IN THE YEAR FOLLOWING a presidential election, the Massachusetts Democratic Party updates its platform. A party platform can stand as a defiant statement of goals and ideals, and a roadmap for a legislative agenda and priorities. In today’s national political climate, such aspirational declarations are especially important as they offer voters something to fight for and something to vote for.
The platform released just last week contains new planks on paid family and medical leave, a $15 minimum wage, automatic voter registration, and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, bolstering what was already, by and large, a progressive document.
On Saturday, June 3, delegates from across the state will convene in Worcester to approve the platform, perhaps with a few amendments to make it stronger.
On Monday, June 5, if the past is any guide, our overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature will proceed to completely ignore it
Democrats in Massachusetts have the third largest legislative supermajority in the country, trailing only Hawaii and Rhode Island. In reputation and number of seats, this Democratic Party powerhouse is – on paper – the perfect site for victories on progressive policies from the Massachusetts Legislature. And in the wake of renewed interest in state legislation as a site of Trump “resistance,” the Senate, where Democrats control 34 of 40 seats (85 percent), and the House, where Democrats control 126 of 160 House seats (78 percent), should be a progressive activist’s dream.
But a supermajority has value only to the extent that it stands for something, and to the extent that it is put to work. When one looks back at the party’s 2013 platform, the contrast between the aspirational document and actual policymaking can be quite stark, perhaps most so in the realm of health care.
For years, the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform has called for a single-payer health care system, one that would truly enshrine health care as a right. The momentum that exists behind single payer in other parts of the country does not seem to have yet reached Beacon Hill. Single-payer legislation recently advanced out of committee in the California Senate and was passed by the New York Assembly. On the national level, the
majority of the House Democratic Caucus in Congress now supports single-payer, an all-time high. But only about a
third of Democrats in either branch of the Massachusetts Legislature have taken heed of their own party’s platform.
...he didn't publicly endorse Article 5 of the NATO treaty (all members come to each other's defence if necessary) while giving a speech in front of a memorial for 9/11 (Steel recovered from the WTC). This is fucked up as following. He's the only POTUS who hasn't referenced Article 5 and their commitment to it publicly since Truman. He stood in front of a piece of the WTC and berated NATO nations for not paying their dues. And the only time Article 5 has been evoked? In response to the events of 11th September 2001.
