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Legislative leaders insist they will try to get some of their unfinished business done in the next four-plus months, when rules call for lawmakers to meet only in informal sessions allegedly reserved for only non-controversial topics.

Spilka opened the door to a new approach late Friday afternoon, saying at 4:20 p.m. the Senate is “ready to return to work and pass this critical economic development bond authorization — and we are prepared to call a special formal session to get it done.” Mariano followed suit around 5 p.m., with caveats.

“The House remains committed to continuing to negotiate an economic development bill, one that fully invests in the life sciences sector and that makes the additional, critical investments the we have consistently pursued. We are prepared to return for a special session when such an agreement is reached,” Mariano said.

It could turn into a long salvage operation led by the same people who rammed the boat into the rocks in the first place. With that in mind, let’s unpack some fallacies revealed by the events of the past week.

Fallacy: They ran out of time

Time was not the enemy. Disagreement was.

The calendar did not change. Lawmakers had the same amount of time they always have, with the typical even-year July 31 deadline that’s been circled since the start of this session on Jan. 4, 2023. They simply could not set aside differences and get the work done.

And if they were truly worried about time, they would have managed things differently over the prior 19 months.

The House could have move on Healey’s economic development bill quicker than three months after she filed it, or her housing bond bill — which did eventually find success, but took up bandwidth doing so — four or five months after Healey offered it, instead of eight. Both branches sat for months on long-term care reforms and prescription drug price controls that originated on the other side of the building.

It was the second term in a row that legislative leaders couldn’t meet one of the few deadlines on their calendar. They kept their final formal sessions going until well past sunrise, but still gaveled out without agreements on scores of bills, not even a job growth bill that’s supposed to represent a crowning achievement, more juice for the state’s economic engine, and fodder for their own reelection efforts.

Unlike the 2022 mandatory-tax-relief bombshell, though, there was no last-minute surprise twist this time around. The ideas that House and Senate Democrats tried and failed to reconcile were complex, but they’d been vetted and debated for months if not years.

Fallacy: The Legislature needs a hard deadline to force compromise

It’s always been true that lawmakers like to leave most of their biggest decisions for the eleventh hour. A hard date on the calendar ups the stakes of negotiations, and forces one or both sides to soften their positions, leading to compromise.

But that was not the case this week. Mariano and Spilka procrastinated for most of the term, and once the deadline-day pressure arrived, they wilted in the July heat.

After getting deals done on housing, parentage definitions and veterans services, Mariano and Spilka decided they would rather walk away than plant a middle-ground flag on health care reform, clean energy siting, business and job growth. They couldn’t agree on a bill to use rainy day fund interest to attract federal funds, legislation where even Beacon Hill insiders couldn’t identify major sticking points. By the way, those federal funds are rolling out the door and are not waiting for Massachusetts to decide what it wants to do.

The last-minute approach also produced problems even in areas where lawmakers found agreement. In the middle of the night, a conference committee submitted an erroneous draft of a veterans services accord, forcing its members to trigger a little-used legislative rule that allowed them to follow the measure up with an errata striking six sections that were mistakenly included.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz (right) listens to House Speaker Ron Mariano in an early-morning talk with reporters on Aug. 1, 2024. Chris Lisinski/SHNS

Fallacy: Power is shared widely on Beacon Hill

Zero lawmakers voted against the House and Senate bills to control prescription drug prices, reform the long-term care sector, improve maternal health, and use state savings to compete for federal grants. Across both chambers, a total of three lawmakers voted against Steward-inspired hospital oversight measures, three against an opioid epidemic response bill, and two against an economic development package.

None of those bills made it to Healey’s desk.

All, or virtually all, of the 200 legislators who each represent roughly the same number of Bay Staters told top Democrats in no uncertain terms: we want these new laws, make it happen. But because the small number of top Democrats who really call the shots could not agree with one another, nothing on any of those fronts got done.

Legislative leaders prioritized their branch preferences over compromise. They could have taken off the table every House- or Senate-exclusive idea in negotiations, and sent Healey bills covering the many areas where both branches overlapped, but they chose not to.

Fallacy: a Democratic governor and a Democratic supermajority could get more done

For the first time in 10 years, House and Senate Democrats had a member of their own party in the corner office at the end of legislative formal sessions. And without the prospect of a Republican who might be more inclined to whip out his veto pen, legislative Democrats could not get out of their own way.

Healey paid a visit to Mariano’s office late Wednesday, which seemed significant. But the governor has largely taken a hands-off approach to the Legislature in public, saying their pace was normal and passing on chances, including one before midnight on Wednesday, to prod them a bit.

There was otherwise little evidence publicly during the overnight hours that her team was on the ground trying to bring Team Mariano and Team Spilka closer. By the time of the final gavel, only Healey’s housing proposal actually made it back to her desk.

Lawmakers tossed her economic development bill onto the “maybe we’ll do it later” pile, in the process effectively killing the borrowing authorizations — including for the life sciences and climate tech industries — Healey has pitched as critical.

“The economic development bond money and legislation are extremely important to Massachusetts. This is absolutely essential for economic growth and development, to support critical economic sectors, and to protect our economy and businesses in the face of increasing competition from other states,” Healey said Friday. “To that end, I am imploring the Senate and House to return as soon as possible and work together with me and my team to get this done. The people of Massachusetts deserve it and are counting on us.”

Her municipal reforms and local-option taxes never even got taken up for a vote in either branch, and the clean energy siting reforms largely drafted by the Healey administration got twisted in the age-old Jeff Roy-Mike Barrett policy tangle. The net result opened an old question anew: might the Legislature be more responsive if they had to deal with a Republican governor?

Fallacy: July 31 is the end of serious lawmaking, and informal sessions are for non-controversial topics only

The 1995 legislative rules reform creating an even-year, July 31 deadline envisioned a clear barrier between the biggest business in the Legislature and the start of campaign season outside the building. Top Democrats will now need to blur that line to prevent everything they cast aside from falling back down to the bottom rung starting in 2025.

If negotiators can find compromise during summer vacations or on the reelection trail, they will need to ask their colleagues to give final approval to major proposals during informal sessions that are usually the arena for bridge-naming bills and town charter changes, or need to call a special formal session as Spilka suggested.

The past few years have already featured a shift toward leaving big action for the informal stretch.

In 2022, when negotiators failed to agree to an earlier economic development bill before adjourning on Aug. 1, legislative leaders pushed a final compromise through in the fall. Last year, Republicans successfully stalled movement of a shelter funding supplemental budget for several days until enough House Democrats arrived to form a quorum and advance the measure.  This year, the Legislature will need to tackle the usual fall close-out budget as well as the supplemental budgets that passed each branch in recent weeks, but didn’t get done.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Save for a few legislative accomplishments, it was a dismal week on Beacon Hill capped off by one of the biggest failures to get work complete in recent memory.

SONG OF THE WEEK: Legislative leaders kept rank-and-file members, advocates, staff and press around from sunset to sunrise and still wound up punting some ideas for the second term in a row.