Response 2025

1. These all look like positive protections for MA citizens.
   Once again, thank you for ALL that you do to protect our safety, free speech and good health.
   Christine

2. Good stuff, Will. Particularly like the language in 2619 & 2726.
   Thank you!

3. Reports like this, legislators like you, and the degree and support you provide to our citizens, residents and needy are the reason so many of us are proud to live here. Thank you for your efforts. I feel proud of you.

4. Such important protections and responses to threats posed by Trump administration.
   Thank you for continuing these efforts!

5. Thanks for this useful summary and the impressive set of accomplishments it reports. Several of the important bills you report have been passed by the Senate but are listed as “awaiting action in the House.” Would any of those particularly benefit from constituents contacting their representatives in the House and urging action?

6. Thank you Will to you and your colleagues! Very much appreciate the proactive approach here.

7. I don’t see the micromobility bill mentioned in public safety. What is the status of this bill? Back Bay needs regulations for these e bikes and scooters. Licenses and insurance requirements and mandatory helmets like cars have mandatory seat belts. Please make residents safe.

   1. We are expecting the report of commission on regulating micromobility within the next month or two. I am hopeful that we will move swiftly to act on the recommendations in the report.

8. So happy I live in, and have lived in Massachusetts my entire life –and thank you Will for helping us to live free in this Commonwealth.

   Well done!

9. “An act amending certain archaic laws” aka the war on history and truth.

   1. Fred, what about old laws that conflict today with accepted behavior? I believe, though I’ve not researched them, that old laws prohibiting unmarried peoples’ behaviors that are common today such as cohabitation. Can you clarify, please?

      1. A different moral calculus was in play then and a different moral calculus is in fashion now. Those “archaic” laws are a touchstone to our moral roots. Erasing that history by vandalizing the past with this act of arson described in the “Response 2025” compendium of virtue signaling to voters in the sway of social media influencers is not leadership.

         Nobody then wanted their children to be a “common nightwalker” and nobody today wants their children to be a common nightwalker and thrown to the wolves. Back then we embraced our agency to form a moral world and now we’ve surrendered to managing an immoral one by calling bad things such as prostitution good.

10. Will,
    I am so pleased to have visibility to this important committee’s work given these very difficult times! The list is an antidote-checklist to the seemingly endless toxic edits/regulations/etc. coming from Washington. Thank you for your work in this critical facet of our state government!
    A

11. These all seem like positive changes. I guess it will be next year when the legislature has to deal with the impact of Trump’s cuts in social welfare benefits. For that debate it will be very helpful for the public to see the data on the type, size and breadth of the cuts.

12. The Commonwealth Stabilization Fund is over $8 billion. No one in Massachusetts should be thrown off of or priced out of healthcare. Mass should look at forming a healthcare network with other states as California is doing.

13. Thank you for your work

14. Thank you to you and your colleagues for this work, and thank you for the update.

15. This is all so great to see! But would love to see bolder action around healthcare – now is the time to move a state single payer system forward with An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts.

16. This is another facet nipping and tweaking around the edges of tax reform (…removal of sales tax for certain housing supply…) I think the entire taxation system in Mass needs to reviewed top to bottom on who benefits and who gets clobbered. Our town just had a debt exclusion vote for a new high school. Likewise I am reviewing if I would best off just to plain leave the state. We have initiative petition to lower the income tax, a testament to the failure of the legislature. It is always better to have “someone else pay”.

17. Thanks for letting us know about this committee and these actions. They seem like good protections for MA citizens and residents.

18. There is so much that is good and helpful that you have done here, Will; thank you.

    Can I recommend to the Committee that the language of Rep. Rogers’ “Act to protect Massachusetts residents against federal government surveillance”, https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/H2687, be introduced in the Senate and supported by leadership?

19. There has been speculation that Trump might try to cancel the 2026 election, or might try to intimidate voters or otherwise make it harder for people to access their polling places. Some think he would wait til the official close of voting, and immediately confiscate the ballot boxes or voting machines in various states, cities, or precincts. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Indeed, it would be very much in character. My question is this: is it now illegal under state law for anyone (underline
    ‘anyone’) to interfere with an election in Massachusetts? I should think it must be. Could the Commonwealth sue officeholders in the federal government, and any of their accomplices, for such interference? Surely that would not be an infringement of the legal guarantee that federal law takes precedence over state law…to my knowledge there is no federal law allowing a president to cancel an election. A hurried vote in Congress to pass such a law right after the election, in order to make the crime seem OK in retrospect, would violate the prohibition of ex post facto laws. I’m inclined to think that the military, already fed up with being repeatedly dishonored by their enforced participation in the many bizarre misdeeds of this administration, would finally take their oath to preserve-protect-and-defend seriously. And … getting wind of impending election interference… would quietly encourage the cabinet, perhaps through mutually-respected intermediaries using carefully-worded indirect hints, to (ahem!) do the right thing. That is, decide unanimously to have the culprit-in-chief hauled off to some high-secutity psychiatric facility. And let the VP take over. And encourage Congress to do what the denizens of those two haunted houses are exquisitely suited to do: sit down, shut up, and don’t make trouble when something serious is going on. I am no fan of Mr. Vance of course, nor of any other Republican in Washington. But at least he isn’t quite as far-gone as Trump. Anyhow, what can Massachusetts do right now to (a) help forestall a potential disruption of the ’26 election, (b) survive any such disruption in reasonably good shape, and (c) clean up the mess afterward, and initiate whatever kind of recovery/return to normal would be possible, under the circumstances?

    1. For starters, state and federal Dems and their surrogates can stop playing Hanoi Hannah against efforts to drive foreign adversaries out of the hemisphere.
       Listening to Congressmen I used to respect defending the interests of Iran, Russia and China by pulling the fig leaf of our efforts in Venezuela is so saddening.

       1. Been trying for two days to parse that reply. Admirably succinct, I must admit. Participation trophy hereby awarded.

20. This is honsetly pathetic. Some of these things are good and necessary but nothing here meets the urgency of the moment. People are being kidnapped off the streets for being brown, and we’re celebrating a bunch of bills that haven’t even been passed. Meanwhile our transit system is barely functional and people are getting kicked out of their homes by greedy landleeches at an ever increasing rate. What has the legislature been doing all year?

21. Why can’t the MassLeg when it changes our laws provide a link to the “struck” language, or better still strike it and leave it? Navigating the labyrinthian General Laws to see what has been changed and purged is not in the spirit of “plain language” transparency and accessibility.

    For example, looking up the original first duty stricken from Adjutant General to compare it to what it was replaced with in the new law to undermine the chain of command.

22. Thanks for this year end update. It is good to see the push back efforts listed all in one place. Next year, will probably require even more. Proud to be from, a part of Massachusetts.

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