Gov. Phil Scott intended for his weekly press conference to be another rant against what the Legislature might do on housing reform. His basic message: Give me the bill that I want.

Which isn’t how things work when you have divided government, and the Dem/Prog supermajority has just as much claim to a mandate as the Republican governor. There’s give and take. There’s compromise. It’s called governance.

Eventually, the subject of Tax Commissioner Craig Bolio’s ill-fated trial balloon came up. You know, the one where he wanted to defer an unidentified bunch of school expenses for an unspecified number of years in order to artificially reduce property taxes this year? Yeah, the one that was shot down right quick by Treasurer Mike Pieciak due to concerns about what that kind of borrowing to pay for ongoing expenses, not any kind of capital investment would do to the state’s credit rating.

Scott, a fiscal conservative all his political life, seemed rather blasé at the prospect of triggering a credit downgrade that might hurt state finances for years if it bought him some short-term tax relief.

He emphasized that the unspecified but massive cost deferral could affect our credit rating. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. “We might suspect that they would look unfavorably on this,” he said, “but if there was a plan to reduce costs in conjunction with this deferment, it could work.”

Okay, well, Scott wants to ignore Pieciak’s informed and considered “could,” but he’s happy to plow ahead with a plan that “could work.” See the inconsistency there?

Time for some word salad!

What the Treasurer could do is tell us what the, um, if, if, if, that’s a big if, if the bonding agencies decide to downgrade our credit rating, what’s the effect? How much will that cost? And then weigh it out from, in, in relationship to what we know is going to impact the $200M is going to impact Vermonters versus what is the, what is the negative effect on Vermont.

What he’s trying to say — I think — is that the effect of property tax increases might be worse than whatever the rating agencies would do. Which, again, is a remarkably blasé attitude about imperiling Vermont’s ability to borrow money at a reasonable cost. As we have to do regularly in order to run the state.

Later, Scott put the onus on the Legislature to rescue his stupid idea. “They ought to get creative and make it work without affecting our bond rating,” he said. “They’re smart people. They’re smart people.”

The governor thinks the House and Senate are full of “smart people”? That is news. This is the same group he insults on the regular. It’s the group he just got done insulting over how to tackle the housing crisis.

What he’s asking is for a bunch of elected Democrats to clean up his mess and make it work somehow. And he wants them to perform multiple impossible tasks in the blink of an eye.

Reminder that we are very late in the legislative session. Adjournment usually comes in early May. Bolio appeared before the House Ways & Means Committee on Friday, April 12 with a “plan” that might have been scrawled on a napkin over breakfast, it was so lacking in detail. And here’s what Phil Scott wants other people to do while he sits back and watches.

• Craft actual legislation fleshing out his cockamamie idea
• Devise a multi-year plan to cut school expenses
• Figure out exactly how the rating agencies will react to all of this

School finance is a third rail in Vermont politics. It’s endlessly complicated. It touches on so many different interests. It affects different jurisdictions in different ways. It has defeated the efforts of many “smart people” to make it more transparent and efficient.

Need I remind you that we’re in this property tax mess right now thanks to an unintended consequence of an education funding bill that became law last year? And now the governor wants us to do those three impossible things listed above, and do them flawlessly in record time?

I ask again, how does this guy get his reputation as a reliable steward of our government?