Thanks for the response and maybe I’m being dense (I swear it’s not intentional), but what’s stopping a state legislator from negotiating compromises between the conflicting provisions of the bill. Why can’t they discuss with other members from both chambers to find acceptable middle ground. Are you suggesting that if they did this, the Senate and House Leadership would vindictively prevent them from receiving future committee assignments based on the fact that they are negotiating compromises without their permission? I’m not doubting you, but that’s way more corrupt than I knew.
The whole point of the leadership and the committee system is to have the ability to coordinate things so that legislating isn't a constant ad hoc process. There's 40 members of the Senate, 160 in the House, it's not exactly
easy to get them to agree on all that much of anything most of the time. That system is how the varying, sometimes diametrically opposed preferences of all the individual members get coalesced into some form that can find a majority vote in the chamber (or, in many instances, not find it, and wither and die in committee).
The problem is that that system inherently gives its leaders power...which they then have an incentive to jealously guard. (This is absolutely not just a Massachusetts thing.) If you're in leadership or the chair of a committee, it directly undermines your authority and therefore your effectiveness as a legislator (remember, that while members
can be corrupt, they don't have to be; and people in leadership can have honest and strongly-held legislative preferences that they'd like to implement). And so anyone who challenges the system soon finds themselves on the outside of it...with no power whatsoever.
And that comes into conflict with the fact that while the General Court is overwhelmingly Democratic, it's not quite
partisan in the same way as federal politics. (Some of that's a result of Massachusetts being a blue state, and therefore there just being more Democrats, and the rest is down to the fact that in a dominant-party system, being a member of the dominant party's legislative caucus is about the only way to have any meaningful power at all.) Meaning you get people who seek election, oftentimes, to try and get things done for their districts, with less of an emphasis on the kind of performative opposition that you can see in federal politics (and to some degree among minority-party representatives in dominant-party states; think, say, Democrats in Texas, who are pretty much powerless in the state legislature other than to vocally oppose the Republicans).
A little bit paradoxically, that means that a lot of well-intentioned legislators have every incentive to work within the confines of the existing system, rather than embark on a Quixotic campaign for internal reform, because it's so hard to get a critical mass necessary for that reform, because everyone
else has legislative priorities they want to get done for
their constituents and can't afford to get frozen out of any influence whatsoever by challenging the leadership. And it's often hard to say how much of things not getting done is outright corruption or general incompetence or petty malice, and how much of it is down to the fact that it's really, really hard to get two hundred people to agree on things, and a hell of a lot easier for most if not all involved to kick the can down the road whenever possible. About the only thing that could
really change that is if the voters started giving a damn about whether the legislature runs well and gets things done, but seeing as how a.) we elect people
so that we don't have to care about those details all the time, and, b.) that it's very easy to cynically believe that all politicians are crooks, or lazy, or bad at their jobs, there's a huge degree of apathy that makes it very unlikely that things will change anytime soon.
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