Lily-livered leadership
The era of "reform before revenue" was certainly short-lived.
Senate President Therese Murray, one of the people who gleefully shot down Governor Patrick's casino plan barely a year ago, is now fully on board with expanded gaming. "Ka-ching!" she told reporters earlier this week, after a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Granted, Murray was never quite as opposed to casinos as then-speaker Sal DiMasi. But she was certainly part of the chorus that derided the idea as a gimmick. Now, apparently lacking ideas of her own, she suddenly embraces it.
Even the administration professed surprise that casinos were back on the table. "We didn't know she was going to say that," a senior aide to the governor said yesterday.
Making up initiatives as you go along - or recycling them - is hardly the way to deal with a billion-dollar fiscal crisis. But this is what passes for leadership at the State House right now. To call it a vacuum would be kind.
The severity of the state's fiscal woes was brought home on Wednesday, when the House unveiled its budget. Almost everything remotely discretionary was deeply cut. That includes anticrime programs and summer job programs, among many others. Almost everyone will find something to hate in it.
Activists were sounding alarms yesterday on the huge cuts in anticrime programs, and rightly so. The House budget was, among other things, an eloquent statement of what the House deems expendable.
Cities were most adversely affected, with public safety and youth programs also chopped to ribbons. Communities can abandon any notion of using state funds to put kids to work or expand community policing to deal with gang violence. Those have all now been deemed frills.
"This will decimate the work that antiviolence organizations have been doing and create a situation that leads to more violence," said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown of the TenPoint Coalition.
In a better process, the Legislature would decide its priorities and find a way to fund them. Failing that kind of clarity, or leadership, the House has opted to just cut everything and let others deal with the fallout. That was the uninspiring path taken by the House and its new speaker, Robert DeLeo.
The clumsy way state government has approached this crisis speaks to a broken culture on Beacon Hill. Lawmakers avoid "tough" votes as if they were not elected to make decisions. Many spend entire careers in the Legislature without making more than a handful of difficult decisions. But this is a time when avoiding decisions is impossible.
Patrick has taken a pounding lately. But he deserves some credit for at least being willing to utter the dirty word, "taxes." The man has not exactly been bold - a candy tax? - but he has broached the subject. Lawmakers continue to run away at the mere mention of taxes.
There are no easy choices in a recession. But what's worrisome is that no one is making any choices. Cutting local aid to pieces isn't a fiscal strategy, and neither is resurrecting casinos. These are desperation tactics that put off decision-making for another day.
The Senate still hasn't submitted a budget, but if there is any willingness in that chamber to deal with the fiscal woes in a serious way, there hasn't been much evidence of it.
A few months ago it looked like the biggest problem on Beacon Hill was corruption. It wasn't. The bigger problem was and is the absence of political courage. Resurrecting casinos is the opposite of bold action.
There isn't going to be any magic solution to this crisis - not casinos, not slots. The Legislature is going to have to make some actual decisions. But its leaders seem determined to put off the day of reckoning for as long as humanly possible.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 