Cambridge Deserves Better From Beacon Hill

As Washington attacks so much of what makes Cambridge and Massachusetts strong — including our immigrant communities, research institutions, and social safety net — our state should be showing the country what progressive government can do.

Yet instead of solving the crises working families face, Beacon Hill lets bills with broad public support die behind closed doors.

I’ve spent the past decade organizing in Cambridge around social, racial, economic, and environmental justice — and I hope to hold our government accountable with common-sense legislation and transparency reforms.

Our state passes the fewest bills and ranks dead last in legislative transparency. This has a direct impact on Cambridge. Housing bills killed quietly in committee keep homes unaffordable. Childcare proposals delayed behind closed doors leave families paying impossible costs. Transit investments postponed make it more difficult and expensive to get to work.

State Representative Marjorie C. Decker, whom I am running against to represent Cambridge on Beacon Hill, consistently works for State House leadership instead of supporting Cambridge’s needs and representing our progressive values.

In 2024 and 2025, Representative Decker voted 100 percent in line with the Speaker of the House, according to Bob Katzen’s Beacon Hill Roll Call. Decker claims to support the right to shelter, yet voted to increase eligibility requirements for emergency housing. She voted for a dangerous social media ban for youth that would open the door to more surveillance and data collection writ large from large tech companies.

Representative Decker is also part of a larger trend of politicians working against voters’ interests. In 2023, months after Cambridge voters overwhelmingly supported the “Fair Share Amendment” to increase taxes on income above one million dollars, the State House passed tax cuts that cost more than $1 billion annually.

I support the budget’s increases to the Earned Income Tax Credit and expanded tax relief for families, renters, and seniors. But the same package also included roughly $347 million each year in estate tax, short-term capital gains, and corporate tax reductions.

I do not accept that helping working families requires hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent tax cuts for a small number of the wealthiest households and large corporations. We could be investing those resources in affordable housing, reliable public transportation, and accessible child care, elder care, and healthcare.

We need our government to work on behalf of ordinary people. We need far more affordable housing throughout the state, and public transportation people can actually depend on. Child and elder care should not be out of reach for ordinary families.

We need Massachusetts to end its voluntary state collaboration agreement with ICE, the only of its kind among Democratic states. And as Washington cuts support for science, the state should protect the research that is central to our economy and saves lives around the world.

State House leadership has failed to sufficiently act on these basic policies to help people. Bad legislation, tax cuts for the rich, and inaction on issues that count are all policy choices, and voters deserve to know who is making them.

One of the most basic tenets of representative democracy is knowing how your representative votes. Committee votes, where bills advance or die, were not available for the public until reform of the House rules finally passed this session, and the new rules still effectively aren’t being consistently followed. Residents could elect a representative, advocate for a bill, and nevertheless have no simple way to learn how that representative voted when the bill came before a committee.

Representative Decker has repeatedly opposed transparency reforms. In 2021, she voted against an amendment that would have made individual committee votes public. The next year, Cambridge voters made their position crystal clear: 94 percent of voters on the issue in our district supported a ballot question calling explicitly for that reform. Despite overwhelming support from our district, Representative Decker failed to fight for public committee votes.

Now we are seeing the same conflict play out again. In 2024, nearly 72 percent of Massachusetts voters approved a binding ballot measure authorizing the state auditor to audit the legislature. Yet just last month, Representative Decker voted for legislation that would constrain the scope of the audit that her constituents approved.

When voters speak this clearly about accountability, our representatives should listen. We deserve more transparency, not a system where leaders decide how much accountability they will permit.

I have faced this kind of institutional resistance before, and am ready to reform Beacon Hill. At Harvard, I helped organize graduate student workers, a landmark union victory for Massachusetts and universities nationwide. I later served as the union’s president. I know what it’s like to work for an institution that hides behind closed doors. The decisions on Beacon Hill affect our daily lives, and residents deserve to know who is making them.

On Sept. 1, Cambridge has the opportunity to turn the page and choose a politics that delivers – not for insiders, lobbyists, or House leadership, but for the people who make our community what it is.

Massachusetts residents deserve a government that works for all of us. That’s the democracy I’m running to build.

Evan C. MacKay ’19 is a candidate for state representative and former president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers.

This piece is part of a special feature asking the candidates in the Sept. 1 Democratic primary for the 25th Middlesex District to weigh in on one of the defining issues of the race: government transparency and legislative accountability. Read the companion piece by incumbent state Representative Marjorie C. Decker here.