WEEKLY ROUNDUP - 'IN THIS BUILDING, WE MAKE LAWS'
(Recap and analysis of the week in state government)

By Jim O'Sullivan
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

MASHANTUCKET, CONN., AUG. 1, 2008….. "In this building," Gov. Deval Patrick explained Thursday, "we make laws, and the laws are made by the Senate and the House. It's INSANE down there right now."

Right he was. Legislative entropy. The governor's audience was a stunningly well-behaved group of kiddies from the Ellis Memorial & Eldredge House in Boston. The lawmakers standing nearby nodded in agreement. The student had become the teacher.

The 185th General Court wrapped up formal business at midnight Thursday, after helping Patrick complete a policy comeback that saw qualified success on most of his major initiatives, with a few notable discards - casinos, a crime bill, new local taxes, his request for expanded budget-cutting dukes.

By the end of the week, the Legislature had cycled back to the governor porkily-flavored borrowing and spending plans for infrastructure in the areas of higher education, parks and beaches, a broad category blandly labeled "general government," roads, bridges, and campaign literature. He'd received an enforceable cap on greenhouse gases, a health care cost control bill that had the pharmaceutical industry threatening to switch the labels on the Viagra and the Ex-Lax, and the state's mea culpa bailout for the Turnpike Authority. Both Senate President Therese Murray's cost control plan and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi's incentives package for the clean-tech industry were late-session policy rollouts that had full passage stamped on them from the jump.

Patrick had time to sign legislation decreeing no sales taxes for most goods sold the weekend of Aug. 16 and 17, repealing a 1913 law restricting marriage rights to out-of-state gay couples, and providing Medicaid benefits to married gay couples on par with heterosexual couples. Due to the Legislature's timing, he also retains the right to veto earmarks from the bonding packages with increased effectiveness.

When a bill is voted through the House and Senate, Patrick explained to the youngsters, "I sign it, or not, as the case may be."

Of course, lawmakers reserve the prerogative to override vetoes later in the year. Not that there was a shortage of overrides this week. Senate budget chief Steven Panagiotakos devised a painstakingly Solomonic override strategy of restoring about half of Patrick's $122 million in vetoes.

Putting the frosting on what has been a fairly wretched session for the business lobby, there were new assessments on employers to help the state keep pace with health care reform. The coalition that came together uneasily but exuberantly in 2006 is now defunct, as the reform itself wobbles under the burden of its own ambitions.

You still can't register to vote on Election Day, or mandate nurse staffing levels, or functionally cast your ballot for a Republican in Massachusetts because legislation circumventing the Electoral College fell short. You can still eat trans fats in restaurants. And, if you're a current or former state worker, your pension can still be invested in Iran.

For the slightly-under 200 legislators, it's time to salt away the policy for the year, convert the floor speeches into stump speeches, and give staffers half-days. For the governor, there's time now for some honest-to-goodness campaigning for Obama.

Much can be done in informal sessions, but apart from the usual simulcasting spat, there's generally little drama. And this year there's plenty of unfinished business, on a number of fronts.

For some in the House, the fallout from last week's cold war over an obscure Springfield data facility siting amendment, which emblemized the proxy battle between Reps. John Rogers and Bob DeLeo over who gets to hold the gavel next, still rankled. The instability fostered by those tense moments shook still looser this Wednesday as the Globe published the latest in its string of compelling stories about DiMasi pals who have done quite nicely for themselves turning coins for companies with state business.

The two events were studies in the widely disparate forces that move objects inside The Building. The latter is, for now, all about public perception, while the former is what quietly unscrews the lugnuts.

A House member with nearly 20 years in the chamber this week called the Springfield vote "a low point" and "an embarrassment" perpetrated by both sides. That augurs poorly for the old guard's regard for whoever succeeds the current speaker, whose appeal crosses the chamber's generational divides.

"The speaker didn't deserve it," the member said.

"For the newer members, they don't have a great deal of institutional memory," said the veteran lawmaker. "This is what they're seeing. This is the conduct they're being shown. It's beneath the institution."

Now the old guard personified, DiMasi was once a newbie, arriving in the House in 1979, plenty of time for the last days of disco. His campaign slogan then, he often relates, was "Give a young man a chance," and has now grayed into: "There's no substitute for experience."

Indeed. Happy end of session, Mister Speaker.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Nearly 18 months after it started, Gov. Deval Patrick's first two-year cycle as chief executive, with a mostly checked list of legislative priorities.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK: 1:30 am. Why not break what's a synthetic and arbitrary rule in the first place. So that's the hour of Senate adjournment Friday morning.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "I don't have an answer right now." - Gov. Deval Patrick, 7/28/'08, responding to a question about whether the state could move to help the financing agency that this year won't be able offer loans to roughly 40,000 students. The Mass. Educational Financing Authority announced that shaken capital markets had prevented it from providing aid for the first time.

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