It was never a question of “whether” Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Kennealy was going to be asked about his tour as former Gov. Charlie Baker’s housing and economic development czar.
It was just a question of “when,” and it can safely be said that time is now. And the call, as they say, is coming from inside Baker’s own cabinet.
In a decidedly barbed email, GOP hopeful Brian Shortsleeve, who helmed the MBTA under Baker (and, who it must be said, probably has some explaining to do there, as well), slammed his onetime colleague for what he described as his “hypocrisy” for his criticisms of Democratic Gov. Maura Healey’s management of the state’s hugely expensive emergency shelter system.
“Before there were Healey Hotels, there were Kennealy Hotels,” Shortsleeve said, using the GOP shorthand for the chain hotels awarded lucrative contracts to house waves of migrant new arrivals.
“The inconvenient truth is that, as housing secretary, Mike Kennealy was the one who first opened hotels to illegal immigrants, and instead of demanding reforms, he urged the Legislature to give him $130 million to expand the migrant shelter system before Maura Healey took office.”
In a statement, a Kennealy spokesperson dismissed what he described as Shortsleeve’s “snake oil salesman routine.”
“The auditor already debunked this claim in one of her reports,” Kennealy spokesperson Logan Trupiano said. “His statement is just … desperation after yet another night of Republican caucuses where he earned little or no support from prospective (GOP) convention delegates.”
The sharp elbows come as no surprise. Public polling shows Shortsleeve, Kennealy and medical device executive Michael Minogue have plenty of ground to make up in name recognition before the Sept. 1 primary.
Healey, who faces vulnerabilities of her own on affordability, her role in high energy prices and her management of the state shelter system, held a double-digit lead over all three of her Republican challengers in a UMass Amherst/WCVB-TV poll released last November.
And more than half of the 183 self-identified Republican respondents in the poll said they did not know enough about the three GOP candidates to make up their minds.
Kennealy, meanwhile, has been a vocal critic of Healey’s stewardship of the emergency shelter system, which filled to the brim and saw its expenses balloon to nearly $1 billion during the first two years of her first term.
“We’re spending nearly a billion dollars a year to house migrants while veterans sleep on the streets, the Cape fights for Sagamore Bridge funding, schools can’t afford proper air conditioning, courts can’t afford to properly function and municipalities struggle to stay afloat. Maura Healey’s priorities are so backwards it’s offensive to every hardworking resident of this state,” Kennealy fumed in a statement last October.
Shortsleeve’s campaign pointed to a December 2022 letter to the top Democrats on the budget-writing House and Senate Ways and Means committees, where Kennealy “boasted of expanding the migrant shelter system, including ‘placing families in hotels with onsite social services staff.’”
Kennealy further “demanded $130 million in supplemental funding for the shelter system. Nowhere in his letter did he suggest any reforms to protect taxpayers or limit eligibility for the program,” Shortsleeve’s campaign asserted in its email broadside.
If elected, Shortsleeve vowed to “reform the emergency shelter system to ensure only U.S. citizens who are residents of Massachusetts are eligible. We will return the system to its original purpose, which was to provide temporary housing to families with children and pregnant women, while also prioritizing homeless veterans.”
Last January, Healey proposed residency rules for shelter recipients, requiring applicants to prove that they had been in the state for at least three months before qualifying for shelter. Shelter recipients were also limited to a six-month stay.
The Democratic administration also ended hotel stays as the number of families in the system dropped dramatically last year.
So in some ways, it feels as though Kennealy and Shortsleeve are fighting the last war.
But as long as illegal immigration remains a front-of-mind issue for the GOP base, and with ICE agents in the streets, it remains fertile political ground. And Healey will have to answer for her management of the system.
Pressley looks to preserve protected status for Haitians
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-7th District, wants to force her colleagues to vote on a measure that would preserve temporary protected status for tens of thousands of Haitian migrants — including many in Massachusetts.
The Boston Democrat filed a discharge petition last week on a bill that would extend protected status for those migrants past the current Feb. 3 expiration date ordered by the Trump administration.
Pressley, the co-chair of the House’s Haiti caucus, represents thousands of Haitian immigrants, many of whom make up the backbone of the state’s health care and elder care sector.
Some 350,000 Haitians nationwide would be at risk of deportation to the war-torn Caribbean nation if the status is not extended, she said.
“Extending TPS for Haiti isn’t just the moral, humanitarian thing to do — it is also good policy,” she said.
The U.S. government granted the temporary legal status to Haitians after the country was devastated by an earthquake in 2010. And since the country’s president was killed in 2021, violent gangs run much of the country, Marketplace reported.
Health care industry leaders have warned that ending the immigrant status would not only be bad for the migrants, but it also would be bad for business, creating serious staffing shortages.
Pressley and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., convened community leaders at a hearing last week to examine the state-level impact of allowing TPS to expire.
There, Pressley said she had “urged Democratic and Republican presidents alike … to support Haiti in its efforts to build the nation, to support a democratic transition,” State House News Service reported.
Markey echoed that point, saying, “I have called on every recent American president to designate, extend and re-designate TPS for Haiti.”
Markey said that despite evidence of worsening conditions, “it’s clear to all, including the Trump administration, that Haitian TPS holders cannot return home safely. That’s what we give that protection for, because they cannot go home.”
Speaking of Ed Markey, the Malden pol has called on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to rethink a rules revision that would remove gender dysphoria from the government’s official list of recognized disabilities.
Markey, joined by fellow U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week arguing that the rule, if allowed to stand, would institutionalize discrimination.
The senators argued it’s also the latest transphobic action from the Republican White House, noting that gender dysphoria is a recognized psychological diagnosis.
“We are gravely concerned that this proposed rule, if finalized, will not only invite discrimination against people with gender dysphoria, but will also set a precedent for additional exclusionary regulations and practices to take root — targeting other members of the disability community and the broader populace,” they wrote.
Communities across northeastern Massachusetts will share in more than $7.5 million for projects ranging from $2 million for intersection improvements in Lowell to $850,000 for UMass Lowell, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-3rd District, said.
The latest round builds on $5 million in federal funding that Trahan said she secured for projects across the district.
Here’s a complete list of those projects, by the numbers:
• $850,000: UMass Lowell’s Strategic Property Acquisition in Support of the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC).
“Families across our district deserve safe roads, dependable infrastructure, and real opportunities to build a better life for themselves and their children,” Trahan said, adding that the infusion of federal cash will “make everyday life better for residents in communities large and small by improving safety, strengthening local infrastructure, and creating pathways to economic opportunity.”
They said it
“It is the willingness of those with the power to do something up here to engage in misapplication of the law when it’s convenient and when it suits them.”
— Massachusetts state Auditor Diana DiZoglio denounces what she describes as a culture of “collusion” among her fellow Democrats on Beacon Hill.
Mass. Gov. Healey’s big speech to the Legislature: Five things to know. And why it matters to you.
‘This is their home’: Mass. lawmakers roast Trump’s plan to end protected status for Haitians
In Maine surge, ICE targets one of the safest states in the nation
Trump budget office orders review of funds to Mass., other Democratic-controlled states
2 activists arrested after locking themselves to each other in L3Harris lobby
Mass. tees up repairs for I-93 bridge in Dorchester. What you need to know. When it starts
Her son struggled to read. Now the Mass. Senate’s top Dem is making literacy a priority for 2026
Rockers Big Head Todd and the Monsters play The Cabot in Beverly on Feb. 20 (info and tickets here). While they’re amazing on record, they really explode on stage. For proof, here’s a live version of their classic “Bittersweet.”
President Donald Trump raised eyebrows ― and prompted invocations of the 25th Amendment — last week when he suggested he’d no longer give peace a chance because he’d been passed over for a Nobel Prize.
But from ancient Rome to our modern era, war-makers have constantly spoken of their devotion to peace, Timothy Joseph, a classics professor and the director of Peace and Conflict Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, wrote in a recent analysis for the public policy site The Conversation.
In case you’d missed it, Trump wants a Nobel the way some among us want to be a first-round pick for the Patriots. And he’s often described himself as a peacemaker who ends wars.
But, as Joseph writes, “the word ‘peace’ can mean something entirely different when used by those wielding power.”
“In the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, ‘With lying names they call theft, slaughter and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”
“This line, said of the Romans by an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ work “Agricola,” has had a long and varied afterlife among those commenting on imperialism.
“Nearly 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the phrase in a 1968 speech questioning the U.S. war in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his homeland’s centuries of desolation; more recently still, the HBO series “Succession” reworked the words into a critique of the show’s despotic central character.
“The quotation has had staying power because it cuts to the core of how talk of peace can be used as a tool of war and power acquisition.
“At the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, these words from two millennia ago speak as presciently as ever.
“Time and again over the last year, Trump has branded acts of war with the language of peace. More broadly, his administration’s persistent styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his continuous claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a growing agenda of military aggression, both foreign and domestic.”
That’s it for today. As always, you can send questions, comments and tips my way at jmicek@masslive.com. Have a good week, friends.…Read more by John L. Micek | jmicek@masslive.com