The House chair of Ways & Means is one of the five most powerful persons on Beacon Hill, the others being the governor, the president of the Senate, the Senate chair of Ways & Means, and the speaker of the house.
For years Dempsey
has been seen as the speaker-in-waiting, the man destined to succeed Bob DeLeo
when DeLeo decides to step down, whenever that may be.
The sound of
long-held expectations shattering is always loud. It echoes impressively, like the blast from a
large bomb dropped in a mountain range.
Immediately,
speculation began on DeLeo’s choice of a new Ways & Means chair.
Although his
name wasn’t mentioned in the initial press accounts, I thought the safe choice
was Steve Kulik, the Democrat vice chair of House Ways & Means, who grew up
in Newton and has represented a collection of 19 small western towns for 27
years. Kulik, age 66, has been a
faithful No. 2 on Ways & Means for a long time. Promoting him would have
enforced the notion that diligence and loyalty are rewarded in the lower
branch.
Another
potential advantage for the speaker in choosing Kulik, I thought, was that he
does not have the political heft of some of the bigfoot House committee chairs who, if gifted now with the chairmanship of Way & Means, would automatically be seen as
DeLeo’s hand-picked successor.
Kulik’s
elevation to Ways & Means chair, I thought, would also give DeLeo time to
evaluate carefully the pros and cons of every other putative speaker on his
leadership team and to make at his leisure the painstaking choices required for
the development of an optimal plan of succession.
If, after
the 2018 legislative elections, the time came when DeLeo wanted to appoint
someone other than Kulik chair of Ways & Means, I thought, DeLeo could assert that Kulik’s leadership of the committee, by mutual understanding, had been provisional from the start
and that he’d always had other things, of equal or greater
importance, in mind for his esteemed colleague from the Berkshires.
Before
leaving the office this past Friday, I went to the web site of our legislative
tracking service, MassTrac, and printed out the biography of each of the House
committee chairs I considered a strong candidate to succeed Dempsey. In alphabetical order, they were:- Thomas A. Golden of Lowell, Committee on Telecommunication, Utilities and Energy
- Harold P. Naughton, Jr., of Clinton, Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security
- Jeffrey Sanchez of Boston, Committee on Health Care Financing
- William M. Straus of Mattapoisett, Committee on Transportation
- Joseph F. Wagner of Chicopee, Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies
Over the weekend, Speaker DeLeo made his choice of a new chair of Ways & Means and it was…Sanchez!
The Sanchez
news broke Sunday afternoon. Several accounts last night and this morning described him as a surprise choice,
while justly trumpeting that DeLeo has set in motion a chain of events that
could culminate in the election of the first Latino to head a branch of the
Massachusetts legislature. Sanchez was
born in Puerto Rico and came to the mainland U.S. as a young boy.
The
commentary on Sanchez also centered on his progressive views as a contrast to
the usual centrist or conservative inclinations of legislators normally put
in charge of the budget process.
I remember the period in 2005 when former House
Speaker Sal DiMasi surprised a lot of people by naming Bob DeLeo, then a quiet,
deliberately-low-profile chair of the Committee on Bills in Third Reading, chair
of Ways & Means.
I remember talking about DeLeo’s promotion one day soon after with a friend and
fellow lobbyist, a gentleman who had served with DeLeo in the House and is a member of DeLeo’s “class,” i.e., they both entered the legislature in
1991.
“You’ve
known DeLeo a long time,” I said.
“Why do you think he was chosen?”
“Like most
things,” my friend said, “it’s kind of simple:
Bobby DeLeo was the only one of Sal’s close friends who can say no to
people.”
Saying no is
a big part of running Ways & Means. It’s not easy, it's no fun, being Mr. Bad News, especially when
you have to reject pet proposals from persons you've served with for
years, men and women you may be very fond of, personally.
Say all you
want about Jeff Sanchez being a progressive, which is kind of a complimentary term for
liberal. Sanchez is a progressive. What's truly salient are two attributes he's exhibited during his chairmanship of Health Care Financing: he's willing to do the hard and tedious work of mastering the numbers, and he can say no to any colleague seeking his support for a
new and ostensibly promising health care initiative if he's not convinced it's worthwhile, financially or operationally. Sanchez is a hard sell. Sanchez is also a good man, a serious legislator, and, wonder of wonders, a non-jaded idealist at age 48.
The Speaker made a good call.
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