How Beacon Hill works

I had to copy this from MASSterlist.com.  It says it all about our legislature and Beacon Hill.

Bill filing: something of a racket.

We're heavy into the season when consultants and lobbyists are pitching stories to reporters and posting on social about the exciting news that proposal x is in play, having been filed by the consultant's client or client organization. Part of a bill-info service or a lobbyist's stock in trade is assuring customers they won't miss progress on vital legislation as it advances through the process.

The thing is though, as a practical matter, almost nothing does advance, and truth to tell, the hired guns know it. Of the 2,000-plus pieces of legislation filed last session (2,298 at the deadline and plenty more subsequently), maybe a few dozen of serious import made it into the law books, and most never got anywhere near the governor's desk.

Nevertheless, interesting bill ideas are fabulous fodder for press conferences and news stories, and press conferences and news stories are what we're getting now. Don't misunderstand, this isn't a terrible thing — the ideas and issues floated in the legislation are often urgently provocative or conscience-activating, and they spark discussions worth having. But are they news? Yes and no.

There's another stratum to this — the genre of bills that have to do with the required gauges of wire in construction, or the rules of practices for dental technicians - measures that provide billable hours for lobbyists, either pro or con, and have almost no other function or impact. Lobbyists have in the past been rumored to file bills so they can get paid to block them.

There was a fine story today on the front page of the Globe, however you define "front page" in 2023, about a bill that would allow prisoners to get time off their sentences by donating organs. Anyone who's been in the State House a while knows the odds of this measure passing are maybe the same as Tom Brady coming out of re-retirement (and really, you never know). Yet there it is — fodder. And we will not be so hypocritical as to assert we're not happy to munch away.