Beacon Hill’s New Rules Are Good. Legislators Should Follow Them.

This guest essay by Jonathan Cohn and Scotia Hille was originally published by CommonWealth Beacon on December 17, 2025.

THIS SUMMER, the Massachusetts Legislature did something that surprised everyone. And, no, we aren’t talking about passing a budget on time. The House and Senate agreed to a set of joint rules for the first time since 2019, including a number of transparency reforms that activists had fought for for years.

The Massachusetts Legislature has often been ranked as the least transparent in the country, and the opening of this session created a fertile opportunity to change that. Last year, we saw a chaotic end of session that left many key bills on the table, competitive legislative primaries waged over voters’ desire for a more small “d” democratic Democratic Legislature, and a blowout victory for Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s ballot question on auditing the Legislature. Everyday people--and not just advocates deep in the trenches--were seeing that things needed to change.

This followed years of organizing on the ground to educate people about why a lack of transparency has been a roadblock to progress on the issues we care about. When too few people hold all decision-making power, everything slows down. When policymaking happens behind closed doors, well-funded corporate lobbyists can push their way in, but regular people, especially those most directly impacted, are shut out and left in the dark. And when we can’t see how our elected officials vote, we are not able to hold them accountable.

Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka kicked off 2025 with a welcome New Year’s resolution: creating a more transparent, efficient, and democratic legislative process. The new rules that emerged contained some major victories:

Committee votes are now public, so constituents can know whether or not their elected representatives are fighting for the issues they ran on.
Every bill now has a public bill summary, so constituents don’t need to be experts in the Massachusetts General Laws to know what bills mean.
Committees now have to provide 10 days’ notice for hearings, so everyday people can more easily make time in their busy schedule to make their voice heard.
And committees face earlier reporting deadlines, so an end-of-session bottleneck will be less likely to happen (we hope).

Winning these reforms was step one. The real question now is whether the Legislature is following them.

Beacon Hill Tracker, a new citizen-created dashboard, paints a very mixed picture. The new site tracks whether committees are following these new rules: publishing committee votes, posting bill summaries, providing sufficient meeting notice, and adhering to reporting deadlines.

For the 8,868 bills analyzed as of this writing, committees broke at least one of these new rules for a slim majority of them (50.9 percent, or 4,513 bills). A mere 725 bills showed no violations. For the rest, it’s too soon to tell.

The most common rules violation was breaking the 10-day notice for hearings (3,318), followed by not posting votes (2,643), and then missed deadlines (2,294). Committees have been much better about posting bill summaries (only 599 violations).

From an earlier manual analysis of Beacon Hill’s adherence to the new rules, we found striking inconsistencies between committees on not just whether they followed them but how: committee votes could appear in any of at least five different places. Constituents shouldn’t have to go down a rabbit hole to know what their legislators are doing.

We have already seen the benefit of the new rules. Last month, when the House Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee advanced a dirty energy bill written by corporate lobbyists, an open committee vote allowed activists to spring into action. Constituents had a clear sense of where legislators on the committee stood and could reach out accordingly.

The non-unanimity of the vote indicated to activists that all was not lost, and that there were real concerns with the bill among rank-and-file legislators. The bill has since been put on pause, and will likely be fully rewritten, a win for the climate and for democracy.

With 2025 coming to a close, some of the new rules will be no longer relevant to the second year of the legislative session (hearings have already occurred, and deadlines have already passed). But if legislators are looking for a New Year’s resolution for 2026, here’s a good one: follow your own rules.

Jonathan Cohn is policy director at Progressive Massachusetts . Scotia Hille is executive director of Act on Mass.