Boston, MA – Today, the Massachusetts House and Senate Conference Committee on Joint Rules advanced new legislative rules for the 2025-2026 session. These rules structure how lawmakers consider and vote on legislation, as well as how the public can provide feedback on bills.

“Strong legislative rules are critical to ensuring everyone gets a voice in the policies that impact their lives. From the very beginning of this process, Common Cause Massachusetts urged lawmakers to adopt more transparent, accessible rules for this session. The new rules announced today accomplish just that by increasing transparency for the public and accountability for lawmakers,” said Geoff Foster, Executive Director of Common Cause Massachusetts. “We’re excited to see the rules include more advanced public notice of hearings, publicly posted committee votes, and public access to written testimonies. We’re grateful to House Majority Leader Moran and Senate Majority Leader Creem, who demonstrated strong transparency throughout the negotiation process making our political institutions more accessible to everyone.”

The proposed new rules include:

• Publicly posting the votes of committee members;
• Making most submitted written testimonies public;
• Increasing the required public notice of public hearings from 72 hours up to 10 days;
• Requiring hybrid meeting participation for the public to be able to watch and/or testify at public hearings either in-person or remotely;
• Ensuring the first conference committee meeting will be open to the public and press;
• Maintaining the July 31, 2026 formal session deadline, while allowing the legislature to handle the people’s business relative to conference committee reports and veto overrides after that;
• And more.

Common Cause Massachusetts initially called for the Massachusetts House and Senate to agree to new Joint Rules that would strengthen transparency and accountability, a process that has not reached completion since 2019.

The full list of agreed joint rules can be found here.