"If we don't all learn a bunch of lessons coming out of this about what the right way to operate and prepare for one of these in the future is ... we will have missed a big opportunity," Baker said Wednesday, one year after declaring a COVID-19 state of emergency. "Because no one ever expected to be using emergency orders for pandemics that were going to last a year, that's for sure."
Baker's sweeping use of executive authority over the past year is now being challenged by lawmakers frustrated with his administration's rocky vaccine rollout. Bills filed on Beacon Hill seek to restore the Legislature's power by placing limits on the executive. Leadership has formed oversight committees to monitor the state's COVID-19 response and its federal stimulus spending.
Baker has issued 65 emergency orders in the past 365 days. The first — issued March 12, 2020, and still in place today — suspended certain provisions of the state's Open Meeting Law. Others have mandated masks, placed limits and fines on gatherings, and dictated business and school closures, reopenings and capacity caps.
Some orders have been rescinded or replaced as the pandemic surges and ebbs. Others that offered greater access to telehealth, expanded the scope of practice for nurses and optometrists and codified requirements for health insurers to cover COVID-19 testing and treatment, were later adopted by the Legislature as part of broader health care reform.
Orders like the one expanding telehealth "have been game-changers," state Sen. Julian Cyr, D- Truro, said. "Now that we're sort of a year into this, though, there certainly really merits an assessment of what orders continued to remain in place."
Legislators have disparate views on how to best rein in the executive as emergency gives way to recovery. Several bills aim to put time limits on the governor's emergency declarations and orders, and compel him to seek periodic legislative approval. Others focus less on restrictions and more on making improvements where lawmakers feel Baker's falling short in his pandemic response.
State Rep. Shawn Dooley, a Norfolk Republican who supported a court challenge to Baker's emergency authority last fall, said he doesn't think bills aiming to curb the governor's authority "stand any chance."
"If the Democratic majority wanted to take away some of the governor's power, they would have already done it," he said.
A spokeswoman for House Speaker Ronald Mariano said the Quincy Democrat "believes executive orders serve a legitimate purpose" and cited the oversight committees as evidence of how the Legislature is "playing an active and crucial role in the commonwealth's recovery and will continue to exert its influence."
State Sen. Rebecca Rausch, D- Needham, said it's not so much the executive power itself that's the problem, "but the way it's been used — or not been used."
Rausch, who's filed a bill calling for a vaccine equity czar, said Baker could be doing more to improve equity in access to coronavirus vaccines and testing.
"This is about bad management from our executive," she said. "And that bad management has led to massive waste of fiscal and other state resources."
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