The headline might seem outrageous, and I’m sure it won’t make anyone on the Fifth Floor happy, but it’s the plain truth.

Vermont’s judiciary system is grossly underfunded and understaffed. The result is a huge backlog of pending cases measured, not in weeks or months, but in years. Gov. Phil Scott’s solution? Cut a few more positions from the courts.

This is the same governor who said, in his State of the State address, that public safety was one of his top priorities. The House decided to boost the Judiciary instead of strangling it, and approved a bill that would pay for more positions in the court system by increasing corporate taxes and fees by a skosh or two. This appears to be a no-go for Scott, who would rather kill any kind of tax or fee increase than, I don’t know, fully fund the judicial system at a time when he claims that we face a public safety crisis.

This was one of the bills that caused Vermont Republicans to lose their collective shit, accusing the Democratic majority of going “off the rails” and being “out of control.” (Former state rep Heidi Scheuermann, perhaps feeling unleashed as a private citizen, took to Twitter to accuse the Dems of having “their heads up their asses.”)

They have an argument, although their rhetoric is ridiculously overblown. House Democrats have boasted that their budget plan is almost dead even with Scott’s in terms of dollars spent. Which is true, BUT. They did so by taking some stuff out of the budget and into policy bills with specific, dedicated revenue sources.

It’s gimmicky, for sure. House Dems wanted to have their cake (claim fiscal moderation) and eat it too (try to solve very real problems). In the end it didn’t save them a bit of political grief since the Repubs had their hair triggers set to react to any revenue increase whatsoever. (It also won’t get anywhere close to the governor’s desk because chief Senate budget writer Jane Kitchel has made it clear she doesn’t like funding mechanisms stuffed into policy bills.)

They could have just folded those items and their revenue sources into the budget, laid it out, and said, “Look, these are things we need to take care of. We looked for ways to fund them without raising taxes on working Vermonters, and we succeeded. The governor just wants to ignore our problems and hope they go away.”

It’s a good argument. It’s honest and forthright. It ought to put the governor on the defensive. Because he’s painted himself into a rhetorical corner: Raise the alarm about big problems like housing, crime, workforce, and substance use, and refuse to make a serious commitment to tackling any of them.

Well, aside from regulatory reform. Scott’s spokesperson Jason Maulucci accused the Dems’ crime bill of “throwing money at a problem.” His alternative, per VTDigger: “further changes to criminal justice legislation.”

Great. We have a multi-year backlog based on current criminal law, and Maulucci would address it by cutting the overstretched Judiciary even further and adding new laws that will require enforcement.

It’s nonsensical. It’s irresponsible. If the Dems couldn’t win that political argument, they ought to find some less challenging line of work.