A beacon in Boston.

• Author: Leccese, Mark
• Position: Massachusetts Senate Pres. Tom Birmingham

Guiding the Massachusetts Senate is a job for only the most competent leader. Tom Birmingham is that and a lot more.

Serving only his fifth year in the Massachusetts General Court, Tom Birmingham decided to buck tradition. The 46-year-old union lawyer wanted to follow such men as Samuel Adams, Horace Mann and Calvin Coolidge in assuming the presidency of the Massachusetts Senate, and, when rumors began circulating last summer that the sitting president planned to retire from the legislature, he saw his first chance.

He wouldn't wait around for a second chance.

In the Massachusetts Senate, as in many legislatures, long-standing practice awarded the job of presiding officer to the majority leader - in this case, a 17-year Senate veteran who had served 10 years in the Massachusetts House before moving to the upper chamber.

Birmingham, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who was born and raised in one of the state's poorest cities, quietly challenged the majority leader, campaigning among his fellow senators for support. He needed 16 votes from among the 40-member Senate's 30 Democrats.

Birmingham was appointed Senate Ways and Means Committee chairman in his first two-year term and helped see the state through a crushing fiscal crisis when the Massachusetts economy collapsed into a deep recession in the early 1990s. Then he spent five years working closely with each and every senator as the legislature crafted its annual state budget, which this year will top $17 billion. He was well-known to his colleagues.

By the time former Senate President William Bulger announced his resignation in December to move on to the presidency of the University of Massachusetts, Birmingham had enough pledged votes to win the Senate presidency easily. He assumed the post in the first week of January, in the middle of only his third (two-year) term.

ON A FAST TRACK

Everything - including climbing the leadership ladder - is moving faster in legislatures today, as a new generation of lawmakers takes over and the specter of term limits looms over the careers of men and women in public life.

Members of the Senate say term limits had little to do with Birmingham's rapid rise to the top, even though Massachusetts voters narrowly approved a ballot question in 1994 that started the clock ticking on four-term, or eight-year, limits on legislators and statewide officeholders. If the law remains in effect, Birmingham can serve only six more years.

One Republican, Senator Richard Tisei, says, "Term limits, if they played any role at all, played a very minor role" in Birmingham's election.

Birmingham himself agrees. "Term limits had an effect, but it wasn't dispositive of my thinking on whether to run or not. If there had been no term limits, I still would have sought the position."

He admits, however, that term limits "gave a certain resonance to my candidacy, in that I didn't have to answer the difficult question of 'Why not wait your turn?'"

Birmingham, in fact, doesn't consider the question of term limits important to governing - because he doesn't think they'll be around much longer.

"I think there's a very strong argument against them, that's that they're violative of the state constitution," says the graduate of Harvard Law School. "Federally, there's a question of whether state and federal term limits can be passed, and federal term limits have been thrown out in courts."

Across the building in the Massachusetts House, a similar struggle for succession unfolded in April when the speaker resigned after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion and admitting to violation of the state's conflict-of-interest laws.

Again, in the House, the fight was between the...