Monthly Archives: June 2024

Some Impertinent Advice for Bernie Sanders

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So, Bernie’s running for re-election. At age 82. Well, we have way too many old politicians who believe they’re indispensable, but Bernie is not anywhere near the top of my list for thinning out the herd. He remains the most prominent voice in America for small-p progressive politics. He is a uniquely impactful figure.

So I’m fine with him running for another term. Although, perhaps ironically, I still think he should have left the Senate in 2018. But we’ll get to that in a minute, after discussing one age-related item he should consider.

Which is, he should stop with the “independent” pose and run as a capital-P Progressive. He can still caucus with the Democrats, but he needs to adopt a party label for the first time since his benighted days under the Liberty Union banner.

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Art Peterson Is Not Quite Done Being Vermont’s #1 Elected Bigot

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When state Rep. Art Peterson leaves the House at the end of his current term (words that should be sung aloud or shouted from the rooftops, not merely written in digital form), the unofficial title of Worst Person In the Legislature will be up for grabs.

Peterson, shown above in a slightly retouched version of his official picture, has once again figuratively pulled down his drawers and shown his ass to the world in a hateful and unnecessary response to a routine announcement from Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas.

She sent an email last Wednesday to members of the Rutland County delegation announcing that her office would be staffing a table at the Rutland Pride Celebration on Saturday, and inviting the county’s electeds to stop by.

Peterson, being who he is, took this like a rabid bull seeing a rainbow flag in front of his nose. His response, which he cc’d to members of the county delegation:

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Oh Look, It’s the Health Care System Murder Board

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There was plenty of talk during the 2024 legislative session about housing, homelessness, Act 250, climate change, school funding, crime, opioids, and other big issues. I don’t recall health care occupying the spotlight at all.

And then last week, an outside consultant delivered a devastating assessment of our “badly broken” health care system and said that wide-ranging “structural reform” is needed as quickly as possible. Or, for those underwhelmed with what passes for leadership in our Brave Little StateTM, much quicker than seems plausible.

Maybe the only person who might feel a little bit good about the consultant’s report (downloadable here under the title “State-Level Recommendations for Hospital Transformation,” because the Green Mountain Care Board is all about that clickbait) is former governor Howard Dean. You may recall that when he dipped his toe, ever so briefly, into the political waters, health care was the only issue he spotlighted. I noted that it was kind of refreshing to hear someone focus on health care, which seemingly left the front burner after former governor Peter Shumlin abandoned single-payer health care.

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Penny for Your Thoughts, Madam Secretary

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I only have one question about two state senators filing a lawsuit over the appointment of Zoie Saunders as interim education secretary after her nomination for the permanent job was rejected by the Senate.

Why only two senators?

Well, I do have another question: What must Saunders be thinking? If I were to guess, it’d be something along the lines of “How did I get myself into this?”

She quit a job she’d barely started in an area that had been her home for years and moved her family a thousand miles north, just to be used as a political shield by the Scott administration and see her reputation dragged over the coals. And this legal challenge could prevent her from serving at all.

My sympathy is limited because she’s a grown-up who made her own choices and she freely accepted a job that she’s unqualified for, but there is a human being in the middle of this uncomfortable mess.

Now, back to the first question: Why did only two senators sign onto the lawsuit?

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Making Two Lists and Checking ‘Em Once

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Now that the truly historic veto override session is over, it’s time to take stock of my fearless, or possibly feckless, predictions about what bills Gov. Phil Scott would veto and which vetoes would be overridden by the Legislature.

But first, let’s acknowledge a masterful performance by legislative leadership, a phrase that doesn’t often escape my virtual lips. Even with supermajorities, overriding a gubernatorial veto is a nettlesome task. You’ve got to make sure all your people are (a) present, not a small item when dealing with 180-odd individuals (some odder than others), and (b) absolutely unified on every vote, including some toughies.

The House and Senate held a total of 15 override votes in a single day, and they won 13 of ’em including a clean sweep in the House. Just scheduling 15 votes in two chambers on one day is fairly amazing, let alone winning 86.67% of ’em.

As for my performance…

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There’s Only One Good Thing About Vermont’s Homelessness Situation, and That Thing Is About to Get a Lot Worse

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Vermont ranks at the extreme end of the 50 states in two measures of homelessness. We rank #2 in the nation in per capita homelessness. That’s, need I say, not a good thing. What is a good thing is that we rank #2 in the nation in the lowest percentage of unhoused people who are unsheltered.

In short, we have a lot of unhoused people thanks in large part to our critical housing shortage, but we’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping roofs over their heads.

Sadly, this is in the process of changing. We have been steadily ratcheting down the General Assistance housing program that’s been keeping thousands of Vermonters in state-paid motel rooms. And we are tightening the screws even more in the fiscal year beginning July 1. The result will almost certainly be a sharp rise in our unsheltered population starting in mid-September.

It’ll be a while before the official statistics reflect this, but it’s a virtual inevitability. As a result of deliberate policy choices by the Scott administration and the Legislature, we will soon be “exiting” (such a nice bureaucratic word) a lot of homeless people to fates unknown.

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The Governor Has No Clothes

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For the second time in two years, Gov. Phil Scott suffered a historic-level smackdown on Monday. It only took the Legislature one single day to override six of his vetoes. He was upheld only on H.121, the data privacy bill. Otherwise it was a complete wipeout for The Most Popular Governor in AmericaTM.

Who is also, far and away, the most overridden governor in Vermont history. I knew he was the rootin’est, tootin’est, vetoin’est governor we’ve ever had, but I hadn’t realized that he’s even more of an outlier on the override front.

I’ve cited the Vermont State Archives’ list of veto messages as my source for veto counts (inclluding my count of 52 vetoes for Governor Nice Guy), but I failed to notice that the list also indicates which vetoes were overridden — with an asterisk.

Are you ready for some truly stunning figures? I know you are.

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Phil Scott Presents: Stupid Map Tricks!

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What you see above is a portion of Gov. Phil Scott’s latest masterstroke: A map of Vermont showing all the land that would get enhanced protections under H.687, the housing/Act 250 reform bill he vetoed last week. He thinks the map proves his point, that the bill goes way too far on conservation and not nearly far enough on encouraging development. Just look at all those yellow and brown areas! The Legislature is out of control!

However… I do not think his map means what he thinks it means.

This map reminds me of the Republican electoral maps showing who won each county. They show that the vast majority of the country’s physical space voted Republican, and help fuel stolen-election conspiracy theories. Truth is, Republicans win the big empty parts of the country while Democratic strength is mainly in population centers. And since our system involves one person, one vote — not one acre, one vote — well, the map is deeply misleading and proves nothing.

Same with Phil Scott’s H.687 map. It proves nothing.

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The Joys of Willful Ignorance

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Phil Scott’s veto pen must be hotter than ol’ No. 14’s engine block at the finish line of Thunder Road because he’s racked up a fresh batch of vetoes this week, bringing his lifetime total over the half-century mark. Yep, he’s now vetoed 52 bills (according to the State Archives’ list of veto messages) including eight this year alone. Reminder that the previous record-holder was Howard Dean with a measly 21. And Dean served 12 years as governor while Scott’s been in the corner office for a mere seven and a half.

(Gubernatorial Trivia Time: Dean first Wielded His Veto PenTM to strike down a bill that would have legalized the sale of sparklers. Yes, really. His letter is a marvel of fearmongering; Dean wrote that sparklers may “appear innocuous,” but are, in fact, “quite dangerous,” burning at temperatures of “between 1600 and 2000 degrees,” and they “caused more than 1,000 emergency room visits” in 1989 alone. Which sounds like a lot, but 300 times as many people go to the ER with dog bites, and I don’t see anyone trying to ban dogs.)

We eagerly await the Legislature’s override session on Monday, where seven bills could be on the table. (An override of the eighth, a ban on flavored tobacco and vapes, failed in the Senate in April.) I’ll give you my back-of-the-envelope rundown of likely overrides in a tick, but first I’d like to point out three vetoes where the governor happily displayed his ignorance of the subject matter and of the process that went into the bills.

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Phil Phones It In

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For weeks, Gov. Phil Scott has been asking legislative leadership to “come to the table” and reach common ground on the school funding situation. On Wednesday, they came to the table — and the governor was nowhere to be found. He stiffed ’em.

He stiffed ’em physically by not showing up, and he stiffed ’em intellectually by presenting yet another half-baked, fiscally irresponsible “plan” for buying down property tax rates.

To me, his no-show proves that he didn’t want a deal that might be politically difficult. He’d prefer that the Legislature override his veto of the Yield Bill so he can use it as a campaign issue in hopes of eroding the Dem/Prog supermajorities.

Look, if he wanted a deal, he would have been there. If there was going to be a serious effort at compromise, he would have had to be there. His officials couldn’t have conducted meaningful negotiations in his absence.

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