If there’s one thing that’s true about politics, it’s that voters rarely care about how legislation gets done as long as it gets done in a relatively timely fashion, doesn’t cost the Earth and manages to make their little corner of creation a tiny bit better.
That’s particularly true during budget season on Beacon Hill, which has now officially entered that precarious stage where, if things are going to go wrong, they are going to go wrong in the most gloriously spectacular way possible.
Here’s why: The competing $61 billion-ish budget plans approved by the majority-Democrat state House and state Senate, respectively, along with the $62 billion iteration offered by Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, all increase state spending from the year before.
The $61.5 billion budget the Senate approved last week, for instance, comes in $70.3 million less than the budget approved by the House, and $568.1 million less than the spending plan that Healey sent to lawmakers earlier this year.
Senate lawmakers nonetheless ladled on $81.1 million in new spending before they took their vote, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.
Senate lawmakers also set up difficult policy fights with the House on liquor license and vocational school reform and health care matters, Axios Boston noted. Thus, there is a high likelihood that things could go screaming off the rails.
Then there’s this.
The Senate plunged forward with its version of the fiscal blueprint for the new fiscal year that starts July 1 by assuming that the $16 billion in federal funding that provides the undercarriage for their budget plan is still going to be there for them. Ditto for the House and Healey.
That’s despite some deeply ominous sabre-rattling from Washington.
Though Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairperson Michael Rodriques, D-1st Bristol/Plymouth, has warned “all bets are off” if Congress moves ahead, as expected, with deep cuts to Medicaid.
At first glance, this is kind of like splashing out for that lease on the Rolls-Royce, expecting you’ll have the cash to cover it, and then hoping for the best if you don’t.
The pro-business Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance was decidedly not amused by that tactic, also noting that senators added tens of millions of new spending, even as they sounded the alarm about “uncertainty” from Washington, D.C.
And spending will likely grow even more once the House and Senate cut a deal on the final budget sometime later next month or early July, the think-tank observed.
“There’s simply no credibility left for lawmakers who talk about fiscal uncertainty while voting for the largest budget in state history,“ Paul D. Craney, the group’s spokesperson, said in a statement.
If lawmakers were “serious about economic uncertainty, they would have tightened the belt, not let it out,” Craney continued.
He’s not wrong. Just this week, Healey and Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey were in Revere sounding the alarm about looming GOP cuts to Medicaid on Capitol Hill.
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Michael Curry, the president & CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, has warned that MassHealth, as Medicaid is known in the Bay State, bluntly said the program would be “unsustainable without the federal partnership, the federal funds.”
That’s about as clear a warning shot as lawmakers are going to get.
MassHealth is among the biggest fixed costs in the state budget. And federal cuts will mean higher costs and a strain on the state’s health care system, Curry told Commonwealth Beacon last week.
Still, the Legislature — as a public institution — has a flexibility that private employers and families balancing their checkbooks don’t have, Jerold Duquette, a Central Connecticut State University political science professor who tracks Bay State politics, said.
And that’s the ability to pass supplemental budgets and access the state’s multi-billion dollar Rainy Day Fund — even if top budget writers have said the latter option is currently off the table.
So while planning a budget where a large chunk of funding may disappear seems irrational, “what they are doing is rational,” Duquette said
“The reason we think it’s irrational is because they’re politicians,” Duquette said. “Why would you make the assumption that you’re going to lose an effort to keep the money? This is not kicking the can. It’s the exactly rational thing to do.”
Lawmakers have until midnight on June 30 to get a deal on a new budget. They haven’t hit that deadline in years, though Rodriques repeatedly has told reporters that he’s optimistic that they will this year.
It requires the same kind of suspension of disbelief that Duquette’s analysis demands. But if Beacon Hill is anything, it’s stubbornly rational in its irrationality.
So who knows?
