Amid health care, gay marriage victories, no one
invokes DiMasi
Sal DiMasi (right) watched then
Governor Mitt Romney sign the health care bill.
By Jim O’Sullivan Globe Staff July 02, 2015
It took a federal
court to cement Sal DiMasi’s legacy. And, this time, almost no one noticed.
It wasn’t the Moakley
Courthouse, the one where DiMasi had to answer for his crimes born of greed and
corruption. But rather the big one across the street from the US Capitol, where
DiMasi’s lasting impact was, over the course of the past week, writ large.
While he rots in a prison cell in Butner, N.C., the two causes that Sal DiMasi
went to the wall for — maybe more than anyone else — passed from controversial
wayposts to the virtually unshakable law of the land.
President Obama
likely wouldn’t have had the chance to pass his 2010 federal health care
expansion if DiMasi, the former Massachusetts House speaker, didn’t stick to
the left during the 2006 debate here. There are valid arguments that DiMasi was
not the prime mover behind the Massachusetts health care bill that provided a
model for the national version (former Senate president Robert Travaglini and
governor Mitt Romney might quibble), but it wouldn’t have gotten done without
him.
A year later, gay
marriage was at the gallows on Beacon Hill. It had been law here for three
years, but a few votes or a slip of the foot in either direction would have
dealt it a blow that might have frozen the whole movement and robbed
sanctimonious Democrats in 2015 of the ability to overlook the fact that it was
an institution their own president didn’t support until six months before his
reelection — and Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t support until a full year after
that.
DiMasi went to the
wall for gay marriage, in old-school, arm-twisting fashion, including the
successful persuasion of one state rep who said his father-in-law offered him a
new car to vote against it. There are valid arguments that others did more —
Senate President Therese Murray, for instance, had the fortitude to call for
the fateful 2007 vote — but that wouldn’t have gotten done without him, either.
Twice in the past
decade Massachusetts has established a far-reaching, long-resonating beachhead
in the progressive campaign. There was one constant.
“He was a hero, but
too often an unsung hero, a not-acknowledged-enough hero of our community,”
Arline Isaacson, a longtime gay rights advocate, said this week. “We would not
have made it as far or as fast legislatively towards equality had it not been
for him.”
There is a valid
argument to be made that no one has done more over the past four decades on the
side of liberalism in Massachusetts than Sal DiMasi.
A gay rights bill in
1983 that established rock-bottom civil rights thresholds for gay people. The
2008 Global Warming Solutions Act, requiring an 80 percent reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Together with Travaglini, DiMasi helped pass
landmark stem cell research legislation that social conservatives opposed, an
oft-forgotten legislative battle that marked the first big win of the DiMasi
speakership.
“Despite all of the
personal issues that Speaker DiMasi faced, he always maintained a very
aggressive progressive agenda,” said Aaron Michlewitz, a former DiMasi aide who
succeeded him in the House. “A lot of what has taken place on the national
level originated from that work that Speaker DiMasi did.”
Governor Deval Patrick shook
hands with House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi after signing a bill repealing a law
preventing gay couples from other states from marrying in Massachusetts.
There was another
echo of DiMasi’s career last week, this one not an enduring success, but a
short-lived victory that thrilled the liberals who now won’t speak his name.
Plainridge Park
Casino opened June 24, a day long delayed by DiMasi’s opposition to expanded
gambling. He fought unions, a sitting governor of his own party, pernicious
rumors about his motivations based on his ethnicity — but DiMasi held casinos
and slot parlors at bay until after he left office.
Indeed, there is a
valid argument to be made that no one — not Ted Kennedy, not Deval Patrick, not
Mike Dukakis — has done more over the past four decades on the side of
liberalism in Massachusetts, and with sweeping repercussions beyond, than
Prisoner 27371-038.
DiMasi’s crimes are
embarrassing to honest public officials and almost humiliatingly penny-ante. He
went to prison for, essentially, taking $65,000 in bribes to steer several
million dollars in contracts. The jury found him crooked, selling his office to
enrich himself. He is paying his debt to society.
But, if his family is
to be believed, his treatment since he entered the federal penal system has
been virtually inhumane — symptoms of cancer ignored and allowed to fester.
And the lack of
credit paid DiMasi after historic affirmations of his policy and political work
should be almost as galling, except that almost no one noticed. Several
prominent Massachusetts Democrats declined to speak on the record for this
column.
On the steps of the
State House last Friday evening, a raucous crowd celebrated the court’s
same-sex marriage decision. Speakers praised the activists and legislators who
had defended same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.
The tremendous amount
of happiness was rivaled closely by self-congratulation. Speaker Bob DeLeo, who
once opposed same-sex marriage while DiMasi was whipping votes in favor, took
the stage to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”
And no one mentioned
Sal DiMasi.
In his day — and in
those since — no one has wielded power on Beacon Hill the way DiMasi did. After
a slow start that prompted questions about whether his would be a weak speakership,
DiMasi found his footing and brought to fruition the liberal causes that had
animated much of his career. He vexed conservatives, but they’re not the ones
turning their backs on him now. It’s the liberals who crow about DiMasi’s
achievements as if they were their own, as if they ever would have happened
without him.
