MA General Court

MA General Court

The Massachusetts General Court (formally styled the General Court of Massachusetts) is the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The name “General Court” is a hold-over from the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when the colonial assembly, in addition to making laws, sat as a judicial court of appeals. Before the adoption of the state constitution in 1780, it was called the Great and General Court, but the official title was shortened by John Adams, author of the state constitution. It is a bicameral body. The upper house is the Massachusetts Senate which is composed of 40 members. The lower body, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, has 160 members. Until 1978, it had 240 members. It meets in the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in Boston.

The current President of the Senate is Karen Spilka, and the Speaker of the House is Ronald Mariano. Since 1959, Democrats have controlled both houses of the Massachusetts General Court, often by large majorities. The Democrats enjoyed veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers for part of the 1990s (i.e., enough votes to override vetoes by a governor) and also currently hold supermajorities in both chambers.

State Senators and Representatives both serve two-year terms. There are no term limits; a term limit was enacted by initiative in Massachusetts in 1994, but in 1997 this was struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled that it was an unconstitutional attempt to provide additional qualifications for office by statute, rather than constitutional amendment.

The legislature is a full-time legislature, although not to the extent of neighboring New York or some other states.

Source: Wikipedia

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Massachusetts Judicial Branch

MA Judicial Branch

The judiciary of Massachusetts is the branch of the government of Massachusetts that interprets and applies the law of Massachusetts, ensures equal justice under law, and provides a mechanism for dispute resolution. The judicial power in Massachusetts is reposed in the Supreme Judicial Court, which superintends the entire system of courts.

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Massachusetts Executive Branch

MA Executive Branch

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is governed by a set of political tenets laid down in its state constitution. Legislative power is held by the bicameral General Court, which is composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The governor exercises executive power with other independently elected officers: the Attorney General, Secretary of the Commonwealth, and Auditor. The state’s judicial power rests in the Supreme Judicial Court, which manages its court system. Cities and towns act through local governmental bodies to the extent that they are authorized by the Commonwealth on local issues, including limited home-rule authority. Although most county governments were abolished during the 1990s and 2000s, a handful remain.

Massachusetts’ capital city is Boston. The seat of power is in Beacon Hill, home of the legislative and executive branches. The Supreme Judicial Court is in nearby Pemberton Hill.

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Committees

Executive Branch

Judicial Branch

Legislative Branch

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    Massachusetts lawmakers weigh bills to expand voting access
    AP, Steve Leblanc – May 19, 2021

    Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing whether to take some of the voting changes adopted at the height of the pandemic — including the broad use of mail-in voting — and make them permanent.

    The state took that step and others — including expanding the use of early voting and ballot drop boxes — to help diminish the pandemic health risk of voters crowding polling locations.

    Many of those changes proved popular, leading to a push to write them into state law.

    “The pandemic is coming to an end and we have to think about whether we want to make some of these changes permanent,” said Democratic state Sen. Barry Finegold, co-chair of the Joint Committee on Election Laws.

    It’s time to bring transparency to the Legislature
    Commonwealth , Jonathan Cohn – February 24, 2021

    Rules debate can lift shroud of secrecy from work of the people’s representatives

    In 2016, when the Massachusetts Legislature updated the state’s public records laws, they chose to punt on the issue of how such laws should apply to themselves. Indeed, Massachusetts remains the only state where the courts, Legislature, and governor’s office all claim to be fully exempt from public records laws.

    In traditional Beacon Hill fashion, the Legislature created a commission to study the issue further, and the bicameral commission ended up with no actual recommendations.

    But that’s not the fault of the senators in the commission. Frustrated with their House colleagues, the six Senate members issued their own report on December 31, 2018. In the report, they highlighted several as-of-yet-unadopted ways make the Massachusetts Legislature more accessible, including the release of all written testimony received prior to all committee hearings and any testimony or other materials submitted in-person during the hearing process, upon request and the online publication of any vote recorded either by electronic poll or by a vote of the “yeas and nays” during a committee meeting or executive session.

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