A good piece of political journalism will accomplish two things: It will explain what’s been happening and give you a peek at what’s ahead. VTDigger’s Sarah Mearhoff accomplished both in her recent look back at the 2024 legislative session, specifically the bitter divide between Gov. Phil Scott and the Dem/Prog supermajorities. It’s obvious that the rarely healthy relationship took a measurable turn for the worse in 2024.

The best bit — the Rosetta Stone that explains it all — goes back to the very end of the 2023 session, when the Legislature overrode six Scott vetoes. That’s a huge number. Overrides have been extremely rare throughout Vermont history. I haven’t done a deep dive, but I’ll bet that six is the all-time record for a single year. Scott comms director Rebecca Kelley called the veto session “eye-opening,” and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth believes that was when the governor changed course:

“I think at that point, they had their own existential moment where they said, ‘We have to get super aggressive and go after these people,’” Baruth said.

Longtime Statehouse lobbyist Rebecca Ramos noted the “breakdown in communication” this year and added there was “just not a lot of interest in repairing it.”

That’s not a good look for the near future, with Scott practically a shoo-in for re-election and the Dems and Progs virtually certain to carry substantial majorities — or retain their supermajorities — into the new biennium. We face a daunting array of crises and challenges, and a soured executive/legislative relationship would be a significant barrier to real progress, no matter how you define that term.

This is especially distressing since the Dems seem not to have a strategy for winning the governorship beyond what Ramos calls “a wait-him-out game.” Yeah, great, two more years of drift. Or maybe four. Or who knows, the Social Security Administration estimates the average life expectancy for a 65-year-old male at just under 17 years, so maybe we’ll still be waiting him out in the year 2041.

Mearhoff engages in quite a bit of both-sidesing, which is the customary approach for political coverage these days. But c’mon, can anyone blame the Legislature for, you know, using their hard-earned supermajorities? Can anyone blame them for trying to enact the agenda that got them elected? The stuff they promised the voters they’d try to get done?

The governor has no business being shocked at the overrides. If he vetoes a bunch of bills in the face of a supermajority, what does he think will happen?

Well, apparently he thought that his vetoes were just an opening gambit. Kelley said the administration offered compromises on vetoed legislation and was taken aback that legislative leadership wouldn’t come to the table.

Yeah, about that. The time to come to the table was during the legislative session. The Scott administration differs from its predecessors in absenting itself from the lawmaking process. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard from lawmakers current and past that Team Scott is just different in this regard. Many vetoes, probably most of them, could have been avoided with a little in-the-trenches effort while legislation was working its way through a months-long process.

That’s the time to negotiate. Not in the relatively narrow window of time between adjournment and override — when, need I remind you, the Legislature is not in session and its members are nowhere near the Golden Dome? Members of the executive branch have full-time jobs. Lawmakers don’t.

Well, they don’t have full-time state jobs, anyway. This time of year, their effort is split between (1) making up for lost time with their regular employers and (2) preparing for campaign season. They don’t have the bandwidth for negotiations with the full-time executive branch.

It beggars belief that Scott, after spending the past quarter-century in state government, doesn’t understand this. We’re already on course for a repeat of 2023 this year, with several more vetoes all but certain. If Scott wants his final years in office to be productive, he will need to take some simple, positive steps to improve his relationship with the Legislature. Otherwise we’re in for a dark period in our political life.