Prominent MA Senators Clash on Resolution Dealing with Top Court Vacancy

A mini-debate in the Massachusetts Senate yesterday afternoon over a resolution concerning the nomination of a U.S. Supreme Court justice revealed an intriguing difference of opinion on the requirements of bipartisanship. 

Ken Donnelly, the Arlington Democrat who serves as Assistant Majority Whip, introduced a resolution calling upon the U.S. Senate to act swiftly on the nomination of a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in his sleep Feb. 13 while on a trip to Texas.

Donnelly described the measure as “a simple ask and an important resolution.” It states, in part:

“Whereas there are several examples in history where a judge has been successfully nominated, confirmed and appointed to the Supreme Court in the year preceding a presidential election, including Justice Anthony Kennedy by President Reagan, Justice Benjamin Cardozo by President Hoover and Justice Louis Brandeis by President Wilson, and

“Whereas, in the event of a vacancy on the Supreme Court, failing to timely nominate, consider and confirm the next justice for partisan political reasons would undermine the plain meaning and intent of the Constitution and be a profound disservice to the American people, now therefore be it

“Resolved that the members of the Massachusetts Senate respectfully urge the members of the United States Senate to swiftly and diligently fulfill their constitutional responsibility by granting a fair hearing and a timely vote to the President’s next nominee to the Supreme Court.”

You will recall that the Republican majority in control of the U.S. Senate has said they will not even meet with President Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee, never mind hold hearings or vote on that person.

Donnelly contrasted the endless partisan warfare and cynicism within the U.S. Senate to the normal fair play and comity in the Massachusetts Senate.  Said he, “When we have 34 Democrats in this branch and five Republicans, we make sure the Republicans have a say. To have it happen in Washington, D.C., that the Republicans don’t let the Democrats have a voice is hypocritical.”  [Note: All quotations in this post have been excerpted from a State House News Service account of the Senate session of Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016.]

Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester was quick to disagree.  “This invitation, this resolution,” he declared, “is an invitation to the hounds of partisanship to enter this chamber, to consume our thoughts, to consume our debate, at a time when the issues are pressing and critical.”

Donnelly said, “I believe it is important to make sure that our citizens, the 160,000 people that I represent (in the Fourth Middlesex District), believe in the political system.  For the many people in my district that spent weeks and months and in some cases years going all across this country to elect the President of the United States and have a vote, I feel insulted that the people down in Washington could say the people should decide.  They have decided.  They decided in the election (of 2012) who should be President until January, 2017.  To say otherwise is insulting.  To say our president is a lame duck is a terrible message to send across the world.”

Tarr said, “If we go down the path of this resolution, then I would suspect that, using the logic of the gentleman (Donnelly), we have an obligation to file resolutions every day to express frustration with the inaction of the President and Congress.  We don’t yet have a state budget in place and have not yet lifted the cap on net metering and have not addressed ourselves to the things we want to do with regard to the opioid crisis.

“If we want to say that our time will be consumed by things of a national scale that we are all interested in, we have the ability to take the direction and the focus of the (Massachusetts) Senate away from what we have done thus far and become a proxy for the United States Congress.

“As much as I understand the frustration and concern of many of us on this one issue, I wonder how many other appointments have not been acted on (in Washington).  Are we going to debate those?”

Tarr moved that Donnelly’s resolution be tabled, and it was.  Senate President Stan Rosenberg then announced the resolution would be brought up at the Senate’s next formal session, which will likely be held on Thursday, March 3.

We can only hope that the next discussion on this issue will be as lively as the first. Invitations to the hounds of partisanship and terrible messages, indeed!

A Blogster's Miscellany: Thoughts on Judges, Living and Gone, and on a Former AG

LET’S HEAR IT FOR POLITICS.  Justice Robert J. Cordy has received some serious praise since announcing earlier this month his intention to leave the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this summer, three years before he would have had to retire at age 70.  Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association, hailed Cordy as “a leading voice on criminal justice issues and an intellectual powerhouse on constitutional law,” and said, “Justice Cordy has played a vital role in modernizing court operations, which will leave a lasting legacy on the administration of justice for years to come.”  Ralph Gants, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, told a reporter for The (Springfield) Republican newspaper and MassLive web site that Cordy’s productivity on the court is “the stuff of legend,” adding, “He (Cordy) leaves an enduring legacy as a justice of this court, not only because of the over 360 carefully crafted and reasoned majority opinions he has authored so far, but also because of the countless unseen contributions he has made to maintain the excellence of this court.”  Cordy has a double-barreled Ivy League education: an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a doctor of laws from Harvard.  He had a successful career in private legal practice and served with distinction as managing partner of the Boston office of McDermott, Will & Emery, an international law firm.  However, he never served as a judge before being nominated for the supreme court in late-2000 by Gov. Paul Cellucci, God rest his soul.  Thus it’s impossible to imagine him getting to the top court had it not been for his prominence in Republican circles and his cachet within the Weld-Cellucci administration, which preceded the Cellucci-Swift administration.  Cordy was Gov. Weld’s chief legal counsel for three years in the early-Nineties.  (The legal counsel, I should point out, is definitely not a part of a governor’s political apparatus. Those holding the job dispense legal advice to the governor and work to ensure that the administration functions properly, from a legal standpoint, across the board.  They’re prized most for their legal acumen; should they possess political skills, all the better.)  The Governor’s Council confirmed Cordy’s appointment to the court on a unanimous 8-0 vote in early-January, 2001.  A number of Democrats endorsed him during his confirmation hearing, including then House Speaker Tom Finneran and former Attorney General Frank Bellotti.  “I hope you will learn I am fair-minded.  I am not by nature a partisan person or one who’s afraid of responsibility,” Cordy told the Council, according the account of the hearing from the files of the State House News Service.  That they did. Cordy will end his public service as a total judicial success, with not a single blemish – and many a high point -- on his long (15 years-plus) SJC record.  He will also leave as a living-breathing refutation of the view that our political system can’t ever get anything really right.  It was good GOP politics that made Bob Cordy Mr. Justice Cordy.  And good justice.

SPEAKING OF JUDGES, WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING?  Michael Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest.   I was happy to see that age has not mellowed our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost anything off his fastball.  Chotiner asked, “How well did you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac, we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds.  So you got to know your section very well.  But I didn’t know who Scalia was until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart.  It is 1960.  We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew, if you were a black defendant, forget it.  And this went on for about three weeks.  I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’  And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to be black in the South?’  A bright guy – yeah.  But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake.  There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy.  Money is corporate speech.  This is all preposterous.”  I strongly recommend you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/michal_dukakis_on_the_bush_family_antonin_scalia_and_donald_trump

WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT, COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts attorney general, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways.  A nod of her head during a conversation over coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it.  It’s not hard to see why she may have been interested.  Coakley is a good and honest person.   No doubt she was sincerely sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be out of work.  But that sorrow would not have kept Coakley, or most people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna.  Most everyone in that situation would have reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone is going to replace her, so why not me?  And by now everyone who follows the news is familiar with the story of the embattled university president who survived a coup attempt.  On Jan. 29, you will recall, the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to a (never identified) person close to the university.”  The article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations (emphasis added) with former state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to the same (unidentified)person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the developments.”  Coakley, the article said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter.  The Globe story was obviously planted by someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into concluding her situation was hopeless and deciding to resign in order to avoid being fired.  It was a bluff. McKenna called it.  Soon, an impressive array of persons and groups materialized in her defense.  The tide turned quickly in her favor.  Around Day 3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate for the Suffolk presidency and not  interested in the job.  One can infer that Coakley had come under pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered: Why do you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the board? The situation culminated with surprising rapidity in an agreement between the university and McKenna, which stipulated that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months.  My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months hence, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract extension.  Things at Suffolk could be going so swimmingly by then they'll have to implore President McKenna to stay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LET’S HEAR IT FOR POLITICS!  Justice Robert J. Cordy has received some serious praise since announcing earlier this month his intention to leave the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this summer, three years before he would have had to retire at age 70.  Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the Massachusetts Bar Association, hailed Cordy as “a leading voice on criminal justice issues and an intellectual powerhouse on constitutional law,” and said, “Justice Cordy has played a vital role in modernizing court operations, which will leave a lasting legacy on the administration of justice for years to come.”  Ralph Gants, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, told a reporter for The Republican newspaper and MassLive web site that Cordy’s productivity on the court is “the stuff of legend,” adding, “He (Cordy) leaves an enduring legacy as a justice of this court, not only because of the over 360 carefully crafted and reasoned majority opinions he has authored so far, but also because of the countless unseen contributions he has made to maintain the excellence of this court.”  Cordy has a double-barreled Ivy League education: an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a doctor of laws from Harvard.  He had a successful career in private legal practice and served with distinction as managing partner of the Boston office of McDermott, Will & Emery, an international law firm.  However, he never served as a judge before being nominated for the supreme court in late-2000 by Gov. Paul Cellucci, God rest his soul.  Thus it’s impossible to imagine him getting to the top court had it not been for his prominence in Republican circles and his cachet within the Weld-Cellucci administration, which preceded the Cellucci-Swift administration.  Cordy was Gov. Weld’s chief legal counsel for three years in the early-Nineties.  (The legal counsel, I should point out, is definitely not a part of a governor’s political apparatus. Those holding the job dispense legal advice to the governor and work to ensure that the administration functions properly, from a legal standpoint, across the board.  They’re prized most for their legal acumen; should they possess political skills, all the better.)  The Governor’s Council confirmed Cordy’s appointment to the court on a unanimous 8-0 vote in early-January, 2001.  A number of Democrats endorsed him during the confirmation hearing, including then House Speaker Tom Finneran and former Attorney General Frank Bellotti.  “I hope you will learn I am fair-minded.  I am not by nature a partisan person or one who’s afraid of responsibility,” Cordy told the Council, according the account of the hearing from the files of the State House News Service.  That they did! Cordy will end his public service as a total judicial success, with not a single blemish – and many a high point -- on his long (15 years-plus) SJC record.  He will also leave as a living-breathing refutation of the view that our political system can’t ever get anything really right.  It was good GOP politics that made Bob Cordy Mr. Justice Cordy.  And good justice.

SPEAKING OF JUDGES, WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING?  Michael Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest.   I was happy to see that age has not mellowed our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost even a bit off his fastball.  Chotiner asked, “How well did you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac, we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds.  So you got to know your section very well.  But I didn’t know who Scalia was until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart.  It is 1960.  We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew, if you were a black defendant, forget it.  And this went on for about three weeks.  I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’  And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to be black in the South?’  A bright guy – yeah.  But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake.  There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy.  Money is corporate speech.  This is all preposterous.”  I stromgly recommend you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/michal_dukakis_on_the_bush_family_antonin_scalia_and_donald_trump

WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT, COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts Attorney General, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways.  A nod of her head during a conversation over coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it.  It’s not hard to see why she may have been interested.  Coakley is a good and honest person.   No doubt she was sincerely sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be history.  But that would not have kept Coakley, or most people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna.  Most everyone in that situation would have reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone is going to replace her, so why not me?  By now, everyone who follows the news in Massachusetts is familiar with the story of the embattled university president who survived a coup attempt.  On Jan. 29, the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to a person close to the university.”  The article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations with former state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to the same person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the developments.”  Coakley, the article said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter.  The Globe story was obviously planted by someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into concluding her situation was hopeless, and that she should resign and quietly go away.  It was a bluff; McKenna called it.  Soon, an impressive array of persons and groups came to her defense.  The tide turned quickly in her favor.  Around Day 3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate for the Suffolk presidency and not interested in the job.  One can infer that Coakley had come under pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered, Why do you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the board? The situation ended with an agreement between the university and McKenna stipulating that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months.  My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months from now, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract extension.  Things could be going so well at Suffolk by then that they will have to ask her to stay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Smart Guys in Everett Saw Steve Wynn's China Strategy from a Mile Off

One of the proverbs lodged in my cranium is, “The judgment of the village is never wrong.”

I buy that.  I also think that units within cities – social clubs, softball leagues, busy restaurants and bars, neighborhoods and even certain street corners -- take on the characteristics of villages in that vital information is exchanged and fresh insights emerge there.

So when I heard in Everett last summer that Steve Wynn had his eye on a large number of Chinese customers for the casino he’s planning on the old Monsanto Chemical site, I paid attention.  Later I wrote a blog post on it. 

Repeating what a friend told me one Saturday afternoon in Everett Square, I wrote on September 14: 

“You watch! Wynn will be doing charter flights from China every other weekend.  He’ll have yachts picking up his most loyal Chinese customers at the Logan Airport dock and whisking them to the casino (on a Mystic-River-front lot, deep inside Boston Harbor).  These high rollers will be dropping Franklins at the tables as soon as they recover from the flight.  And when they’re not betting in the casino or eating at Wynn’s restaurants and shopping at the high-end shops in his luxury hotel, he’ll be sending them in his fleet of limos to the best that Boston offers: restaurants, shows, art galleries, you name it.”

I happened to see on the Internet this morning that Steve Wynn had mentioned Everett during a Wynn Resorts investors call yesterday, and that he’d trumpeted the value to his business of the direct flights that exist between cities in China and Boston.  “Hey, wait a minute,” I thought.  “I heard that months ago.”

I easily found a transcript of that investors call online.  (What can’t you find online?)  Here’s the operative section, from Wynn verbatim:

“I think…the Everett Boston metropolitan area opportunity is enormous.  And we can’t wait to be there.  It’s the first time we’ve ever had a hotel that has nonstop service from every major capital in the world: Hainan Airlines and Cathay Pacific fly nonstop from Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai to Boston.  So does every other world capital, nonstop to Boston.  And we are 12 minutes from Logan Airport with our new hotel.  So all of that sort of makes me feel confident and positive about our future prospects.”

There was also a press release to be found, one that had a vanilla headline: “Wynn Resorts, Limited Reports Fourth Quarter and Year End 2015 Results.”  In the fourth quarter of 2015, the release said, “net revenues were $555.7 million, a 27.0% decrease from the $761.2 million generated in the fourth quarter of 2014.”

Charter Contracting Company, one of the nation’s top specialists in complex environmental clean-ups, is hard at work decontaminating the land where the Wynn Everett resort casino will rise.  Construction of the complex will begin as soon as site remediation is done.  If all goes as planned, Wynn Everett will open late in 2018.

By the sound of yesterday’s investors call, that day can’t arrive soon enough.  Who’d have thought it?  Old Everett riding to the rescue of a mogul from Las Vegas.

The Man and City Combined to Reach Unimagined Heights of 'Buddyness'

“His (Cianci’s) place in the history of American mayors is there for us to look at and conclude that there is no question he changed his city from a wrong turn on the way to Boston to a Destination City.”
               -Tom Cochran, Executive Director, U.S. Conference of Mayors

I never had any dealings with Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, but I’ve spoken through the years with many who did. To a person, they all say roughly the same thing:

He was brilliant and driven, one of the smartest and best politicians they’d ever seen. He rightly deserved credit for the economic and cultural rebirth of Providence, Rhode Island. It was hard to work for him, or be accountable to him, but you always learned something when you were with him.  Unfortunately, you never knew when one of his inner demons would pop out to torment you and/or create a spectacle.

We were once engaged in a project in Massachusetts with a man who’d run the Providence Civic Center (now the Dunkin Donuts Center) for a spell when Cianci was mayor.

“Buddy was a wild man, a total wild man,” the man told us.  “He’d think nothing of calling you at 1:00 a.m. to ask a question about some nothing issue.  But he was a genius.  He could see things in government that other people never could.  He’d make a victory out of something everyone had missed but him.”

This man explained that he’d been hired by the center’s board of directors and reported directly to the board.

“That didn’t matter to Buddy,” he said.  “From the beginning, he made it clear I worked for him, and that, if I wanted to keep my job, I would do what he told me. Period. End of story.  That’s how it was for everyone in Providence.”

Cianci died this past Thursday, Jan. 28, at the age of 74.  Up until a few days before his death, he was still going, fairly strong, as a radio talk show host in Rhode Island.

Of all the things I’ve read about the man since his passing, nothing is as good and as worthy of recommendation as Matt Taibbi’s piece yesterday in Rolling Stone, “One Crazy Hour With Buddy Cianci.”  This is a highly entertaining account of the time in September, 2013, when Taibbi was a guest on Cianci’s radio show together with Stephen Day, former head of the Providence firefighters union.

Here’s a sample from “One Crazy Hour,” told in Cianci’s voice to Taibbi during a commercial break:

“This one time, we’re signing a collective bargaining agreement.  There’s cameras everywhere and when I’m done signing the paper, all of a sudden all of these firefighters are slapping me on the back and shaking my hand.  And I’m panicking.  Why are they so happy?  I lean over and I say, ‘Stephen, what the fuck did I just sign?’ ”

That Taibbi is the author of this piece provided a needed hook (excuse) to write this post: he grew up around Boston and graduated from Concord Academy.  His father, Mike Taibbi, was an outstanding TV reporter in Boston before going on to a distinguished national career at NBC news.

To get Matt’s entire article, click on:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-crazy-hour-with-buddy-cianci-20160201?page=3

Tobacco Settlement Perennially Validates the Wisdom of General Harshbarger

Back in the early-Nineties, 46 attorneys general brought a massive lawsuit against the largest U.S. tobacco companies to recover costs incurred by states in caring for persons afflicted with smoking-related illnesses over a period of many decades.  We the taxpayers are fortunate they did. 

Under the terms of the 1998 “Master Settlement Agreement” of that suit, the states collectively have since received in excess of two hundred billion dollars: $200,000,000,000!

That money continues to flow at astonishing levels:  during the current fiscal year, the states will derive approximately $7 billion from the settlement.  Massachusetts alone will get over $200 million. 

What continues to astonish, as well, is the harm caused by tobacco: smoking will kill more than 480,000 Americans and smoking-related illnesses will necessitate health care spending of approximately $170 billion this year.  

In Massachusetts, 16.6% of adults still indulge in the nicotine habit.  That number ties us with New York as the states with the 11^th lowest smoking rate in the U.S.  Utah has the lowest rate, 10.3%, and Kentucky the highest, 26.5%

Here’s something we chin-rubbers of the political persuasion seldom consider: the debt all Massachusetts taxpayers owe to Scott Harshbarger, our attorney general from 1991 through 1998.

Harshbarger was in the coterie of attorneys general who conceived of and organized the suit versus the tobacco companies and helped to turn the case into a juggernaut by bringing so many other AGs on board.    

As discussed in a previous post, we at Preti Strategies once had a client, Dr. Robert Berger, who wanted to use a relatively small portion of the state’s tobacco settlement dollars, one time only, on a clinical trial of the effectiveness of lung volume reduction surgery.  See:

http://pretiminahan.blogspot.com/2016/01/it-proved-impossible-to-do-what-doctor.html

That proposal failed due mainly to the opposition of those wanting to spend the lion’s share of those dollars on smoking prevention and cessation programs.  We had no choice but to drop the idea and move on.  

The overall debate on how best to use the settlement in Massachusetts, however, has never ended.

One on side have been the governor and a majority of legislators, who each year have favored putting most of the money in the state’s general fund, where it can help defray the enormous and ever-growing costs of running the Medicaid program. 

On the other side have been the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Tobacco Free Kids organization, and an assortment of well-grounded, passionate health advocacy groups, who want tens of millions taken from the settlement every year and spent directly on smoking prevention and cessation.

The CDC says Massachusetts should be spending roughly $67 million a year on prevention/cessation.  Advocates use the CDC number as a rallying point every budget season (February through June) on Beacon Hill.

In the current state budget, $3.9 million is set aside for prevention/cessation, only 5.8% of what the CDC says is required to protect the citizens of Massachusetts, especially children, from cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Over the years, Massachusetts has spent as much as $50 million on prevention/cessation (FY 2001) and as little as $2.5 million (FY 2004).

When Governor Charlie Baker filed his proposed FY 17 state budget this week, he level funded prevention/cessation at $3,866,096.  Neither the House nor the Senate, I predict, will change that figure much when they take their turns at bat in the budget formation contest.

Here’s a concluding bit of relevant data:  in Gov. Baker’s FY 17 budget, total spending on MassHealth, the name we give to Medicaid hereabouts, is pegged at $15.4 billion, which is nearly 40% --and by far the largest single spending category -- of his $39.6 billion budget

 

 

It Proved Impossible to Do What the Doctor Ordered...and that Still Hurts

I can remember the morning but not the year – it was around 1999 or 2000 -- when my boss, Al Minahan, and I drove from downtown to Brookline to meet a prospective client.  We had an appointment with a recently retired surgeon at his home. 

His house was on a quiet side street just beyond the Brookline Reservoir, to the left of Boylston Street (Route 9) as you’re leaving the city, and up a hill. The neighborhood had been built on or near what had once been the Lowell Estate. 

Dr. Robert Berger answered the bell and ushered us in. 

He seemed a little hesitant or distracted.  Maybe he didn’t like the look of us, I thought, or was having second thoughts about hiring a lobbyist.  We’d been referred to Dr. Berger by a friend and fellow lobbyist, a gentleman who could not accept Dr. Berger’s assignment because the goal conflicted with the interests of an existing client.

The three of us were soon in Dr. Berger’s first-floor den, where the doctor began searching the shelves and a closet for a videocassette.  The subject of the video was lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS), an option used by some surgeons to treat patients with chronic obstructive lung disease, many of whom have advanced emphysema caused by years of smoking.  In LVRS, a surgeon removes the most diseased parts of a patient’s lungs in order to give the less-diseased parts more room to work in.  Post-surgery, the patient is supposed to have less shortness of breath, more comfort, less pain.

Dr. Berger was going to decide if we were the ones who could help him secure state-controlled funds for a randomized clinical trial on the effectiveness and optimal application of LVRS.  The project was formally known as the Overholt Blue Cross Emphysema Surgery Trial, OBEST for short.  It had been designed to yield useful results in as little as six months. 

Dr. Berger was the OBEST project director when he came up with the idea of funding OBEST via a one-time allotment from the continuous, multi-million-dollar revenue stream flowing to Massachusetts under the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement of the lawsuit against the major U.S. tobacco companies by Massachusetts and 45 other states.  He believed that somewhere between two and three million dollars could do the job. [NOTE: Here's an example of how much money still comes to Massachusetts through this agreement: In 2014 alone, the Commonwealth received $282 million from the tobacco companies.]

We watched the video, which lasted maybe 10 or 12 minutes.  Dr. Berger asked some questions and so did we.  We chatted about our work, our contacts on Beacon Hill and our normal fees. Then we parted company without coming to an agreement on his hiring us, although it seemed he was leaning in that direction.

In a previous position, I had worked with physicians and surgeons for nearly 15 years.  I remember thinking that Dr. Berger lacked the hard edge and driven personality I’d come to associate with most doctors.  I wondered if what I perceived as hesitancy or tentativeness was not a sign of fatigue or even disillusionment.

Later, I realized how wrong I was.  I saw that Dr. Berger did not have to summon much energy or attention to take the measure of a person or situation.  He was kind of on cruise control the day we met.

Within a week, we were hired and began setting up a series of meetings with legislators and policy makers in the state health care bureaucracy.  We also arranged meetings with folks from the American Cancer Society and what was then the Coalition for a Healthy Future and has since become Tobacco Free Massachusetts.

Dr. Berger came to all of those meetings and never failed to make a good impression.  It turned out that he had ample reserves of charm and wit, which he could call upon at will.  Making the case for OBEST, he always got to the point and hammered it home passionately.  You never had to pull him back from a meandering digression.  He liked putting his charisma to the test.

As we made the rounds, and as we had coffee and lunches with him between appointments, some details of Dr. Berger’s highly unusual and remarkable life would come out. 

He had been born in Hungary in 1929.  When World War II began, his family was caught up in the Holocaust.  Barely in his teens, he had to flee to Budapest, where he lived in the shadows with other displaced and hunted Jewish boys.  One day, in a near-fatal encounter with a Nazi soldier, he was clubbed in the forehead with a rifle butt, but managed to run away.

Dr. Berger survived the war and lived afterwards in camps for displaced persons administered by the allied powers.  In 1947, he was resettled in New York City, and then in Boston, under the auspices of Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS).

When he arrived in Boston, Dr. Berger spoke no English and had the equivalent of a seventh grade education.  Within a year, he had earned enough credits to graduate from Boston Latin, and had gained admission to Harvard College.  After Harvard, he attended and graduated from Boston University School of Medicine. He received training in internal medicine, general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery.

Dr. Berger became a surgeon and ascended rather swiftly to the top tier of the profession.  The positions he held included: director of cardiothoracic surgery at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Boston City and University Hospitals, and professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine.  The first surgical team to perform heart bypass surgery in Boston had Dr. Berger as its chief.

Dr. Berger was the kind of surgeon who’d be paged at Symphony Hall on a Friday night and be driven by police at breakneck speeds to City Hospital, where a gunshot victim, inches from death, badly needed his services.

Most of the above information was not conveyed to me by Dr. Berger but rather came to light through my own research.  I’d be intrigued by something he’d say in passing, like how he’d gone to Israel during the 1967 war to make his skills available to the wounded and would be willing to go back in the event of another war, where “I would treat anybody who was hurt, any Palestinian as well as any Israeli,” and I’d go back to the office and search the Internet for information on him and his accomplishments. Then I’d ask him questions later about what I’d learned.  He really did not like talking about himself; the good stuff I had to pull out of him.

Three or four months in, it was becoming apparent there was no appetite in Massachusetts for funding OBEST from the tobacco settlement.  No one liked the possible precedent it would set.  No matter who we met with, that person would basically tell us:

“These patients have been harmed by smoking and you make a good argument that tobacco company money should be used to help them, but where do you stop?  How do you refuse the next group that steps up and asks for money from this pool?  The Master Settlement Agreement is supposed to be reimbursing the state for the cost of caring for Medicaid patients harmed by smoking and paying for smoking prevention.  It makes no provisions for clinical trials, no matter how good they may be or how much they may be needed.”

Our interlocutors had a strong conviction that Massachusetts should use its Master Settlement Agreement money only for anti-smoking advertising campaigns and smoking cessation programs.

When a proposal fails to gain traction, when a cause that once gave you hope turns gloomy, it is hard to acknowledge that fact.  It’s hard to say you cannot win when you’ve been hired and paid to earn a victory.  It is especially hard when you’ve been hired by someone like Dr. Berger and you’ve come to realize he is one of the finest human beings you’ve ever met, and that the project in question could have been a fitting coda to a glorious career in medicine.   But acknowledge it you must, as soon as you see the outlines of a loss emerging.  You have to give clients the bad news as quickly as you give them the good.

During that last conversation with Dr. Berger, he was quite disappointed, and reluctant to accept that the mission was over.  He showed his disappointment the most, I think, in how he grew distant.  He was polite but the change in his voice, the perceptible cooling of his customary warmth, made it plain that he felt let down.

On Tuesday, January 5, I opened The Boston Globe  to find that Dr. Berger had died on New Year ’s Day of complications from a heart attack.  He was 86 years old.  The disappointment of the OBEST assignment sprang to mind but was quickly subsumed in the gratitude I felt, and will always feel, for having once known a man as strong, a healer as skilled, a humanitarian as large as Bob Berger. 

NEXT: A look at the Master Settlement Agreement, 18 years later, and how Massachusetts has utilized this multi-million-dollar, constantly replenished resource.

 

 

Say What? The Job of a Legislator 'Isn't Worth Doing Any More' ?

I pay attention to Peter Lucas, who writes on politics for the Lowell Sun.  I seldom disagree with what he says and I never dismiss out of hand anything he says about Massachusetts politics.

So, when he did a column the week before Christmas on why so many persons leave the legislature in the middle of their terms, I lapped it up.  Lucas has been around forever, and, like I said, he really knows his stuff.

"...over the past five years," he wrote, "the upper branch of the legislature has seen at least five senior members, all Democrats, leave, taking with them years of invaluable experience that went out of the Senate chamber with them," ["Climate change spurs Senate's brain drain," 12-22-15].  I recommend you read the entire column by going to:

http://www.lowellsun.com/peterlucas/ci_29297759/peter-lucas-climate-change-spurs-senates-brain-drain

Lucas cited East Boston Senator Anthony Petrucelli as the latest example of this trend.  Petrucelli's resigning to join the lobbying firm headed by Dennis Kearney: Kearney, Donovan & McGee.  Dennis himself got his start in public life many years ago as a rep from East Boston.

The basic reason so many legislators have quit in recent years, said Lucas, is "the job is not worth doing any more because the business has changed."

Developing this theme, he quoted one unidentified "veteran senator," who said, "You can't help people anymore, which is why I ran for the job in the first place.  Sure, we still vote on a budget and on social programs, but they've made it a crime to help people, to help a constituent get a job, or get a kid into a state college."

A little further down in the column, Lucas quoted "one veteran legislator," who said, "We run for office and get elected to help people.  But now helping people has become a crime.  You can't write a letter for anybody anymore, you can't even make a phone call.  Everything is now recorded and designed to come back and bite you."

Then he quoted "another ranking legislator," who said, "Everybody is afraid to do anything."

At the very end of the column, he quoted "one veteran legislator," who said, "Who needs it?"

Yeah.  I guess.

In this post-Ware-Report/post-convicted-Probation-Commissioner world, who needs a seat in the Massachusetts legislature if it comes with a permanent de facto prohibition on helping a constituent land a job on a public payroll or a friend's kid gain admittance to a public university?

With patronage and doing favors supposedly gone the way of the Walkman, I thought legislators might want to turn their attention to more meaningful and rewarding activities.

If you accept the premise of "Climate change," no, they'd rather walk away from the State House than spend their newly-freed-up hours doing what's on the official job description: lawmaking.

Here's a topic I'd like to see Lucas, et al. at the indispensable Sun explore: Is enough actual lawmaking taking place these days to hold the interest of the sharpest legislators over the long haul?