During yesterday’s full formal session of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Republican Caucus put forward a resolution that would have fixed a minimum level of local aid.
In order to advance the proposal, which was filed by House Minority Leader Brad Jones and signed by a bipartisan group of legislators, the House had to vote to suspend the rules, a procedural measure that was debated on the House floor.
“In previous years,” said Republican Rep. George Peterson, “we have adopted these early resolutions so cities and towns have a comfort level. We as well as they are under significant financial stress. They’ve done an awful lot of belt-tightening. They’ve done a lot more than I think we have done.”
House Ways & Means Chair Charley Murphy (D-Burlington) countered that he and his counterpart in the Senate had already put out a public statement that would achieve, “the same net outcome as a resolution, namely that local aid will be cut no further than 4 percent across the board.” He continued, “It’s not an easy decision. It’s not a popular decision. It’s the responsible thing under the circumstances.”
Representative Jones challenged the House to have a debate over whether, “the level of funding in the governor’s budget [is] reasonable or is some cut to 4 percent reasonable.” Jones said, “The appropriate place to do that is here, not in some statement by two members on top of some statement in January about what are revenues are going to be.” Jones then pushed for suspension of the rules so that the resolution could be debated.
State Rep. Barbara L’Italien (D-Andover) argued against suspension, saying “I hope this motion does not pass. I’ve been working on this budget for the past few months, and I’m here to tell you that we just simply cannot afford to level fund local aid and education. The sad reality is that we cannot.”
The resolution was referred to the Committee on Rules, and House Republicans took to their blog to blast Democratic leadership.
“Not surprisingly,” the caucus wrote, “the resolution was not even allowed to be introduced and debated on the floor. Also not surprising is the hypocrisy shown by Democratic leadership…It also clearly shows the difference in priorities between House Republicans and Democrats. GOP lawmakers want to protect communities and local services while the Democrats want to slash local aid.”
Kurt Hayes, a Republican candidate for State Rep. in the 37th Middlesex district (disclaimer: Hayes is an advertiser on this site), noted that yesterday’s debate over rules, “Is yet another example of the real damage caused by single-party control in Massachusetts. Our State House is so out-of-balance that the House leadership regularly uses their stranglehold on procedural rules to deny important resolutions from even being heard or debated in formal House session.”
