Governor Healey Sets a Modern Record for Vetoes; Her Own Party's Legislature Overrides Her to Raise Tolls on Out-of-Staters

BOSTON — Governor Healey vetoed a modern-record 31 bills this year, and on Wednesday a legislature controlled by her own party reconvened for the express purpose of restoring seven of them, including a ten-year transportation plan the governor had described as a tax increase and the legislature described as roads.

The override means the first toll increase for out-of-state drivers in 19 years, a widening of the interstate through the capital, and a reworking of two highway exits that have functioned for a generation as a civic personality test. The governor opposed the plan on the grounds that drivers without transponders would pay more; lawmakers observed that drivers without transponders are, by design, largely from somewhere else.

Also restored over the governor's objections: a right to a new trial for inmates with exonerating evidence, a broader medical-marijuana cultivation rule, and limits on local no-trespass orders. Upheld were the governor's vetoes of a bathroom bill and a book-restriction bill, so that the year's ledger records a governor who was overruled on the roads and sustained on the culture war, which is not the sentence either side planned to be able to write.

Supporters of Governor Healey called the vetoes principled fiscal discipline. Her party's legislators called them something that required a recount of who was in charge. The Press's veto desk notes that 'independent-minded' and 'lost the room' are the same governor viewed from the two ends of the same hallway.

"We respect the governor," said one legislative leader, shortly after demonstrating how much.

At press time the governor's pen was being returned to its stand, the toll gates were being recalibrated, and the modern record for vetoes was shared by one person with the modern record for being overridden by her friends.