Late scramble illustrates ‘need for reforms’

MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATURE

BY CHRIS LISINSKI

State House News Service

BOSTON — The procrastination, upheaval and disappointment that defined the end to formal lawmaking business last week was “nothing new,” according to the former legislator leading a push to subject the House and Senate to new scrutiny.

Auditor Diana DiZoglio, who is backing a ballot question to explicitly empower her office to audit the Legislature, said the chaos of last week’s all-night session and uncertainty about how Beacon Hill will pick up the pieces has “further put on display the need for reforms.”

“Anyone who saw the way this legislative session ended is likely to come to the same conclusion: the Legislature is not supposed to operate the way it has been operating,” DiZoglio said in an interview. “Not only have people been shut out from the process, but even many of their elected representatives are shut out too. That’s how broken the system currently is. Decision-making is so concentrated in the hands of the Senate president and the speaker and their two or three loyalists that capable legislators, especially legislators whom they can’t control, are being locked out of the process.”

The Methuen Democrat, who regularly clashed with legislative leaders during her tenure in the House and Senate, called the status quo “an authoritarian and dictatorial system of governance” that “disallows for any semblance of a democratic process.”

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