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To the Editor:
The Massachusetts Legislature has again thwarted the will of the people. Despite the 95,000 voters who signed the petition to put reform of the legislative leadership’s $5.4 million loyalty pay scheme on the ballot in November 2026, they found a backdoor maneuver to block it.
Bypassing the normal challenge of filing a lawsuit, the legislature made a last-minute request for a supposedly non-binding, advisory opinion from the Supreme Judicial Court, a maneuver only available to the legislature and that bypasses full oral arguments. The Court’s non-binding, advisory opinion said that the loyalty pay (i.e., stipend) reform ballot question impermissibly infringes on the legislature’s power to set its own rules. The Attorney General then reversed her previous approval of the ballot question and directed the Secretary of State not to issue the signature forms needed to finally put the question on the November ballot.
This is precisely the type of abuse of power this initiative was designed to address. By the way, when this reform was filed as a bill in January 2025, the legislature refused to give it a bill number and a hearing. Another example of legislative leaders’ abuse of power.
Unfortunately, our legislative leaders have shown again that they will do anything to avoid accountability to the voters. I hope you’ll join me in a sustained movement across Massachusetts to keep up the pressure to reform our autocratic, opaque, ineffective, and undemocratic legislature. We seek to empower constituents to hold their legislators accountable and to make our legislature transparent and responsive to we, the voters.
As one step forward, I encourage your readers to please sign the petition and vote for the ballot question to make our state’s public records law apply to the legislature. They’ve exempted themselves from this key transparency requirement, despite requiring local governments to comply with it.
John Lippitt
Mineral Street
Blogging on national policy and politics at https://www.policyforthepeople.org/
On Bluesky at @jalippitt.bsky.social
