Goodbye, July 31 scramble. New legislative rules extend the end-of-session playing field

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Maybe it's something in the air around Causeway Street and in the North End, because Aaron Michlewitz sounded a little bit like Brad Stevens and Bill Chisholm this week.

No, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman and House Speaker Ron Mariano weren't facing reporters to explain why they shipped Second Assistant Majority Leader Paul Donato off to Harrisburg in exchange for a couple chairmen to be named later. But they seemed to embrace the new front office mantra of the Boston Celtics as they explained how they are approaching July 31 under this term's new set of rules.

Optionality.

"July 31 "is going to be different this year," Michlewitz maintained Wednesday. "It's not the old, traditional July 31."

The "old, traditional July 31" approach -- in which legislative rules dictated that all matters that required or were controversial enough to warrant a roll call vote be settled by the end of July in even-numbered years -- led to calamity two and four years ago. Last go-round, the Legislature went into the home stretch with an even dozen conference committees hashing out final accords on bills that already passed both chambers. By the time the final gavel dropped the morning of Aug. 1, only three resulted in deals.

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"We kept trying and trying and trying and just ran against brick walls. Eventually, we had to stop running into the brick walls," Michlewitz said two years ago as legislative leaders took stock of their deadline-day hits and misses.

The old way of doing things led to greater acrimony between the branches, which continue to operate under the same leadership regimes, and greater public disapproval of the way Beacon Hill operates. As they continued to resist a popular, voter-backed legislative audit, legislative leaders this term crafted new rules that will let them hold formal sessions to vote on more controversial matters through early January, so long as they get them into conference committee by July 31.

"It's more about things getting into conference definitively than actually getting to the governor's desk," Michlewitz explained. "If things work out in conference committee to get to the governor's desk before July 31, then obviously that'll be helpful. But the deadlines have changed, and so I do think we're going to operate with those new structures going forward, and that will certainly create a different last week of July than I think most people have been used to."

That's the optionality mindset used to justify the Jaylen Brown trade -- do enough to keep your options open, but not so much that you're boxed into any one approach. That's likely to play out in various ways over the next two weeks.

Mariano has suggested the House may respond to the Senate's primary care bill with legislation focused more on prescription drugs -- marrying those in a conference committee could keep both ideas on the table through the fall. And the House and Senate could use the new rule as something of a defense mechanism -- why worry about sprinting through talks over something like differing animal welfare packages to try to finish the job without a dedicated negotiating panel when you could just put it into conference and deal with it later?

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"Why would we now go back to the old ways of trying to make it by the deadline of July 31?" Mariano said this week, making his point by asking a question. He emphasized that conference committees will "continue to meet" as the calendar turns to usually-sleepy August and then the heart of election season. "When they get to a point where they can agree, they'll bring it forward. So it'll all work out in the end."

Bills already in conference include those addressing child welfare, energy affordability, environmental borrowing, data privacy, bell-to-bell cellphone bans in schools, immigrant protections and higher education infrastructure. Lawmakers also face decisions on youth social media regulations, teacher retirement options and eventually economic development. The House passed an economic development borrowing bill last week, and the Senate plans to take up its own version next week.

State regulation of artificial intelligence is shaping up as one of the central battles that economic development negotiators will wrestle with. Reps on the Economic Development Committee endorsed transparency and incident reporting requirements for certain large AI developers, but the House Ways and Means Committee removed that language and leadership kept it out of the final version. Now, that idea is back on the table in the bill expected to pass the Senate next week.

And as long as they get that into conference by July 31, the House and Senate could fight over that until Jan. 5, 2027 under their new rules. It's not specifically addressed in the new rules, but there's an election on Nov. 3 and taking up popular compromises before then while leaving more unpopular decisions until after the voters have spoken is an enduring political consideration.

ODDS AND ENDS: Wildfire smoke lent an eerie tint to life in Massachusetts for much of this week, and it led to two days of a statewide air quality alert. State officials said the haze of smoke drifting from Canadian wildfires contributed to unhealthy air quality statewide for sensitive groups like children and seniors ... Gov. Maura Healey had more events in the public eye this week, following a fairly quiet start to the month. With reelection coming right up this fall, the governor exercised her diplomacy skills when she hosted international tall ship captains at the State House on Monday for a swanky reception and held press events to (surprise!) take positions that most voters would find no argument with: education is good, and the live event ticketing industry is infuriating ... Relaxed pouring laws for the World Cup have contributed to "a marked uptick in beer sales" and there's generally been a feeling that the local economy is humming along this summer. But senators who advanced an anti-poverty package and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston made clear this week that low- and moderate-income households are hurting. A grocery chain operator told the Fed "higher beef prices had led to record sales of chicken and pork as customers traded down to those lower-priced items." Fewer ribeyes on the grill this summer, more BBQ chicken ... Phil Eng is working two traditionally full-time jobs at once for the foreseeable future, and he said this week he's cool with that. Healey didn't give a direct answer about whether she's actively hiring for either T general manager or transportation secretary. Hired as the T's general manager but tapped as interim transportation secretary after Monica Tibbits-Nutt resigned in October, Eng said he's "enjoying it" and "will continue to do it for as long as they need me to."

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