The Massachusetts House voted at 9:58 PM on Thursday, April 13th to stay up past its bedtime.
This led to hours of semi-conscious and even unconscious voting on the twenty-two billion
dollar state budget until the House version was finished.
There was no reason to suspend the House rule that forbids working after 10 PM; the budget
they pulled an all-nighter to complete will just sit there for a month or two until the
Senate does its version.
Two Republicans and most Democrats voted to stay in session that night and are responsible
for the silliness that followed on the part of some: drinking wine and beer, sleeping during
debate, pushing rollcall buttons for absent colleagues, yelling "toga toga toga" while Rep.
Sal DiMasi tried to call "Animal House" (his words, not mine) to order. The five Democrats
who voted sensibly to put off debate until everyone was awake were not from Essex County.
However, all local Republicans did the sensible thing. I have the roll call, and I
thought you should know.
Well, there's nothing we can do about the House. At least we don't have to worry about the
Big Dig anymore, now that Andrew Natsios is on the job.
I first met Andrew in 1978, when I was secretary to Citizens for Limited Taxation's
executive director just as the property tax revolt was beginning.
Perhaps "met" isn't the right word; I was working in the next room as my boss and several
Republican legislators tried to draft the first version of Proposition 2½ together.
This was the beginning of the sometimes stormy relationship between CLT and the
Republicans on Beacon Hill. We eventually had two versions of Prop 2½: the legislators'
version was floated around Beacon Hill as "the responsible alternative" to CLT's initiative
petition.
Negotiations were intense, though we all agreed on certain key provisions, some of which
were drafted by Rep. Natsios (R-Holliston). He helped communities live with property tax
limitation by forbidding new state mandates on the cities and towns unless the state
included funding; to oversee this provision he created the state Division of Local Mandates.
Andrew and the other fiscal conservatives took their less dramatic version to the
Massachusetts House. The majority of legislators were not interested in property tax
limitation, "responsible" or otherwise, so in the end the CLT version was on the 1980 ballot
and the voters found it responsible enough for them.
Andrew became one of Prop 2½'s strongest defenders in the Massachusetts House, debating
every attempt by its enemies to water it down. The rest is history, and Andrew Natsios is
the kind of man who learns from history and is therefore not doomed to repeat it.
Last year, as Governor Cellucci's Secretary of Administration and Finance, he supported
taking the Governor's income tax rollback directly to the people, and has refused to be
distracted by the so-called "responsible" alternative floated this time by the so-called
Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF). Most legislators are not interested in rolling the
income tax rate back to 5 percent, over three years as in the initiative petition, or over
many years as proposed by MTF. But Natsios recognizes that legislators may use
the latter to prevent the former, then discard the whole idea; he is wiser and tougher than he was twenty
years ago.
This is a very good thing, because he is now in charge of the Big Dig, the state's biggest
headache. From now on, we and the Feds will get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth; Andrew will give it to us whether we're ready for it or not.
He once tried to tell the voters the truth about the Massachusetts Legislature and its
democracy-abusing rules. A passionate convert to the initiative petition process, he brought
the Republican State Committee, of which he was chairman, into the 1983 Coalition for
Legislative Rules Reform which included us, Common Cause, Citizens for Participation in
Political Action (CPPAX) and a group of dissident Democrat activists.
After a successful petition drive, legislative reform was thrown out by the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court on the grounds that the legislature's internal process was none of
the people's business, an argument too bizarre to comprehend. It is still, however, popular
on Beacon Hill, as evidenced by the House budget debate with its uncontrollable spending,
increase in legislators' slush funds, and effective murder of a voter-passed initiative law
on campaign finance.
The latter happened in the middle of the night, the time when Andrew and other Republican
House members would be most vigilant in fighting the majority leadership, back in the good
old days of an opposition party. Now, though they battle hard on tax cuts, the Republican
legislators seem to have given up on "good government."
I can relate to that; I've given up on it too. But I'll bet Andrew hasn't, and if he can get
control of the Big Dig, we might in the future define "good government" as him.