With a key legislative deadline pushed forward by a month, Beacon Hill lawmakers have some extra leg room as they draft up their proposals for the 2021-2022 session, which continue to stream into the clerks’ offices.
The deadline was extended this year to Feb. 19 under an amendment to Joint Rule 12 agreed to by the House and Senate on their first day of session, just hours after marathon meetings to end their last two-year session.
The rule change appears to have been crafted in response to two occurrences: the blitz of legislating that occupied the attention of lawmakers into early January and the old deadline’s proximity to the unusually late end to the last session. The traditional due date for filing legislation is the third Friday in January, which this year would have given representatives and senators 10 days to file bills after the old General Court concluded formal lawmaking in the early morning of Jan. 6.
Formal lawmaking usually concludes on July 31 in the second year of a session, which gives lawmakers more than five months in which they can contemplate and draft bills, but this year the branches adjourned sine die shortly after 4:30 a.m. on the same day the new session began after tackling weighty bills in the final days.
“I think it has been helpful that some of the deadlines have been pushed back a little bit, so we have a little bit more breathing room to really kind of sort out and organize the legislation we want to file, and get all of our things ready and prepared to go,” new Rep. Meg Kilcoyne (D-Northborough) said on a recent episode of the “State House Takeout” podcast.
The Joint Rule 12 deadline has bounced around through the years. The rules for the 1920 session, for example, called for seasonably filed bills to be deposited with clerks on the second Saturday of the session. In 1971-1972, Joint Rule 12 fixed the deadline at the first Wednesday in December preceding the next annual session.
A spokesman for Senate President Karen Spilka said this year’s move was intended to “give members sufficient time to research, review and file bills that address issues important to them and their constituents.”
The deadline produces the bulk of the bills up for consideration each session, but bills will continue to pour into the General Court throughout the session, entering the system as “late-files.” The vast majority of bills fail without receiving votes in the House or Senate, withering after committee reviews or perhaps dying in one committee after getting a favorable recommendation from another. The omnibus bills that command most of the attention each session are often crafted by committees and feature components of numerous other bills.
As lawmakers and aides prepare to file a petition, they work on the bill language and gather names of any other initial supporters. If it’s a local bill — perhaps a successful town meeting warrant article that needs legislative approval — they must provide documentation of municipal-level approval bearing the city or town’s embossed seal.
Or, if a legislator is re-filing a bill that didn’t make it to the finish line last time around, they can provide the previous bill number and the clerks’ computer application — known as LAWS — auto-fills the old bill text and links it with the clerks’ documentation from last session.
After bills are filed, House members are customarily given seven days after the Joint Rule 12 deadline to sign on as cosponsors to their colleagues’ proposals. This year, that too is changed.
The House on Jan. 28 approved a new window for cosponsorship, giving reps as much time as the bill sits in its initial committee. That brings the House in line with a traditional Senate practice, where the cosponsorship deadline is likewise whenever the bill is first reported out of committee. Cosponsor totals give some indication of levels of support for legislation.
Committee reports on all these new bills could take a while to start rolling in, depending on how long it takes Speaker Ronald Mariano and President Karen Spilka to assign members to those panels and then start up the work of committee hearings. Over the past decade, top Democrats have made their committee and leadership assignments in a window ranging from Jan. 21 in 2015 to Feb. 26 in 2011.
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