Testimony to 2025 Mass Dems Platform Committee Hearing

Before I elaborate on some specific recommendations for the 2025 update to the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform, I want to point out that this party needs to have an honest reckoning about the purpose of the platform.

I am proud of the work that the 2021 Platform Committee (of which I was a member) did. Following the hearings, discussion, debate, and wordsmithing, we improved the platform in meaningful ways, and I feel confident in saying that we have the most progressive state party platform in the country.

However, at the same time that I am proud of that work, I believe that the platform means nothing to Democratic electeds. To say that they “take it under advisement” would be charitable; they treat it as no different from toilet paper.

The party has resisted efforts to make the platform mean something, quashing an effort at the 2017 convention and processing to death a renewed attempt several years later. I was the filer of the renewed resolution, out of which came a committee that met only a few times and produced nothing.

The party platform accurately reflects the pulse of the party grassroots, the party base, the party activists, and the party’s voters. But it does not reflect the party’s electeds. This dissonance speaks to broken mechanisms of accountability.

Now to some concrete suggestion:

1. The party platform should celebrate recent policy wins in Massachusetts. Because the platform grows by accretion, it does not do a decent job of highlighting victories achieved by Massachusetts Democrats. An example: paid family and medical leave is described as something Massachusetts Democrats “will fight for.” We fought for it and won it. The platform should celebrate accomplishments like paid leave, the ROE Act, the Work & Family Mobility Act, police reform and criminal justice reform, No Cost Calls, and the Fair Share Amendment and what it has made possible — -universal school meals, free community college, fare-free RTAs, and much more.
2. At the same time….the party platform should avoid reinforcing Republican frames. This call for celebrating wins should not include celebrating recently passed regressive tax cuts. The Massachusetts Democratic Party should be one that lifts up working families, not one that gives tax cuts to speculators and dead multi-millionaires.
3. The platform should be clear in its opposition to cuts to health care access and other essential programs. We face the possibility of steep and damaging cuts because of the cruelty and greed of Congressional Republicans. Our platform should make clear that Massachusetts Democrats will oppose cuts at the state level. In line with this, the platform should state clear support for tax reforms like the Corporate Fair Share, or “GILTI,” tax reform proposal from Raise Up Mass, which would increase the amount of offshored corporate income subject to MA’s tax laws.
4. The platform should reflect the cost of living in MA in the latter half of the 2020s. The 2021 platform mentions the $15 minimum wage, which was phased in over a time following a 2018 law. However, a living wage in Massachusetts for a single adult without children is $28.88, according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator. We should be calling for a minimum wage of at least $20 per hour.
5. The platform should include several other key points, from campaigns that have gained momentum over the past four years:

• Supporting the right of State House employees to form a union
• Eliminating tenant-paid broker’s fees to remove costly barriers to stable housing
• Banning the sale of cell phone location data and strengthening the privacy rights of all residents of and visitors to the Commonwealth
• Automating the criminal record sealing process to remove administrative burdens and increase economic opportunity
• Raising the age of criminal majority to 21 to ensure that young people are able to access critical education and counseling services
• Eliminating arbitrary, unnecessary restrictions on visitation rights in prisons, jails, and ICE detention units
• Ending the undemocratic practice of state takeover of public schools
• Ensuring that major polluters have to pay a fee to fund critical climate resilience work
• Ending the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure

6. The platform should have standardized style and structure and should avoid repetition. Because, again, the platform grows by accretion, there are various places of faulty parallelism and clear repetition. It’s no small undertaking to address that: good luck.