Author Archives: Hesterprynne

Field Notes from the State House: Senate Budget Debate

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This week at the State House, the Senate will debate the budget proposal that its Committee on Ways and Means released last Wednesday. The 39 Senate members (there’s currently one vacancy) have filed 725 amendments to the Committee’s budget. After a couple days of internal discussions on Monday and Tuesday, the debate will likely begin on Wednesday. Not all the amendments will receive formal consideration — at some point, probably on Thursday, the amendments that have not yet been considered will be sorted by the Committee into two “bundles,” as they’re called: a thumbs-up bundle, and another — larger — thumbs-down bundle. The Committee’s bundling decisions are generally accepted, but any Senator can contest a call.

Not surprisingly, the members of the minority party often file amendments in excess of their numbers, and this year that is particularly true. In fact, one Senator, Minority Leader Bruce Tarr from Gloucester, is the author of 14 percent of the amendments — 103 of the 725.

Let’s see what vision of state government the GOP amendments offer.

Certainly the Norquistian “drown it in a bathtub” approach is prominent. There are amendments to lower both the sales and income taxes to five percent, which would reduce available revenues by billions of dollars. Also, there’s one that might bring some unwanted attention to a U.S. Senate candidate — proposing that the state ought to be giving away lots more money in historic preservation tax credits (now come out from behind that facade, Mr. Gomez).

But is the GOP entirely committed to small government? Apparently not. For one thing, there’s no end to the money that they feel the state should spend in order to ensure that not one single person who is not eligible for public benefits receives them. And a true libertarian would dismiss the amendment to prohibit young people from receiving drivers’ licenses until they have pledged to abide by the laws as a misguided effort to involve the government in meaningless gestures.

Most significantly, many of the GOP amendments propose additional spending, notwithstanding the drop in revenues that would result from their proposed tax cuts. Our police training facilities are inadequate. Our seawalls are falling apart. More people need help paying for health insurance. Dams are in urgent need of repair. Contaminants in our aquifers may be migrating into the water supply and causing cancer in children. All these problems sound like they might be legitimate concerns of government, but the GOP’s overriding priority of tax cuts undermines a serious discussion about them.

Oh, and one more spending item. Apparently our sewer costs are just too much to impose on individual property owners and the government must step in to shoulder more of the burden.

The vision of the GOP budget? Government has an obligation to drain all bathtubs, even those intended for drownings.

Dear IRS: Let’s Change the Subject (Slightly)

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(Catching up on my correspondence.)

Dear Folks at the IRS:

I bet you would love to talk about something — anything — besides the extra scrutiny you have apparently been giving to Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status. So here’s a different topic.

Let’s revisit 2005, when U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez took a federal tax deduction of $281,500 for agreeing not to make any changes to the facade of his historic Cohasset house. By an interesting coincidence, that very same year you were warning taxpayers that such deductions might not be legal. Your “Dirty Dozen” tax scams list for that year (the historic facade scam was number 9) urged people not to be “fooled by false promises peddled by scam artists. They’ll take your money and leave you with a hefty tax bill.” Before reading your list, it had not occurred to me that Mr. Gomez might have been the victim of the false promise of a scam artist, but now I can picture it: the scam artist mounting the steps of the historic Cohasset house carrying a cheap suitcase. He looks like Steve Buscemi.

I so admire your willingness to give Mr. Gomez the benefit of the doubt in this case, and would encourage you to apply it more widely. For example, also in 2005 your “Questionable Refund Program, which uses “data mining” computer techniques, surmised that hundreds of thousands of refund claims appeared that they might be fraudulent. You put a freeze on those claims and did not even notify the taxpayers that their returns were being held. Some 28,000 of the people whose refunds were frozen asked the Taxpayer Advocate Service for help, and in 4 out of 5 cases, they ended up receiving their full or a partial refund. The average income of these taxpayers was $13,300, and more than eight months passed before those who pursued the matter received their refunds. Here’s how bad it was – even Chuck Grassley wrote you a protest letter.

Based on this experience, the Taxpayer Advocate concluded that the filters on your data mining programs might be in need of some adjustment. This seems especially true if, as appears to be the case, the tax return Mr. Gomez filed was not one of ones that was frozen.

So, going forward (and sincerest apologies for getting back to the issue of the tax exempt status of 501(c)(4) social welfare groups), you might want to double check that your data mining filters are programmed to let you investigate whether a group like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which spent $70 million during the last election, does in fact qualify for tax exempt status under your guidelines. As you say,

the promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office . . . a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity

If your filters don’t tell you that the primary activity of Crossroads GPS is political, it’s definitely time for another adjustment.

With all good wishes,

H.P.

Let’s Occupy the Film Tax Credit

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Old joke – a merchant tells a customer that the goods he’s selling actually cost him more than he’s charging the customer for them. When he’s asked how he can afford to sell them at such a low price, he answers: the profit comes from selling a large quantity. Sadly, something akin to that joke is serving as the premise for our state’s film tax credit program: all our tax break giveaways are — somehow — going to boost our bottom line.

This is the eighth year Massachusetts has offered a film tax credit. For the first six of those years (2006-2011, the years for which data is available), the state gave away $327 million in credits. These tax credits attracted $186 million in new spending, which yielded $44 million in new revenue. That is to say, for every dollar we spent on film tax credits, we got back 13 cents and lost 87.

Given its abysmal record so far, why is it (to borrow a line from a movie that was not filmed in Massachusetts) that we just can’t quit the film tax credit? Let’s review.

In 2005, Massachusetts enacted a relatively modest film tax credit, which was signed by Governor Mitt Romney. Also in 2005, director Martin Scorsese filmed a movie about Boston, The Departed. Most of the filming for that movie, however, took place not in Boston but in New York. And especially after that movie won four Oscars in 2006, people got to talking about how other states were poaching on what should be our movies and how we needed to do something about it.

So in 2007 (possibly influenced by one film director who said that film executives “would shoot a movie on Mars if they could get a 25 percent tax break”), Massachusetts opened the spigot wide, where it remains today. Now we reimburse film companies for 25 percent of their production and payroll costs, and we also throw in an exemption from the sales tax. Most significantly, the film tax credit is now refundable. This means that after the film company has paid the state taxes it owes, it can sell the remainder (usually at a slight discount) to a company or individual who owes state taxes and who can therefore capture the full value of the credit. As soon as he signed the legislation, Governor Deval Patrick (apparently unconcerned about criticism that the point of the the film tax credit was to let politicians hobnob with Hollywood celebrities) hurried off in order to hang with Denzel, who was in town filming The Great Debaters. And probably at exactly the same time, markets sprang up for the buying and selling of film tax credits.

Who’s buying them? Primarily insurance companies, financial institutions and other corporations that owe state taxes. Of the $327 million in film tax credits that have been generated since 2006, these organizations have purchased $280 million, or 86 percent. They have paid an average of 89 cents for a dollar’s worth of tax credit and thereby reduced the state taxes they would otherwise have had to pay by $30 million.

In the difficult budget years after he signed the film tax credit into law, Governor Patrick has lost some of his original enthusiasm. He now believes that the credit should be capped at $40 million per year. There’s no cap under current law. This is an entitlement program — filmmakers are free to come to Massachusetts and we are obliged to pay them 25 percent of their production costs, whatever those costs are. And if past experience is a guide, 87 cents of every credit dollar we give will simply disappear. The Department of Revenue estimates that the projects claiming the film tax credit in 2012 will cost the state more than $78 million. Representative Angelo Scaccia of Boston filed an amendment to the House budget last month to cap the film tax credit at $40 million, but it was rejected; the prospects for closing the spigot are not good.

So what to do? How about — if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em? The market for buying film tax credits is open to everyone. Maybe some civic-minded individuals or companies or individuals who owe state taxes could purchase tax credits at the going rate of 89 cents on the dollar and then, instead of keeping the 11 percent savings, donate it to a worthy cause. Or we can organize ourselves into (gasp!) collectives and then share the proceeds among us. As the insurance companies and financial institutions have demonstrated, there’s lots of money to be had. If they can make millions from this policy debacle, why can’t we?

So what do you say? It’s showtime!

House Budget Debate: A Guide for Progressives

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It’s budget week for our House of Representatives. The House Ways and Means Committee released its budget recommendation for the upcoming fiscal year on April 10, and since then Committee staffers have been busy analyzing the 888 amendments that House members filed and sorting them into subject matter groups. Here’s what we can expect.

In keeping with the practice in place for a decade or so, much of the budget debate will happen outside of public view, in a room next to the House chamber. Announcements will be made that the amendments on a particular subject are to be considered. Representatives interested in those amendments will then go to the side room to argue their case to House leadership. There will be some winners and some losers, but the end result, known as a “consolidated amendment,” is always agreed to, often unanimously.

This process may strike you as shockingly devoid of transparency. Its defenders point out that all members are free to decline the consolidated amendment process and to debate their amendments on the House floor instead. Some members regularly accept that challenge — the members of the minority party, along with a conservative Democrat or two. We can expect that they will again demand debate on at least two issues, closely related to each other politically.

The subject of the first debate will be cutting taxes. Minority Leader Brad Jones, for example, has filed an amendment to cut both the sales and income taxes to five percent over five years. (If you’re wondering, House Democrats have not filed any budget amendments proposing large-scale tax increases.) The GOP’s tax cut amendments stand no real chance of being passed — their purpose is to try to force the Democrats to vote against a tax cut, a record that could then be used against them in the next election. The Democrats may counter that amendment with a further amendment in order to render the issue politically innocuous: to wit, last year, when the GOP proposed a sales tax cut, the Democrats changed the amendment to provide that the sales tax would be cut when legislation was passed to cut it — and voila, who could be against that?

The subject of the second debate will be the fraudulent receipt of public benefits by the recipients of those benefits. Promoting the notion that this is the single most pressing issue facing the state is a joint profile-raising venture among the Republican Party and conservative media, and it has been used — with a fair amount of success — in each of the past three budget debates and well before that. The particulars of this second debate have varied over recent years. Sometimes the villains are immigrants, as in this Herald cover from House budget debate week in 2010:

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Last year the focus was on EBT cards. This year again, the public benefits fraud alarm has been sounded, in eighteen separate amendments* calling for more restrictions and more punishments, the tacit message of which reinforces the first subject the GOP is eager to debate — if it weren’t for these moochers robbing us, we’d have our money back in the form of tax cuts.

Mark Twain once said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on. And so it is here, with the claim that public benefits fraud by recipients is the biggest problem we face. State Senator Dan Wolf and some others have helpfully begun to expose this notion as a myth. Here are some reasons why they’re right.

For starters, the idea of investigating potential fraud by recipients of public benefits programs is hardly a new one — it’s nearly as old as the programs themselves. Today, it is the mission of the Bureau of Special Investigations, which was established in the early days of Weld administration. The Office of the State Auditor, where the Bureau is located, reports that in a recent fiscal year, the Bureau received more than 2000 complaints of suspected fraud and identified $4.1 million in fraudulent claims.

Second, the premise that welfare fraud is becoming more rampant because so many more people are receiving welfare is just wrong. Let’s look at the caseload numbers. Shortly before the Great Recession began, the welfare caseload stood at 45,900. The unemployment rate at the time was 4.1 percent . Three years later, in December 2010, when the employment rate had nearly doubled to 8 percent, and one might have expected the welfare caseload to have done the same, it stood at 52,463, an increase of only 14 percent. The truth is that today, fewer than half the families living in poverty in Massachusetts receive any form of cash assistance; fifteen years ago, nearly all of them did. We readily suspect that poor people are up to no good, but we’re oblivious to their poverty.

Finally, the argument that eliminating welfare fraud would significantly affect the state’s bottom line collapses when you consider that the program for cash assistance to families living in poverty — the primary target of the anti-fraud movement — accounts for less than one percent of the entire state budget.

Now, let’s consider — and embrace — the argument that public benefits fraud should be eliminated wherever it occurs. In that case, the state’s biggest welfare cheat is a pharmaceutical company named GlaxoSmithKline, which paid $35 million to the state’s Medicaid program to settle charges of illegally marketing and pricing drugs that it manufactures. That’s almost nine times the amount of money that the Bureau of Special Investigations identifies annually in recipient fraud (and the $35 million is only what GlaxoSmithKline admitted to). Did outraged legislators demand investigations of other drug companies and call for Glaxo to be excluded from state Medicaid contracts as punishment? Not exactly — in fact, quite the opposite: the House responded by loosening restrictions that had been imposed to control Big Pharma’s aggressive marketing of drugs. Or to take another example, remember when one guy stole $4 million from the film tax credit program and there was a swift and stern response from legislators calling for the Department of Revenue to exercise much stricter oversight? Of course you don’t, because, although the theft occurred, the swift and stern response did not.

But we progressives need to get ready for another battle in the welfare fraud wars. The Boston Herald is already crowing that it has brought House Speaker Robert DeLeo to heel again this year. DeLeo is demanding photo ID’s on electronic benefits cards, a very expensive venture of dubious value in fraud prevention, and he wants another layer of bureaucracy on fraud patrol. If he thinks that those moves will end the debate, he doesn’t know the minority party very well. Leader Brad Jones has predictably responded to DeLeo’s initiatives by saying, “it’s a great first step, but it’s not addressing all that needs to be addressed.”

So it looks like we’re getting set up for another House budget debate where the only thing that’s debated in public is the deliciously tormenting idea that poor people are getting away with something at the expense of the rest of us.

What can we progressives do? We can support the good budget amendments that will fight poverty instead of fighting the poor. We can provide more child care for working families. We can restore dental benefits to adults who receive subsidized health care; we can provide jobs for unemployed kids; we can help to bring vacant public housing units back online to ease the problem of homelessness, and we can provide shelter for homeless children without first requiring that they sleep in unsafe places.

And the biggest thing we can do is to make sure our Representatives know that we’re rejecting the austerity war against the poor. We’re rejecting tax cuts and we’re rejecting the lie that punishing the poor for their poverty will solve our problems. This year, maybe, the truth has its running shoes on.

* The amendments, by number: 96, 322, 385, 387, 683, 686, 697, 753, 790, 814, 820, 828, 838, 840, 848, 871, 878, 880.

GOP Senate Candidate Mike Sullivan: Mr. Death Penalty

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It’s time to pay a little attention to the U.S. Senate race on the GOP side. Let’s meet candidate Michael J. Sullivan and learn about the big role that the death penalty has played in his political career.

A GOP State Representative from Abington, Sullivan was in the right place at the right time when, in 1995, the Plymouth County District Attorney, William O’Malley, died after suffering a heart attack. Sullivan’s outstanding qualification to succeed O’Malley, in the view of Governor William Weld, was his enthusiasm for the death penalty, one of Weld’s biggest legislative ambitions. The state’s 11 district attorneys were divided on the death penalty issue, and Weld wanted to counter the death penalty opponents among them as well as Attorney General and former Middlesex County D.A. Scott Harshbarger, who had denounced the death penalty as “simplistic, arbitrary, misguided, ineffective and costly.” So the strong support Sullivan had demonstrated for Weld’s crime-fighting agenda in the Legislature earned him the nod. “We’re confident that DA Sullivan will be a big-foot crime fighter in Plymouth County,” Weld told the Globe.

The hopes of Governors Weld and Cellucci for death penalty legislation in Massachusetts were not realized. But in 2001, when Sullivan was sworn in for his next job as the United States Attorney for Massachusetts, he already had plans to bring the death penalty to the state. He took steps to transfer one of his Plymouth County murder cases from state court to federal court because the defendant, if convicted in federal court, would be subject to the death penalty under a federal carjacking statute. Sullivan knew he had the backing of Attorney General John Ashcroft to have the defendant tried in federal rather than state court — Ashcroft had abandoned the policy of his predecessor, Janet Reno, to prohibit federal prosecutors from seeking capital punishment for the sole reason that, in the state where the trial was to be held, there was no death penalty statute on the books. Sullivan’s prosecution was successful and the defendant, Gary Lee Sampson, was sentenced to death.

These days, Michael Sullivan still works for John Ashcroft, but their private practice specializes in areas such as white collar defense, so there’s lots less talk about the death penalty. It doesn’t even make the “issues” list on the Mike Sullivan for Senate website. This makes it a little easier for Sullivan to take a states’ rights position on marriage (“consistent with my federalist view, I believe that it is up to the people of each individual state to define marriage”). A little awkward when people remember that he once favored ignoring his state’s position on the death penalty.

And in case you are curious about Gary Lee Sampson, the defendant who was sentenced to death in federal court in 2003, a judge awarded him a new trial in 2011 after finding that one of the original jurors had misled the court about her ability to be impartial. Current U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is appealing that decision. Like Scott Harshbarger once said, the death penalty is “simplistic, arbitrary, misguided, ineffective” — and costly.”

Taxed Beyond Belief: Tracking One State Rep’s Stand on the Revenue Question

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There’s going to be a debate on taxes very soon at the State House and things are getting lively. Representative Ryan Fattman (R-Sutton) was having a little fun on Twitter this week with those who support higher taxes, pointing out that at a Tuesday hearing held by the Joint Committee on Revenue, no one from the public had testified in support of a bill that would amend the constitution to allow a progressive income tax. (The reason, of course, is that supporters of more revenue were hard at work advocating for a specific proposal that achieves a measure of progressivity under our present constitution.)

Representative Fattman himself is opposed to any tax increase, whether it’s the $500 million plan proposed by the Speaker and Senate President or proposals that would raise a lot more revenue, like the Governor’s bill. His party is committed to closing the deficit primarily through budget cuts. As Representative Fattman told the State House News Service, “Right now with the way the economy is, especially the people I represent, they can’t pay another cent. They’re taxed beyond belief.”

Opposition to tax increases is not the entirety of the Representative’s platform on revenues, however. He’s also the sponsor of a bill to eliminate the estate tax in Massachusetts. That tax is imposed only on estates worth more than one million dollars, and so, not surprisingly, only about 1000 estates owe any estate tax in a given year. The rates, which are tied to the size of the estate, range from 0.8 percent to 16 percent, which applies to estates of more than $10 million. (The supporting data from our MassBudget friends is here.)

To quote the noted socialist Warren Buffett, “a progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy.” That the threat of plutocracy is real is borne out by the amount of revenue produced by the estate tax. The tax generates well over $200 million dollars per year, even though it affects only 1000 estates annually and even though its highest rate is only 16 percent.

So if the Representative is serious about his proposal to bestow another $200 million on the 1000 wealthiest families in Massachusetts every year, he’ll need to defend that policy when his bill when it comes up for a hearing by the Revenue Committee, and he’ll need to go beyond what his party colleagues are advocating and propose $200 million more in cuts during the budget debate later this month. Otherwise, it would seem that what is being “taxed beyond belief” is the Representative’s credibility. We’ll stay tuned in.

Unemployed or Underemployed? Don’t Bet On A Job In The Casino Industry

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If you’re among the many people in Massachusetts who are unemployed or underemployed, you may have your eye on the casino industry. There are sunny predictions of more than 10,000 new jobs, and under the gaming law the state must “provide for new employment opportunities in all sectors of the economy, particularly opportunities for the unemployed.”

But don’t sign up for that on-line croupier course just yet. There’s this issue about credit checks.

It used to be that credit checks were used only by potential lenders to evaluate a borrower’s creditworthiness. But now they are increasingly used as part of employment applications, on the theory that they are a window into character.

A credit check includes not only your name, address and social security number, but also information about your mortgage, student loans, car loans, credit card history, any debts (including medical debts) that have been handed over to collection agencies, any tax liens and any bankruptcies. An editorial in the New York Times yesterday, entitled “The Credit-History Pariah Class,” cited a study by Demos finding that the people whose credit scores declined during the Great Recession were more likely to have suffered job loss, medical expenses (often in connection with job loss and sometimes so great as to lead to bankruptcy) or, in the case of persons of color whose relatively low assets made them especially vulnerable to predatory lenders, a racial discrimination of very long standing. An employment credit check in these barely-post-recessionary days is less often a window into character and more often a license to blame victims for their own misfortune or to discriminate against them because they have in the past been targets of discrimination.

So back to the casino law. While it requires the state to provide job opportunities for the unemployed, that’s a secondary purpose. The “paramount” purpose of the law is “ensuring public confidence in the integrity of the gaming licensing process and in the strict oversight of all gaming establishments through a rigorous regulatory scheme.” In other words, because this business can be infiltrated by criminals, job number one is to take every step to make sure the public doesn’t think it has been. And to that end, the law requires that anybody working in the casino industry as a state employee must get a credit check. So if you are looking for a job in the state oversight part of the casino industry — say, as in the “accounting” or “inspection” or “problem gambling” departments — you will be credit checked (as well as fingerprinted and drug tested).

And the state has the authority to regulate the employees of the casinos as well as its own employees. The state’s Gaming Commission might have something to say on that subject as soon as tomorrow (3/28), when it is scheduled to vote on draft regulations. If the Commission calls for credit checks for casino employees as well as state employees, or if the casinos themselves decide credit checks are a good idea, the state’s mandate to “provide opportunities for the unemployed” in the casino industry will be significantly undone. One step forward, one step back.

For me, an opponent of casinos, these possibilities — plus the fact that the people with bad credit reports who wouldn’t get casino jobs would be warmly welcomed as casino patrons — would be just one more reason to call the whole casino thing off.

Sidebar: the problematic use of credit reports in employment is certainly not limited to the casino industry. And in an effort to solve the problem of their widespread use, eight states (California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, Vermont and Washington) have already enacted legislation to limit credit checks in employment, and legislation is pending in other states, including Massachusetts, where Senator Mike Barrett is the sponsor of the Senate bill, and Representative Liz Malia is the lead sponsor of the House bill.

Mass. Employers: It’s Always Time to Trim Employee Protections

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Last week’s news that Massachusetts now has more jobs than it did just before the start of the Great Recession was greeted appropriately with cheers. A senior vice president at AIM (Associated Industries of Massachusetts), the state’s largest employer trade group, applauded this way: “Despite all the fits and starts, ups and downs, we have over time created a significant number of jobs and brought ourselves most of the way if not all of the way back out of the recession in terms of employment. The numbers are really pretty remarkable.”

The numbers are pretty remarkable, especially when compared to other states. AIM might have tempered the rather self-congratulatory tone of its comment by mentioning the role that the federal government had played in stabilizing the economy, starting with the more than 18.5 million weeks of additional unemployment insurance (UI) benefits paid to nearly 700,000 unemployed Massachusetts workers long after their employers’ obligations to them had expired. Without the consumer demand that those benefits fueled during the past five years, we would not be in the relatively fortunate position we are today.

But it’s really not surprising that AIM did not mention UI in its celebratory comments. Only two days later, the group was back to its customary hand-wringing, imploring the state to change our UI law to lower employer costs. Massachusetts provides some of the most generous unemployment benefits in the country, AIM says, which makes businesses here less competitive. But Massachusetts is a high-wage (and high-cost) state, and our unemployment benefits, while perhaps high in absolute terms, replace only 37 percent of a worker’s average wage, very close to the national average. And the benefits are capped at $674 per week.

I was thinking of asking the state’s corporate executives how they would like to try to get by on $674 per week, or even 37 percent of their wages, but since that latter number would be well into the millions annually, I will reconsider and ask a different question. Why is it that Massachusetts must strive to be second to none when it comes to education, infrastructure and some other important components of a successful economy, but we must strive to be second to all when it comes to protecting our workforce against job loss? I think it has to do with who’s paying the tab.

You, Too, Can Navigate Our Legislature’s Website

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The Sunlight Foundation has given our state Legislature’s website a failing grade — ouch. There’s also been some grumbling about the website on BlueMassGroup. One of the big complaints is the difficulty of finding roll call votes.

I am apparently in a minority of persons who think that the website is more useful than it gets credit for, although it’s certainly not perfect. So, in my first foray into the world of motivational speaking, I’m here to say that I can have you finding roll call votes in four (pretty easy) steps.

Let’s go back to 2011 and find the roll call votes agreeing to the House-Senate compromise bill that was enacted as the gambling law.

Step one. Find the relevant bill number (the one that became the gambling law).

The tan-colored line just below the State House picture has seven pull-down menus for various subjects, starting with “Massachusetts Laws.” Here’s a partial screenshot.

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We select “Massachusetts Laws,” then on the pull-down menu, we select Session Laws, and then the year 2011. We end up here.

Now our browser can search for the string “gam” (remember, the Legislature much prefers to use the term “gaming” instead of gambling,” so leave off the “b”) and there it is, Chapter 194 of the Acts of 2011, with the bill number — House 3807 — in parentheses.

Step 2. Find the history of the relevant bill, House 3807.
Back to the pull down menus, we go this time to “Bills,” and then click on “Bill Search.” We end up here.

We enter 3807 in the bill number field and we are careful to change the General Court field to the 187th Session, because this is not a current bill, but one from the 2011-2012 session. We end up here.

When we click on “Bill History,” we learn that the House accepted the Conference Committee report on November 15 by a vote of 121 to 33 and that roll vote is number 144. The Senate also accepted the Conference Committee report on November 15 by a vote of 23 to 14.

Step 3. Find the House roll call vote. Again we go back to the pull down menus and again choose “Bills,” but this time we select “Journals,” then “House Journals,” then “Uncorrected Proofs of the Journals of the Massachusetts House” (yes, the “uncorrected proofs” business is an annoying CYA on the Legislature’s part. There’s no reason the “official versions,” whatever those are, can’t be on the website; on the other hand, I have never known the website versions to be inaccurate). We end up here. Then we scroll down to “View 2011 Journals,” click and end up here. We then enter the number of the roll call, which in Step 2 we learned was as roll call # 144. And voila, the roll call in PDF form.

Step 4. Find the Senate roll call vote. We go back to the pull down menu under Bills, click on Journals, then Senate Journals, then “Senate Journals from Prior Sessions.” then choose 2011, then choose the date Nov. 15. (The House, which takes roll calls of its 160 members by machine, keeps those votes in separate PDF files. The Senate, which actually still calls the roll of its 40 members — which is why roll calls there can take longer than in the House — embeds those votes right into the Senate Journals.) We end up here, and our browser can find the relevant bill number, 3807, and the 23-14 vote.

Now, don’t you feel like a pro? Getting information about current bills is not that hard, either. Let’s say we’re interested in the issue of early voting and want to know what bills on the subject be coming up in the 2013-2014 Legislative session. Here in this partial screenshot of the website home page, on the left side of the homepage under “Search Bills and Laws,” is a quick search function. We enter the phrase “early voting.” Because we want to search only current bills and not already-enacted laws, we unclick “laws.”

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We end up here.

I find that the search engine is reasonably good at sorting by relevance, but if it returns too many results, we can refine the search further using the filters on the left side. By clicking on one of the relevant bills listed in the search results, we get the text, the bill history, the bill’s co-sponsors (under the “miscellaneous” tab), and learn that these bills are scheduled for a hearing by the Joint Committee on Election Laws on March 27 at 2:00 P.M. in Hearing Room A-1.

I hope this gets you started, though there are many other things to learn. The state budget, for example, is a category unto itself. Topics for future lessons are being accepted in the comments — will teach for website hits.

Sunshine Week For Open Government: Our “Before” Picture

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(This week is Sunshine Week, a national initiative to discuss the importance of open government. My contribution is a tale from nearly 20 years ago, when a bill cutting capital gains taxes passed the Massachusetts Legislature with hardly anybody in the Legislature knowing about it. (The story will help to correct an impression that the Republicans in our state would like to cultivate — that government secrecy is entirely the fault of the other party, although nobody comes out looking good.) Sunshine aficionados — think of this as our “before” picture, compared to which our “after” picture will shine with even greater glory.)

Late in 1994, what Governor William Weld wanted really badly was a cut in state capital gains taxes. What House Speaker Charles Flaherty and Senate President William Bulger wanted really badly was an increase in the base salary for legislators, which had remained at $30,000 for more than a decade.

So the Governor, the Speaker and the Senate President made a deal. First, the Legislature sent the Governor the pay raise bill, which increased the base salary for Legislators to $46,000. The Governor did not sign the bill right away, but instead allowed it to sit on his desk while the Speaker and Senate President, late on a Wednesday afternoon, managed to pass the Governor’s tax cut without their members’ knowledge. Here’s how that happened.

A bill entitled “Tax Relief for Low Income Families,” was very quietly amended in the House to include the Governor’s capital gains tax cut. The amendment was offered by Republican Representative Edward Teague, and was quickly adopted on a voice vote. Then the bill (its title was not changed), was just as quickly passed by the Senate and sent to the Governor who wasted little time signing both the pay raise and the capital gains tax cut into law. We will probably never know who in the Legislature was in on the deal other than the Speaker, the Senate President and Representative Teague, but it was a very small group.

When the swap came to light, nearly everyone was outraged, especially the legislators who had been unaware of the last-minute amendment and understandably feared that their constituents would think they were out of the loop. New legislation of such import would ordinarily be brought to everyone’s attention, but this was apparently a special case. The Globe editorial page fumed — “arrogant troika,” they called the perpetrators. The members of the arrogant troika got out of Dodge for several days (on a “factfinding” mission to Ireland) to let things cool down. And eventually things did.

An afterword: today, neither of the laws involved in the deal is still in effect. The base salary for Legislators is now set by a formula tied to the median household income in the state, the result of a constitutional amendment ratified in 1999, and Governor Weld’s capital gains tax cut was undone in 2002. Sic transit gloria Troika.