DiMasi outski

The trickle of bad news for the House Speaker has reached a nice gush and so he has handed in his resignation and is leaving Beacon Hill.
Does this story sound familiar?
It ought to, it is roughly the same end meted out to the last two Speakers of the Great and General Court.
Seems to me, that the Speakership has become an "attractive nuisance" in state politics, a little too much power and far too much in the way of easy pickin's for friends, family and sundry sycophants.
I'm glad the Governor is putting up a new public ethics bill, sharpening those teeth is long overdue...but the House of Representatives is in desperate need of a structural overhaul that puts temptation out of reach and decentralizes power.
Until that happens we will be back here again and again and again...and don't think for a minute that a switch in the majority party on Beacon Hill will change things one whit. Weld-Cellucci-Swift-Romney had sixteen years to do something about public ethics from their end of the deal and they did patently nothing.
None of those governors cared at all about Flaherty or Finneran's excesses until they got caught.
Then some shocked and pious noises were emitted, nothing more.
Meanwhile with no real pressure from without, the autocracy of the Speakership grew by leaps and bounds. The problem is one of power, too much of it is concentrated into one pair of hands that has to change.