VIDEO: Is Beacon Hill Rigged?

On a quiet Friday afternoon during the holidays, Beacon Hill gave members not returning next session a chance to give farewell speeches.

The one that stood out was most was Rep. Matthew Patrick calling out the status quo for doing business in the Massachusetts State House.

“If you play your cards right, vote the right way, keep your criticisms to yourself, you have a chance of becoming a chairperson of a committee,” he said, adding that eventually, “You find yourself not participating in debates, not even listening, because you and everyone else knows what the outcome will be. It’s preordained. You continue to play the game until one day you find out that some lobbyists have more influence than you, and you ask yourself, is that right? Or you find out that your bill has been sidelined by someone quietly without explanation, or you are asked to vote for something you oppose … It’s a system that has evolved over the decades and it is all that we know.”

SHNS: And Rep. Joseph Driscoll… laid out publicly something he’d discovered about Speaker Robert DeLeo. “I also learned very quickly from the speaker that he is a fair man and all that he wanted – all that he wanted – was complete compliance with his wishes after reasonable discussion.”