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By Fred Berman

Kathleen Hornby has chosen character assassination as her strategy, presumably hoping that if she throws enough out-of-context misrepresentations and misstatements at her Democratic Primary opponent, incumbent Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven, some of her claims will stick, whether or not they are true.

So, for example, she stated that Rep. Uyterhoeven “joined the Republican Caucus in voting AGAINST emergency shelter funding in 2024.” Ms. Hornby neglected to mention that the bill that Rep. Uyterhoeven and other progressives voted against substantially undermined the Commonwealth’s 40-year Right-to-Shelter commitment to homeless Massachusetts parents, children, and pregnant women by creating an unrealistic 9-month deadline for achieving sustainability and discharge… even as it provided supplemental funding for the last two months of this fiscal year.

As Ms. Hornby knows from her years working at the State House, legislators often have to vote on bills that contain some good provisions and some problematic ones. Sometimes, the principled position is to vote “no” and reject a short-term benefit, if voting “yes” would mean supporting provisions with serious adverse consequences. And sometimes, taking the principled stance makes legislators vulnerable to misrepresentations by political opponents who fail to explain the context in which the vote was taken…

Thus, for example, Ms. Hornby claimed that Rep. Uyterhoeven “voted AGAINST child and family tax credits,” but she neglected to mention that the Governor’s $1.1 billion tax cut package, which included those tax credits, also included deeply regressive tax cuts that exacerbated income and wealth inequalities, and as originally proposed, seriously undercut the impact of the Fair Share Amendment, which had been passed by voters to bolster funding for education and infrastructure, including long-overdue MBTA maintenance.

Significantly, Ms. Hornby also failed to mention that Rep. Uyterhoeven played a leading role (along with Sen. Jehlen) in sponsoring and winning support for amendments that removed some of the worst provisions of the originally proposed tax cut legislation (See Mass Budget’s summary analysis at https://massbudget.org/2023/09/26/tax-package-statement/) … and once the legislation was thusly amended, Rep. Uyterhoeven voted for this less regressive tax cut bill, which included the very same child and family tax credits that Ms. Hornby claimed that Rep. Uyterhoeven voted against.

Ms. Hornby claimed that Rep. Uyterhoeven “filed ZERO budget amendments to bring money to Somerville in this year’s State budget,” apparently overlooking Rep. Uyterhoeven’s role in 2024 in leveraging $54M for Somerville Public Schools, $1.2M for road repairs, $150K for the Somerville Homeless Coalition and $100K for a City of Somerville pilot to provide interim housing subsidies for limited income seniors waiting to get into elderly public housing, $30K for Groundwork Somerville, $1M for Greentown Labs, $1M to expand SCALE’s adult education and English literacy programming, and $5M to improve pedestrian access to the East Somerville MBTA station.

Given Ms. Hornby’s misrepresentations of Rep. Uyterhoeven’s efforts, one wonders how much credibility to assign to her description of her own work “help[ing] shepherd multiple bills and amendments through the legislative process, from drafting to endorsement.” Presumably, Rep. Marjorie Decker, Ms. Hornby’s unmentioned State House employer, played the more substantial role in all those efforts, even if Ms. Hornby “helped.”

In terms of their positions on issues of concern to Somerville residents, Rep. Uyterhoeven (https://www.electerika.com/issues) and Ms. Hornby (https://www.kathleenhornby.com/issues) are both “progressives,” notwithstanding Ms. Hornby’s misrepresentations. Over the course of her two terms, Rep. Uyterhoeven has demonstrated a commitment to effectively partnering with her colleagues in the Somerville delegation, as well as with other progressive legislators.

Integrity and transparency have been central to Erika Uyterhoeven’s prior work with Act On Massachusetts and as our current State Representative. By contrast, Ms. Hornby’s campaign mailings smearing her opponent with out-of-context misrepresentations and misstatements appear to demonstrate a disquieting, and for me disqualifying, lack of integrity.

Next week, we will find out whether hers was nonetheless a winning approach to challenging an incumbent.