It may have adhered, by the tiniest hair on its chinny chin chin, to the letter of tradition, but it absolutely blasted the spirit of tradition right to the moon.

I speak of Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to appoint a Democrat to the seat formerly held by the chair of the House Progressive Caucus. The Progs are furious, and they have every right to be.

Scott’s flimsy rationale is that Emma Mulvaney-Stanak ran for House in 2022 as both a Prog and a Dem. Okay, sure, but c’mon now. Mulvaney-Stanak’s political identification is clearly Progressive. She served on Burlington City Council as a Prog. (For a time, she was the only Prog on City Council.) She ran for mayor of Burlington as a Prog. She served for four years as chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, for Pete’s sake.

I don’t care if she ran for House that one time in the Democratic primary. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is a Progressive through and through, and her replacement in the House should have been a Prog.

Where else could we take this? Sen. Dick Sears, a lifelong Democrat, won both the Democratic and Republican nominations in 2022. If he were to step aside, would Phil Scott choose a Republican to replace him? I don’t see why not, if the Mulvaney-Stanak maneuver constitutes a precedent.

How about the recently retired senator Dick Mazza, whose seat remains vacant for the time being? He actually had a token Republican opponent in 2022, but he had frequently won the Democratic and Republican nominations in the past. Why not consider him the same way as Mulvaney-Stanak?

What about Bernie Sanders? He’s about to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate at age 82. He is an independent, not a Progressive, and he will inevitably appear on the ballot as a Democrat this fall. If he didn’t serve out his is-year term, could Scott pull another fast one and either appoint a Democrat? Or worse, choose a nominal “independent” from the political center? He certainly wouldn’t feel bound to replace Bernie with a Progressive.

Let’s go the other way. What if longtime Republican Sen. Richard Westman leaves office under a Democratic governor? Westman routinely wins both major party primaries and runs as a Republican and a Democrat. Could a future Democratic governor cite what we should call “The Scott Loophole” and install a Democrat in Westman’s place?

See, there are all kinds of little games you could play now that Scott has opened the door to political chicanery. Which is why Vermont has had a long-entrenched tradition of filling a vacancy with a person of the same political persuasion as the former occupant. Scott has abided by this standard and stated his intention to do so as long as he is governor. But this decision erodes away at the value and purpose of the tradition.

This is the kind of jiggery-pokery that Scott consistently claims to be above. Truth is, he’s not. Phil Scott has been a politician for the past quarter century, running for office like clockwork every two years. He is a political animal, much as he likes to protest otherwise.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Politics is how we run things in a democracy. Just don’t think of Governor Nice Guy as being above the fray, or somehow immune to the pressures and impulses that come with being a politician. Don’t take his professions of principle at face value. The replacement of one of Vermont’s most prominent Progressives with a Democrat is the latest piece of evidence that Phil Scott is not a different animal. He’s one of the herd.