A contempt for constituents: why Rep. Decker lies

On September 1st, about half of Cambridge will be voting for a Representative in the MA House. The current incumbent is Rep. Marjorie Decker, and she is being challenged by Evan MacKay; whoever wins the primary will represent me, and maybe you, depending where you live.

In a previous post I talked about how much lobbyists love Rep. Decker. In this post I’m going to cover the time she lied to the public, over and over and over again. And more importantly, I’m going to provide some evidence about why she lied to the public, as embodied in her opposition to transparency measures in the legislature, and what that tells you about how she operates as an elected official.

Secret lobbying, while claiming no position

First, a little background.

On Sundays, from spring to fall, Memorial Drive is closed to cars and converted to a lovely park. During the pandemic this was expanded to Saturdays. Then, after a meeting between DCR (the relevant state agency) and the few residents who opposed to the closure, DCR shut down Saturday parks with no notice or further discussion. After a massive public outcry, they reversed course, and had multiple public meetings on the topic.

During the resulting public discussions, many park supporters reached out to Rep. Decker. The relevant part of Memorial Drive is in her district, and state agencies give a lot of deference to local state representatives. Eventually, she put out a statement claiming neutrality on the topic, saying she had “not ever publicly or privately advocated against Saturday closings [to cars].”

But a public records request revealed a letter from Secretary Tepper of the state Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs (EOEEA), that recounts a meeting with Cambridge representatives where “Rep. Decker reiterated her position that she was opposed to the park and she hoped none of her colleagues would attempt to force this on her district.”

“Reiterated” suggests this wasn’t a one-off, but a repeated statement she made to state officials.

Doubling down on the lie

Once the public records came out, Rep. Decker put out another statement saying “The email from Secretary Tepper does not, and never has, reflect either my current position, or any position I have articulated in the past. The fact is that I have never stated any personal opposition to the closure of Memorial Drive on Saturdays.”

Should we believe this denial? Apparently not.

Cambridge Day journalist Mike Gajda confirms that Rep. Decker’s second statement was also false:

A person present at the meeting described it to Cambridge Day long before the state released Tepper’s memo; the memo seems to confirm the first account as accurate. Specifically, Decker was remembered as asking her colleagues to take no further action to open the park on Saturdays.

Decker consistently opposed the park conversion, lied about her position, and when she was caught out, she lied some more.

Stacking the deck, and more false statements

Rep. Decker’s staff later convened a neighborhood meeting with the DCR commissioner, which was attended by staff from the governor’s office, EOEEA, and city councilors. The meeting only allowed opponents of the park to speak; the moderator said anyone who supported the park would be “purged” from the room. Perhaps in order to ensure that only opponents of the park were present, the meeting was announced to the general public with less than 24 hours notice, after 11pm at the end of the previous night’s City Council meeting.

After organizing a meeting that was designed to only allow opponents of the park conversion to speak to the commissioner, Rep. Decker also took the opportunity to falsely accuse one of her colleagues of not listening to residents:

Decker criticized her colleagues for not being more involved in discussions with these residents. “I have a colleague, a rep, who’s gone out to rally for this,” she said, referring to Riverbend Park Saturdays. “I begged that rep, Mike Connolly, I said please come to the neighborhood. Please come meet with constituents before you go rally for this.”

But as the Cambridge Day explains, Rep. Connolly had listened to both sides, unlike Rep. Decker:

The record shows Connolly did that. The city held three community meetings online and in-person in 2022 about Riverbend Park [which were attended by DCR staff] that were advertised in the neighborhood with laminated posters attached to street signs. Online notes by city staff for two of them say who attended, including Connolly. Decker is not identified as attending. A survey and other requests for opinions at the June 28 event drew comments in favor and against; an online meeting Sept. 14 drew 140 people; the in-person forum Oct. 6 had approximately 60 people, about the same number as Tuesday’s meeting.

A one-off situation, or a broader problem?

The problem I am focusing on here is not that Rep. Decker opposed the park conversion. Given Rep. Decker felt strongly about the topic, I can’t fault her for following her principles, even if I disagree with her conclusion.

The problem is that she repeatedly claimed to be neutral, while at the same time secretly lobbying DCR for a specific outcome. In short, the problem is that she lied.

And if she lied about an issue that really wasn’t that important, can we trust what she says about more important topics? To answer that we need to ask another question.

Rep. Decker could have said publicly, from the start, that she was opposed to the park conversion on Saturdays. Certainly a number of Cambridge City Councillors did so. She felt she was doing the right thing; why not tell us about it? Why did she lie?

I believe it’s because of how she sees her job as a representative.

Keeping committee votes secret

In 2021, the MA House discussed changing the rules that would have them post committee votes—who voted yes, who voted no—publicly on their website. On the face of it, this is a basic transparency measure: how can you judge what your elected officials are doing if they hide how they voted? But Rep. Decker was opposed to making committee votes public.

In a speech at the time, she explained that if it’s easier to pass a bill without sharing information publicly, then passing the bill is more important: “if there ever comes a day where I decide that [sharing how I voted] in a given moment, would jeopardize the ability to move an important life-saving bill forward I would also be transparent to [my constituents] why I might choose to pause for a moment.” Transparency, for Rep. Decker, means trusting her to do the job, even with no information about what she’s doing.

Importantly, this idea of hiding information from the public in order to pass legislation is not theoretical. Earlier in the speech she gives an example where committee members needed to hide their vote from right-wing voters in their districts, in order to move the bill forward.

This is pretty shitty to voters; everyone deserves to know what their representatives are doing, even if I might not agree with their responses. After all, who is to say that Rep. Decker isn’t likewise hiding information from me and you, in order to get bills passed? Plus, given a legislature with a Democratic super-majority, the idea that the only way to get things done is to hide how they vote seems implausible.

You can watch her closing statements here; rewind to minute 53 or so to listen to her whole testimony:

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Accountability means running unopposed

It seems like Rep. Decker’s conception of her job is that of someone who decides the best policy and does what it takes to enact it. The accountability Rep. Decker expects from constituents is at the ballot box. As she explains in the speech linked to above, if they don’t like the outcomes, “they will decide maybe I’m not the person they want to keep there.”

This is a very convenient form of accountability, given the Democratic candidate in Cambridge runs unopposed, and representatives almost never get challenged in their primaries; this speech was given 3 years before she had any sort of real challenger. So in the past the only thing holding her accountable were her colleagues in the legislature, and her own conscience; the public she nominally worked for were irrelevant.

What voting for Rep. Decker gets you

All of this helps explains why Rep. Decker lied about Memorial Drive: achieving the best outcome (as defined by her) is the only thing that matters. It was simply more effective to lie to the public, and lobby in secret for what she considered the correct outcome, than it was to tell the truth. And since she had no reason to believe she would be challenged credibly in the primary, there was no risk of blowback.

Which leads to the decision of who to vote for—

If you vote for Rep. Decker, you will get someone who will do whatever it takes to do what she thinks is right.

What you think about the issues is irrelevant. If you have facts or ideas that might change her opinion, good luck. First, you might not even know that her opinion needs changing, because she is happy to lie to you about her position if it’s useful to achieve her goals. Second, she won’t talk to you.

So if you think Rep. Decker will always be right about every single issue, then you should vote for her. You’d be joining, as mentioned above, 130 different lobbyists who voted for her with their money.

But if you think that sometimes your Representative might be wrong, or might benefit from hearing additional opinions, or owes you an honest accounting of their reasoning, or should at least listen to you even when they disagree—then you should vote for Rep. Decker’s opponent, Evan Mackay.

And I do plan to provide a more detailed comparison of the two, but that’ll be a whole other article.

A bit more

Take action: If you can vote, but September 1st is going to be inconvenient for some reason the legislature had absolutely no way of foreseeing when they chose this date, you should register to vote by mail.

Song of the day: Punk Boy by Joey Ramone & Helen Love.