ROLL CALL VOTES

By Representative Don Humason, Jr.

April 28, 2007

 

This is the first time since I became Westfield’s State Representative in 2003 that I have written my weekly column while sitting at my desk in the House chamber (seat number 152) during a formal session of the House of Representatives.

I was in Boston every day as legislators debated our version of the FY ’08 budget all week.  On Monday it was 85 degrees in the chamber.  The air conditioning wasn’t scheduled to be turned on until May.  By Thursday it had cooled, with the weather, to a more comfortable 65 degrees.

Last summer, during Sales Tax Free weekend, I purchased a laptop computer for work.  This week in Boston it really paid off.  I recall that my predecessor, Representative Cele Hahn, had a laptop and used it in the chamber all the time.

Actually, I didn’t write the column at my desk while debate was happening.  I had plenty of time during the many recesses in the session.  It seems like we were forever waiting for the members and staff of the House Committee on Ways and Means and Speaker Sal DiMasi’s office to combine the more than 1400 amendments filed into consolidated amendments.

As I wrote in my column last week, most amendments fail.  It used to be that each amendment came before the House individually and was debated separately and then voted upon.  Now, most amendments are consolidated into categories like “Elder Affairs and Medicaid” or “Early Education, Education, and Higher Education” or “Disability Agencies, Mental Health and Mental Retardation.”  I think there were something like 25 different categories.

I had plenty of time to sit and think.  I began to think about this year’s budget process in terms of roll call votes.  Roll call votes are the recorded votes of our actions during a formal session.  These differ from voice votes where there is no actual record of the count.

In the House we vote by pressing buttons on a panel at our desk (Yea or Nay).  The tally is recorded electronically by the House Clerk.  The Clerk’s office compiles the official Journal of proceedings where the roll call records of the 160 members of the House are listed.  The roll call records contain the bill number or budget item being voted on, and records the number of yes votes, no votes, late votes, or members who didn’t vote.

It tells the story pretty accurately if you count the number of roll call votes from this year and compare it to previous year budget debates.  There are simply far fewer votes being taken this year.

Let me back up a minute.  This session of the Great and General Court began the first Wednesday of January 2007.  To show you how we got off to such a fast start, our first roll call vote didn’t even occur until January 23, and that was just a quorum vote…basically an attendance “are you here or not” type of vote.

When budget week began Monday we were up to 45 roll calls for the year.  Whew!  By Thursday afternoon at 4:15 PM, after awaiting the start of the day’s debate, we were only up to roll call number 75.  That’s only 30 roll call votes taken to dispense with hundreds of amendments!

If you consider that many of the roll calls are just procedural, like the quorum vote, that doesn’t leave you with many substantive roll call votes on issues.  The low numbers also reflect the lack of real debate.  Loud, spirited, heated debate, while rare during this year’s budget session, is the thing that comes to mind when most people think about what a legislature does.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining.  I’m just making the observation that it’s very different in the House these days under Speaker DiMasi and his Democratic leadership team than it used to be.

It will be up to you: the voters, taxpayers, toll payers, and rate payers of Massachusetts to decide whether this way is good for our democracy or not.