Vowing to bring more transparency to a legislative body often accused of resisting it, Massachusetts Senate leaders unveiled a wide-ranging package of changes Thursday that would require lawmakers to file public summaries of all their bills and mandate that any votes in, and testimony submitted to, a legislative committee be made public.
The proposals — which need approval in the Senate and, in many cases, the House as well — could reshape the Legislature’s decades-old calendar and how much visibility the public is allowed in legislative decision-making.
They also drew a mix of praise and skepticism from advocates who have pressed for transparency on Beacon Hill, who questioned how far internal rules changes alone could go.
The Senate is expected to vote on its rules packages next week, according to Senate aides. It’s unclear when the House will take up its own proposals.
The changes follow a session in which lawmakers passed a slew of major legislation, but in doing so, frequently blew past their own legislative deadlines and did most of the negotiating behind closed doors. That drew scrutiny from news media, watchdog groups, and the state auditor, who successfully pushed a ballot initiative that subjects the Legislature to audits by her office but which lawmakers have so far resisted.
“We strongly believe that these rule changes continue to enhance the [Legislature’s] transparency,” said state Senator Joan Lovely, a Salem Democrat who headed the committee that wrote the package. “We want the public to be engaged, involved and be able to have ... information online and available to them.”
Any changes lawmakers adopt would amend the internal rules the Legislature creates for itself, not actual law. Each chamber proposes, and passes, rules that govern its operations, but traditionally, the House and Senate also pass what are known as joint rules that cover both chambers and, thus, require approval by both.
Senate leaders released a variety of plans Thursday: They’re seeking to make all Senate and joint committee votes and testimony available to the public; currently, they are not for joint committees. The new rules also would require the Senate to publicly post summaries of any bills reported out by the chamber’s budget committee, through which most major legislation flows.
They’re among the changes state Senate President Karen E. Spilka previewed last month, when both she and House Speaker Ron Mariano promised a range of rules reforms.
The Senate is also proposing that every lawmaker file what the rules describe as a “comprehensive” summary of their bills to help the public better track what legislation would do. Lovely said the summaries the Senate has provided in the past include a breakdown of the bill’s major elements and where “there’s a fiscal impact,” should it pass.
Senator Paul Feeney, a Foxborough Democrat, said the change is in response to complaints from residents that they “just want to see in plain English what [a bill] actually does.”
The rules package, however, would not require a separate analysis of the bill. Bills, instead, would have to include a disclosure noting the bill sponsor wrote it and that the committee where it was filed “does not certify the accuracy of its contents.”
The change is among those that would need approval in the House, where Mariano said he had yet to see the full Senate proposal. Mariano called the provision to require bill summaries “an interesting concept,” but declined to say if he’d support it. A former teacher, he likened the extra step of summarizing legislation to having to do school paperwork.
“Gotta go back [to] grading papers,” he said.
Jeanne Kempthorne, a former state ethics commissioner and member of a coalition that’s pushed for more legislative transparency, called some of the proposals a step forward, but she said she was skeptical they could usher in real change.
“This seems to me to be window dressing to act like they’re doing something,” said Kempthorne, who’s also an author of a measure to create offices of legislative research and fiscal analysis, versions of which legislatures in 49 other states already.
She also questioned whether the proposals would even survive; the chambers last session never reached an agreement on a joint rules package.
The Legislature has operated under a rule first established in the mid-1990s that calls for lawmakers to wrap up formal sessions at the end of July in the second year of its two-year session.
The Senate’s rules package would keep the July 31 deadline for approving some bills in formal sessions. But the new rules seek to allow votes after July 31 and through the end of the two-year session on so-called conference committee reports — agreements on major bills that are hatched in negotiations between both chambers, usually in secret, and are designed to reconcile differences between similar bills passed by the House and Senate.
If approved, it’d be similar to a change legislators made last year to keep working on legislation after formal sessions ended in July.
Scotia Hille, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Act on Mass, said such a move would amount to “democratic backfiring.”
“It would absolutely be a step back to normalize the practice of working on conference committee reports [longer],” Hille said, adding: “At the end of the day, expecting an un-transparent institution regulate itself via its own rules it can suspend at will, it’s only going to go so far.”
The Senate is also seeking to give lawmakers, and the public, at least 24 hours to review a conference committee agreement between when it’s filed and when a vote occurs.
Currently, lawmakers can file a deal by 8 p.m. and a vote can occur as early as 1 p.m. the next day, though lawmakers also routinely suspend that rule — and others — amid their late-session crunch to pass legislation.
The Senate proposed changing the operations of the Legislature’s joint committees, too — the panels of Senate and House members that take testimony on bills and vote on whether they should advance for a possible vote in the full chambers. The chamber’s proposal would keep the committees together, but allow senators to vote and advance their chamber’s bill and the House to do the same with theirs.
Senator Will Brownsberger, a Belmont Democrat, said “a lot of the opacity that people may perceive around committee process” is rooted in disagreements between House and Senate members about what legislation should emerge from the committee for potential votes by the full House and Senate.
“But this,” he said, “would situate the accountability clearly on each chair, and so people would know how the decisions were being made.”
Also tucked into the Senate’s own rules proposal is a provision to allow senators to continue to vote remotely on legislation, a change that was adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been scrapped by the House and doesn’t exist in other state legislatures.
Lovely said the Senate kept the rule to allow senators who need to be home because they’re sick, or have a sick family member, to be able to participate.
“We see this as a plus to the way we operate,” she said.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout. Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross.