BOSTON — When she walks into the State House this week, Senate President Karen Spilka will be doing something no one has done — or been allowed to do — since the mid-1990s: leading the Massachusetts Senate into a ninth consecutive year.
Spilka was first elected president of the Senate on July 26, 2018, eight years ago Sunday. When she took the gavel, the Senate had a rule adopted 25 years earlier barring anyone from holding onto it for more than eight consecutive years. Had it not been wiped away by Senate Democrats three years ago, it would have forced Spilka to give up her power this weekend.
But now, the timeline for a leadership transition is almost entirely in Spilka’s hands. She told the News Service on Thursday, “We’ve done so much, but we still have more to do” and she suggested she is not thinking about handing off the gavel.
“Honestly, I don’t know. But I do believe that I will know when it’s time to go, and that’s when I’ll go,” she said in her third-floor State House office when asked how long she wants to remain president.
She has, though, signaled she is not leaving imminently.
Being elected president again in January 2027 could boost her tenure atop the Senate beyond a decade.
This May, she became the modern Senate’s second-longest-serving president, behind only President William Bulger’s 18-year tenure.
For years, the cast around Spilka in Senate leadership has barely changed and the Senate has run with little drama. The one blip in that steadiness came in the middle of November 2021, when she had what she called a “mild stroke,” dropped from public view for weeks, then was back presiding by late December.
That steadiness was not always a given. When Spilka first took the gavel eight years ago Sunday, she inherited a Senate in turmoil — but also a job she had maneuvered toward for years.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” the Ashland Democrat who worked as a labor lawyer and mediator before being elected to the Legislature in 2001 said as she banged the gavel for the first time as president.
In her speech that day eight years ago, Spilka, 65 at the time and 73 now, alluded to the complex circumstances that led up to her presidency, saying the Senate had recently “experienced difficult times” but was about to “write a different story.”
“As we turn the page and look to the future, I pledge to uphold and maintain the integrity of the Senate — for the public and for each and every senator, staff member, advocate and intern that passes through our doors,” Spilka said, drawing applause.
In her time atop the Senate rostrum, Spilka has pursued expansions of mental and behavioral healthcare services, updates to the way the state funds local education, stronger protections for reproductive rights and abortion care, a reform of the criminal justice and police accountability systems, and additional protections and state documentation for immigrants. She also guided the Senate through the COVID-19 pandemic and into a hybrid era that has seen some rules loosened and Senate customs altered.
She said she draws from her professional background in social work and conflict resolution to lead the Senate toward consensus and collaboration.
“I believe in my bones, deeply, in a collaborative style … whether you call it shared leadership or collaborative consensus building, that’s my style of leadership in the Senate,” Spilka said.
She added, “My caucuses go until people have nothing more to say. So if it’s an hour, or three hours, or four hours, we talk it out.”
School committee to Senate
Raised in Yonkers, New York, Spilka moved to Massachusetts after graduating from Cornell University, and worked as a waitress until she found a job counseling kids. She attended law school at Northeastern University to focus on juvenile justice, and went to work as a labor lawyer and later as a mediator.
In the late 1990s, she said in 2018, she ran for a school committee seat “because, to be blunt, I was pissed off about something that was going on in my district.” She became active in lobbying for reforms to the state school funding formula, which she has further addressed twice as Senate president.
She won a 2001 special election to succeed Rep. John Stefanini in the House of Representatives, and has said she visited the State House for the first time on the day she was sworn in.
Spilka arrived in the Senate in 2005 after serving three years in the House. She became the Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities and later co-chaired the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. She has long been active in economic development and animal protection issues.
Under Senate President Therese Murray, who stepped away from power due to the old term limit rule, Spilka rose in the ranks of leadership to become an assistant majority leader before she was tapped by Senate President Stanley Rosenberg to take over the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee when he took power in 2015. She ran for Congress in a 2013 special election to replace U.S. Sen. Edward Markey in the House, but came in fifth in the seven-way Democratic primary.
But Spilka’s ascension to the presidency played out amid disorder in the Senate, not as the conclusion of a more traditional succession.
Leadership in turmoil
Rosenberg gave up the presidency in December 2017 amid a scandal centered around his husband, Bryon Hefner, and as an Ethics Committee inquiry took shape into whether he’d enabled his husband’s alleged misconduct, which included allegations that Hefner sexually assaulted men with business pending on Beacon Hill and bragged about his alleged influence in the Senate. Rosenberg would resign his seat entirely five months later, sealing the abrupt end of the “shared leadership” style Rosenberg preached in the Senate.
Spilka was among a handful of senators who publicly made her interest in the presidency known even before Rosenberg stepped down, along with Sens. Eileen Donoghue of Lowell, Linda Dorcena Forry of Dorchester and Sal DiDomenico of Everett. Sens. Eric Lesser of Longmeadow and John Keenan of Quincy joined the jockeying later, and Forry left the Senate before the matter was settled.
Faced with an immediate void in the president’s suite, senators installed Majority Leader Harriette Chandler as a caretaker president in a dramatic full-Senate caucus that stretched into the night. Chandler was initially given the title “acting” president and the Worcester Democrat made clear from the outset that she didn’t want the job long-term, allowing for a scramble to play out among several other Democrats who wanted a more firm grasp on the gavel. But in early 2018, the Democratic caucus voted to strip the “acting” prefix from her title and voiced support for her to remain in the role through that year.
“An election will be held on the first date of the 2019 season, which is January 2, as is the normal course of business for the Senate,” Chandler said, adding that she would not seek the presidency at that point.
Spilka, then Ways and Means Committee chair, locked up the required votes by March 21, 2018. She never released her initial list of backers, but the News Service reported at the time that her claim to the presidency was cemented when blocs of Democrats aligned with DiDomenico and Lesser moved into Spilka’s camp with their endorsements.
Spilka said “it happened, I think, a little bit sooner than folks anticipated.”
Following awkward weeks of behind-the-scenes talks between Chandler and Spilka over timing, the hand-off landed at an unusual point: July 26, 2018.
The oddly-timed transition further inflamed the tense relationship between the House and Senate during that time period. That upset representatives and House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who said it violated an agreement he had struck with Chandler to hold formal sessions that weekend and that he “presumed” Spilka would honor it.
Eight years ago, Spilka became the 95th president, the third woman to lead the Senate, and its third Jewish president in a row. That afternoon, an eight-year clock began ticking.
A deadline removed
The Senate had imposed a limit on a president’s time leading the chamber in 1993, as Bulger’s 15 years in charge was starting to wear thin with some.
Sen. William Keating was challenging Bulger for the presidency, and had drawn support from a handful of other senators. Bulger appointed a special committee that came back with rules reforms that included the limit, which took effect on Jan. 4, 1995. Bulger left to lead the University of Massachusetts system in January 1996.
The rule originally covered several other leadership posts before being pared back in 2001 to the presidency alone.
Senate President Thomas Birmingham made a run for governor in 2002, approaching seven years in the presidency. His successor, Robert Travaglini, resigned after about four and a half years as president to start a lobbying firm.
But the Senate’s eight-year limit on the presidency came into play more meaningfully with President Murray, who took the gavel from Travaglini in March 2007.
By 2013, the limit was on Beacon Hill’s radar and questions began about the future of the Senate presidency, and Murray’s political career. She initially said the March 2015 expiration of her time as Senate president would not preclude her from running for reelection in 2014, but also declined to rule out a potential run for governor that year.
But by February 2014, with the limit just more than a year away, Murray announced that she would not run for governor or for reelection, and would end a 22-year career on Beacon Hill that saw her become the first woman elected to lead the Senate. She told Senate Democrats in a private caucus that she would finish out her term and not leave early for another job, and she gave way to Rosenberg in January 2015.
Boston Mayor Martin Walsh and former Senate Presidents Therese Murray (2007-2015) and Robert Travaglini (2003-2007) were among the guests at Spilka’s election as president.
The move to repeal the term limit on the presidency came fast and early in the 2023-24 session. Sen. Michael Rodrigues — whom Spilka has repeatedly picked for the Ways and Means Committee chairmanship that has been a springboard to the presidency — filed an amendment to the Senate’s rules package to simply strike the term limit rule.
The Westport Democrat said he made the proposal after discussing it with Spilka. The Senate voted 32-6 on Feb. 9, 2023, to remove it following very little discussion and no debate. The dissenters were the Senate’s three Republicans and three Democrats (Sens. John Keenan of Quincy, Becca Rausch of Needham, and Walter Timilty of Milton).
Those who objected argued the limit was worth keeping precisely because it forced change at the top. Rausch called term limits “a really important part of small-d democracy,” saying they “help advance new visions, new approaches.”
Rodrigues argued that the Senate president was the lone “Big Three” leader subject to a limit, which he said weakened the chamber against the House and governor, especially as any president neared the deadline and succession jockeying began. Spilka stayed out of the debate and issued only a written statement about the Senate being “on equal footing.”
On Thursday, she told the News Service that she believes — “and the senators evidently believed” — that the limit on the president’s time in office “put the Senate at a disadvantage … in negotiating with the House and the administration.”
“So I think this equalizes the Senate and the House, especially, and I think that really makes a difference,” she said.
For most of the last two-plus decades, Beacon Hill debate around term limits has been focused almost entirely on the House of Representatives, where a cap on a speaker’s tenure has been implemented and repealed multiple times. It has not been in place since 2015, which allowed DeLeo to become the longest-serving speaker in Massachusetts history in February 2020.
When Spilka took over in 2018, the News Service described an era of turmoil and turnover in the Senate coinciding with historic consistency in the House.
By early 2025, the next and most recent time that the Senate rules were up for a freshening, no senators had filed an amendment to bring back the president’s term limit, clearing the way for Spilka to exceed eight years and become the second-longest serving president of the Senate in the modern age, behind only Bulger.
Colin Young is the deputy editor for State House News Service and State Affairs Pro Massachusetts. Reach him at [email protected].
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