For lawmakers who thought activists were just blowing smoke all these years, the events of recent days were a reminder that ultimately the voters call the shots.
ZAP! BUZZZZZZZZ!
That was the sound of the Massachusetts House and Senate touching what for years has been considered a politically hazardous “third rail” subject – marijuana.
The Legislature last week did what it has refused to do for years – talk in public about the leafy green intoxicant – but only because voters forced Beacon Hill’s hand and did the hard part of legalizing cannabis on their own. For lawmakers who thought activists were just blowing smoke all these years, the events of recent days were a reminder that ultimately the voters call the shots.
About a year before voters legalized marijuana themselves, Senate President Stan Rosenberg explained why, to that point, only one senator had agreed to serve on a special committee to study marijuana and why Beacon Hill avoided the sticky-icky ganja.
“Drugs are a third-rail issue in politics and you don’t want to associate with it publicly because just studying it is enough for people to say, ‘Oh, he must be in favor of it because he is studying it,’ and people just avoid drug-related stuff,” he said.
The sudden zeal to alter the law drew the ire of activists and like birds of a feather, various pro-marijuana factions flocked outside the State House to rail against legislative tweaking June 21. Hoping to up the public pressure on lawmakers, a ballot campaign official even deputized those in the hazy crowd as “ambassadors of cannabis” who swore an oath to lobby their elected officials.
Inside the State House, it was mostly silent in the morning as both branches did the bulk of their work in the afternoon and evening hours.
By the time the House got to work, on the longest day of the year, reps did what everyone’s mother would have yelled at them for – they sat around inside all day. The House gaveled in June 21 at 11:45 a.m., but the first of the 118 amendments filed to the pot bill wasn’t taken up until 5 p.m.
Away from the House chamber, leadership sorted through the amendments and often determined their fate – puff, puff, pass – as the reps who filed them were bouncing around the room and satisfying their munchies with Swedish Fish and Twizzlers.
In the absence of real debate, some reps became restless.
Rep. Kate Campanale, a Republican from Leicester, tweeted, “So we just sat around for about 30 minutes doing nothings, and then we were called to recess. So glad that this process is efficient… .” She later deleted the tweet.
Rep. Peter Durant, a Republican from Spencer, tweeted just before 4:30 p.m., “So glad we are just sitting around. This legislature is so unproductive. Next they are gunna tell us we wont actually vote today….”
Eventually, at about 9:40 p.m., the House did vote – 126-28 – to pass its marijuana law rewrite and hand it off for the Senate to take a hit.
When the Senate gaveled in shortly after 11 a.m. June 22, the House was still bogarting the bill, giving it one final review.
“I know that we eagerly await the arrival of legislation relative to the control of the adult recreational use of marijuana in our chamber as it is being finally processed in the chamber down the hall,” Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said, interrupted by Rosenberg banging his gavel.
Rosenberg asked, “Did he say awaiting papers from the House so that the Senate chamber, we may consume marijuana in the Senate chamber?”
“Mr. President, I know that may have been wishful thinking on your part, but that was not what I said,” Tarr responded.
By noon, the Senate had begun working through the 111 amendments proposed and wrapped up its work that night at about 9:15 p.m. with a 30-5 roll call vote.
The reconstruction of a law passed by nearly 1.8 million Massachusetts citizens will be finalized by just six lawmakers — Reps. Ronald Mariano, Mark Cusack and Hannah Kane, and Sens. Patricia Jehlen, William Brownsberger and Vinny deMacedo — who are tasked with hashing out a pot law that’s built to last.
After delaying parts of the voter law six months, legislative leaders tied themselves to a self-imposed June 30 deadline to get a marijuana bill to the governor’s desk. That committee will work under the pressure of that deadline, a watchful and vocal public and Rosenberg’s promise that Gov. Charlie Baker is “gonna love the final product.”
The first question the conference will have to answer is whether they are going to keep the ballot law – Chapter 334 of the Acts of 2016 — as a skeleton and “amend and improve” it (as the Senate says its bill does), or are they going to repeal and replace the voter-backed law, which the House bill does.
The House’s 28 percent and the Senate’s 12 percent tax rates will likely be reconciled with the Goldilocks method – one’s too high, the other too low, so settle on something in that “just right” middle ground.
Working through the issue of local control may be a bit stickier for the committee. The Senate maintained the ballot law’s requirement that a city or town can only ban marijuana facilities by a townwide referendum, but the House gave that power instead to local elected and appointed officials.
Their compromise bill will have to clear both branches one last time before going to Baker for his signature, or amendment. The governor, who opposed legalizing marijuana and has been on board with many of the Legislature’s proposed changes, was in California wooing life sciences executives at the BIO Conference in San Diego last week while reps and senators did the dirty work.
Before he left, Baker presented lawmakers with a scaled-back version of the $2,000 assessment on certain employers he proposed in his budget, a plan that sought to raise $300 million to help keep up with spending growth at MassHealth.
Baker’s new proposal, a sweeping package of insurance reforms and temporary assessments offered after the Legislature essentially punted the issue back to him, calls for a two-tiered assessment on companies, with the bulk of the burden falling on employers with non-disabled workers who enroll in MassHealth.
The administration expects to collect $200 million from its latest proposal, designed to target companies whose workers are opting for public plans, if income-eligible, instead of private coverage.
The plan represents yet another thing for the House-Senate conference committee negotiating a final fiscal 2018 budget plan to consider as it crafts a compromise spending plan, due by July 1.
Since June 5, six lawmakers have been privately attempting to resolve differences between the House and Senate’s roughly $40.3 billion spending plans, all while dealing with fiscal 2017 tax collections that have fallen significantly short of projections, and amid acknowledgments that revenue projections used to build the House and Senate fiscal 2018 budgets are unlikely to hold up.
The governor last week filed a temporary $5.15 billion budget bill intended to fund government operations in the fiscal year that begins July 1 in the event that the conference committee is not able to produce a spending plan on time. The House referred it to Ways and Means June 21 but did not advance it during its session June 23.
If it’s revenue that the state needs more of, a tiered tax on sugary drinks could bring in an additional $368 million a year, proponents pitched to the Revenue Committee last week. But meanwhile, retailers are pushing lawmakers to commit to waiving the state sales tax for a weekend in August, which the Department of Revenue estimated in previous years to result in $25.5 million in foregone revenue.
The House began last week mourning the loss of Rep. Gailanne Cariddi, who had represented her native North Adams and other parts of Berkshire County in the House since 2011. Tapped this session to chair the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture, Cariddi died June 17 at a Boston hospital after a private battle with cancer. She was 63.
Reps from the Berkshires delegation and elsewhere – including Rep. Sarah Peake, whose outer Cape Cod district is about as far from North Adams as you could get – recalled Cariddi as a fun-loving and generous friend who cared deeply about her district.
Rep. Smitty Pignatelli, who met Cariddi 35 years ago when they both ran family businesses in the Berkshires, recalled a lunch he, Cariddi and Rep. Paul Mark had on May 23 after collectively deciding to blow off a meeting with an elected official in higher office.
“I will cherish that lunch for the rest of my life,” Pignatelli said, speaking from the seat where he said he would often look across the House chamber to share a wave or nod with his friend. “We laughed, we joked, we talked about politics, we talked about nothing. But we had fun.”
credit:plymouth.wickedlocal.com