A Senate Democrat from Salem tasked with forming new internal rules for the Legislature said she is open to replacing the long-standing joint committee structure with separate House and Senate panels after a lead House lawmaker floated the idea last month.

Individual bills are vetted by subject-specific joint committees made up of lawmakers from both branches. But the system faced issues during the last legislative session when the heads of an energy-focused committee openly feuded and held separate hearings on the same matters.

Sen. Joan Lovely, who is leading the rules reform effort for the Senate, said she envisions a new committee structure with separate panels that still hold hearings together but ship bills back to their respective branches.

“(The Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee) almost did an informal pilot last year and it worked and that’s a very busy, meaty committee,” she told the Herald. “So we’re gonna talk about it.”

Rep. Michael Moran, who served as House majority leader last session and is heading up rules talks for the chamber this year, suggested breaking up the joint committee process in an interview with the State House News Service last month.

The Brighton Democrat said separating joint committees would prevent bills from getting stuck in limbo.

“With that one move, it gets rid of the entire logjam at the committee level, right? Then the public — you want transparency? Then the public knows exactly where the bills are,” he told the wire service.

Lovely said the Senate has attempted to split the committee process since 2015.

“We really want to engage and talk about that,” she said this past week. “We actually have been talking about it for a while. It’s been pushed back from the House. But now that they’re talking about it, let’s talk about it.”

Both lawmakers pointed to the Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee led last session by Sen. Michael Barrett of Lexington and Rep. Jeff Roy of Franklin.

The two Democrats found themselves trading public barbs in 2023 over how much sway each branch’s members had on committee decisions.

The dispute led the lawmakers to schedule separate hearings on the same set of bills, a move that often required advocates, lobbyists, lawyers, and even lawmakers to testify twice on the same matter.

Barrett said the energy committee’s experience last session “went brilliantly.”

“I think this definitely can be done if that’s what the two branches want,” he said in an interview with the Herald this past week.

The dispute he had with Roy was “never personal,” Barrett said, and the underlying issue was about “how to preserve absolute equality between the two branches.” Nearly all of the state legislatures in the United States have separate hearings for each branch, he said.

“The joint committee process can work too, but the power-sharing there is more delicate, and both branches really need to be into power-sharing. When anything comes along to disrupt a branch’s inclination to share power equally, that wreaks havoc with the system that we have,” he said.

The separate committee hearings led by Roy and Barrett saw both branches draft different omnibus climate bills.

Talks on the bill broke down in dramatic fashion on the last day of formal sessions over the summer with Barrett and Roy pointing fingers at each other for failure to reach an agreement on the different proposals.

Roy accused the Senate of going back on its word by not advancing language around siting and permitting that had allegedly been agreed to before each branch publicly released its own climate bill earlier in the session.

“There’s no reason why we can’t do it and they agreed to do siting and permitting, and they’re going back on their word,” Roy said in the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 2024.

The breakdown in lawmaking at the end of formal sessions last year left people on and off Beacon Hill calling for reforms. House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka later pledged a new set of internal rules that attempt to promote transparency and efficiency.

House and Senate lawmakers typically debate their rules proposals at the end of January or the start of February. Lovely said the Senate will likely take up their reforms in “the next few weeks.”

“We want to get them done so we’re ready to hit our hearing process and start to get things rolling,” she said.