a time when expectations for democratic give and take have been so low.

“There’s a long way to go for openness in the Massachusetts House,” says Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts. “So many decisions have been made in the speaker’s office with minimal involvement of others. I think there’s a tendency for any leader, whether in politics or anywhere else, to control information, to control decision making. To have more openness there has to be more pressure from the bottom, pressure from the outside.”

That means how things shake out ultimately will depend as much on what House members are willing to do as on what their new speaker says.