King Sal

If the high-mindedness DiMasi brought to the gay-marriage and healthcare debates showed him at his best, it also only makes it that much harder to comprehend the borderline churlishness he's displayed on other issues. Take last year's energy bill. To get it passed, DiMasi seized another large, divisive issue, and brokered another unlikely coalition, this one among environmentalists, businesses, and the administration. But this time, not without also inflicting harsh punishment on members who had gotten out of line, and, more importantly, setting aside some time to mercilessly kick the governor around.

Patrick had garnered praise for his campaign rhetoric on energy policy, and he looked likely to make it a cornerstone of his environmental and economic development portfolio. But in December 2006, on the same day the governor-elect was scheduled to address an energy summit, DiMasi announced he'd be filing comprehensive energy legislation, and that it would be the House's top priority in 2007. He then involved the administration in the debate on his bill—for which he was hailed as a great compromiser. Given that among the more significant compromises DiMasi struck with Patrick was agreeing not to strip the executive branch of several important oversight powers, the governor can be forgiven if he fails to appreciate the magnanimity. It also couldn't have helped when, during a press conference announcing the breakthrough, DiMasi used the occasion to happily twist the knife. "I did say it was a great cooperative effort," he told a roomful of reporters and policymakers. Then he turned to Patrick—a man he towers over—and tossed a grenade at him. "It took 11 months, by the way. Sometimes, when you go slow and steady, you come up with something really, really good." He made a point of peering at the governor, then asked, "Did you get that?"

"I got it," Patrick replied, trying to play along.

"Jeez," DiMasi shrugged. "Very pushy, this guy."

In the end, DiMasi's energy measures didn't make it to the House floor for a vote until the final day of last year's formal sessions. DiMasi had imposed a strict cutoff date for submitting amendments to the bill—of which members submitted dozens—then blew his own deadline. While the House remained in recess for hours, with members chatting on their cell phones, milling about and snacking on leftover Halloween candy, his leadership team worked in private to consolidate the amendments they were willing to accept, and discarded the ones they weren't. The green-lighted amendments were introduced on the floor, but as the House clerk began to speed-read each one, DiMasi cut him off. They passed instead on voice votes, without debate. "You've got 20 minutes to look at 20 pages and figure out what's what," a discontented backbencher says. "I defy anybody to do that." Nobody could, which seems to account for how DiMasi and his lieutenants were able to sneak through a late rider opening the state's coastal waters to unfettered wind-turbine development. Blasted as a giveaway to a DiMasi pal, developer Jay Cashman, it's now the subject of a showdown with the Senate.

In the energy bill's wake, the same backbencher, who asked to remain anonymous, says, "there's a lot of discontent in the House with the way things are working. A lot of my colleagues are afraid to confront the speaker. They're afraid to lose their perks, and I don't blame them." The backbencher believes the speaker's leadership team is becoming "vindictive." Representative Jim Marzilli is cited as one victim of that new trend. His crime: He filed an energy bill that competed with DiMasi's, which promptly got him bounced from his vice chairmanship of the influential Health Care Financing Committee. (He did not return calls for comment.) "It's Sal's bill, so it goes through Sal's way," says a Beacon Hill insider. "Marzilli got a bullet in his head because he had his own ideas on the bill that was the cornerstone of Sal's agenda." House minority leader Brad Jones notes the irony. "I've said to Tom Finneran, ‘It's amazing—now people will think of you as a process liberal,'" he says. "Whatever excesses or shortcomings there were [under Finneran], many people would say the current speaker has taken those even further."