With the election now past, the Massachusetts Legislature has a long list of business to complete before the 2025-2026 term ends on January 5, 2027. There are 12 House-Senate negotiating panels still working to finalize compromise bills, plus a late-moving spending proposal needed to close the state’s financial books. Lawmakers will need to start the process from scratch after they’re sworn in for the 2027-2028 session if any bill is left unfinished by the term’s end.
House Speaker Ron Mariano said Friday that the negotiating teams are “making progress and working hard.” “It’s important to understand that these are complex policy decisions that take time, and often many conversations and meetings to resolve,” Mariano said in a statement to CommonWealth Beacon. Stretching the timeline, he added, gives lawmakers “more time to work diligently to reach the best possible policy outcomes – understanding that the content of the final product is far more important than reaching an agreement quickly solely for the sake of doing so.”
This is a new phenomenon for the Legislature to have this much unfinished business this close to the end of the two-year session. For decades, lawmakers set themselves an earlier deadline, writing into their internal rules that no formal sessions can take place after July 31 in the second year of the term. Roll call votes can only happen in a formal session, so the rule effectively meant the only lawmaking that could occur after the cutoff date needed to be uncontroversial enough to win unanimous support.
