Monthly Archives: April 2025

Doing Something: A Follow-Up

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Yesterday’s installment of “Doing Something,” my daily report on Doing Something Every Day in response to Trump’s assault on the government, democratic norms, and the rule of law, was about emails I had written to the chairs of the Vermont House and Senate Judiciary Committees. I suggested that one or both of the panels should hold hearings on how various state agencies and departments cooperate with (or are complicit in, your choice) Trump’s crackdown on people of color who are in the United States legally. I provided a starter list of questions and state agencies that should be included in such hearings.

Credit to both chairs, Sen. Nader Hashim and Rep. Martin LaLonde, for getting back to me within hours. More is likely to come, but I wanted to report back on what I’ve learned so far. Which is that neither of them needed my encouragement to become actively engaged on these issues.

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Doing Something.

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Another daily report on my effort to Do Something Every Day about Donald Trump’s assault on government, free speech, and the rule of law. Today I sent emails to House Judiciary Committee chair Martin LaLonde and Senate Judiciary Committee chair Nader Hashim repeating an idea I explored in my most recent blogpost: That one or both committees hold wide-ranging hearings on the state’s immigration-related relationships with the feds. Cut-and-pasting the message to Sen. Hashim:

Sen. Hashim: 

Hi, John Walters here. Not a constituent, but an interested party. You may have read my most recent blogpost about Gov. Phil Scott’s, shall we say, measured response to the illegal detention of Mohsen Mahdawi. It included a suggestion which I am repeating here because it involves the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

The events surrounding Mr. Mahdawi’s kidnapping and detention raise a number of questions regarding state/federal cooperation beyond the fact that he is being held in a state prison. Cut-and-pasting a passage from the blog, in which I call for a hearing of the House or Senate Judiciary Committees or possibly a joint hearing to raise these questions with appropriate state officials. 

“We know the motorcade that whisked Mr. Mahdawi away had Vermont license plates. What can the DMV say about that? Can it reveal who registered the vehicles? How does it facilitate this unAmerican secrecy? Do state or local police agencies participate in or offer any support to the Trump regime? What rules do sheriff’s departments operate under, if any? How does the Department of Corrections interact with the feds? Are federal agents allowed access to detainees in state prisons? Do they interrogate detainees in state facilities? 

“That’s a starter list of questions. Such a hearing wouldn’t disrupt the system, but it would put useful information on public record and perhaps lead to legislation limiting state interaction with the feds.”

I think this would be a relevant and appropriate legislative response to Mr. Mahdawi’s detention. I hope you agree. 

Thanks and best wishes, 

John Walters

Phil Scott Dips a Toe Into the Resistance River and Finds the Water a Bit Chilly

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At his weekly press conference, Gov. Phil Scott refused a call from Senate Democratic leadership to terminate Vermont’s agreement with the federal government that allows immigration detainees to be held in state prisons. “I’m not sure it helps the people being detained by moving them out of Vermont,” Scott said, citing a report that one detainee expressed relief that he was being held in our B.L.S.

And you know, he’s not wrong. At least not in one important way. Immigration attorney Brett Stokes of the Vermont Law and Graduate School and Falko Schilling of the Vermont ACLU told VTDigger that they’d prefer their clients to be close at hand, not sent to unknown facilities in other states — or even overseas. I understand that, and I think we should take their viewpoint seriously.

That said. There is a moral dimension to this question that Scott did not address. Do we as Vermonters want to be complicit in the Trump administration’s crackdown on alleged thought crimes? Are we comfortable being part of this authoritarian project? Phil Scott apparently is, as long as we can help shave the rough edges off.

I must also point out a bitter irony that went unnoticed by our news media.

“I get the frustration that people are feeling. People want to do something about what they see happening,” Scott said. ““But is that in the best interest of those who are being detained to just ship them off to somewhere else, Mississippi, Texas, wherever?”

Ahem.

Mississippi, you say?

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The House Does a Big Thing that Phil Scott Won’t Do

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The Vermont House of Representatives did something kind of impressive a couple weeks ago. Not that the media paid much attention, due in part to all Trump all the time — and I let it pass by for that same reason, but I can play catchup when events call for it. So here I am, belatedly.

Way back on April 2, the House approved H.91, the “Vermont Homeless Emergency Assistance and Responsive Transition to Housing Program.” Quite a mouthful, but the acronym is VHEARTH, which is catchy indeed.

But that’s not the impressive part. What the bill’s writers managed to do is create a new state program from scratch. VHEARTH is meant to replace the much-lamented and chronically underfunded General Assistance Emergency Housing Program, d/b/a/ the motel voucher program. Yep, legislative leaders had been begging Gov. Phil Scott to propose an alternative to vouchers for years. Seems they finally got tired of waiting for the chief executive to do his damn job.

I first learned of this five days later, when the Barre Montpelier Times Argus published a front-page story (paywalled, sorry) about H.91 gaining House approval. I was so surprised to learn of a major Statehouse development in my sadly reduced local paper that I had to check and double-check to make sure I hadn’t missed a story in the more customary outlets like VTDigger, Seven Days, or Vermont Public.

But I hadn’t. Those usually dependable organizations either missed a major piece of legislation achieving a milestone, or they deemed it unworthy of their attention. If it was the latter, well, they were sorely mistaken.

C

A Little Fascist Cosplay Right Here in Vermont

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Thank God Becca White was there.

I’m so sorry Becca White was there, because she had to witness… I’d call it a farce, which it is, but it may well be a harbinger of the post-democratic America that Donald Trump wants to create. A post-democratic America which would be no respecter of state borders, red, purple or blue.

The state senator from Windsor County was on hand when her friend and Vermont resident Mohsen Mahdawi was kidnapped by cowardly stormtrooper wannabes hiding their faces and driving unmarked vehicles. In fact, they needed four unmarked vehicles and who knows how many agents to corral a legal U.S. resident and known pacifist.

Brave, brave men. With little tiny penises.

What would we know about Mahdawi if not for White being present to document his kidnapping? We’d probably know the fact of his detention (his lawyer was present), but we wouldn’t have video proof of this unlawful action by a bunch of unAmerican secret police cosplayers.

God, it’s contemptible. And deeply scary. How’s that thing go? “First they came for the Palestinians, and I did not speak out because I am not Palestinian.” Something like that.

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Doing Something.

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Here’s my brief daily post chronicling my effort to do at least one thing every day, no matter how small, to fight the authoritarian sociopath in the White House. Today’s entry: We gave a donation to Social Security Works, an organization whose mission has been to promote expansion of Social Security as a vital part of our social safety net. Now, sadly, they’re likely to spend a lot of their time battling Elon Musk’s apparent plan to kill Social Security. They have my support.

(SSW is promoting a national day of action entitled “Hands Off Social Security” tomorrow, Tuesday April 15, but the nearest protests are in the Boston area and the southern Hudson River Valley, so I won’t be attending.)

News You Should View: Yeah, Most of It Is About Trump

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More and more of our Vermont news space is taken up with the local/state ramifications of Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, the rule of law, and the government itself. So much so that unrelated stories are sometimes getting short shrift. More on that in my next post, or at least that’s the plan. In the meantime, please enjoy the panoply of bad news that Phil Scott thinks we should stop fretting about.

Counting the Trump damage done. Going to start with not a story, but an ongoing data collection effort. Vermont Public is tracking federal funding losses in our state in an easily digestible list. This is not the “rhetoric” that our governor insists we’re wasting time on; these are actual cutbacks with tangible effects. You’ve read about most of these if you follow the news, but it’s good to have them all in one place. The most recent entry is a lost federal grant for a local history training program, which was mentioned in a recent post and will make another appearance later in this missive.

Environmental Law Center “threatened on two fronts.” From the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, a story about concern at the Vermont Law and Graduate School about potential Trump threats to the school’s Environmental Law Center. They’re feeling the heat, between Trump’s attacks on major law firms and educational institutions and his assault on anything that smacks of climate change or other inconvenient truths.

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Do Something.

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Like many disheartened liberals, I almost completely withdrew from following national politics after the November election. I just didn’t have the capacity to deal with a flood tide of bad news about what Donald Trump was going to do.

I still spend less time consuming national news than I used to. But I can no longer enjoy the luxury of abstinence. Things are just too bad and too consequential.

The above passage is from Chapter 24 of the Book of Proverbs. I came upon it while tracking down the famous quotation, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” It’s usually and wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke; as with many famous quotations, its actual origin is murky at best.

That sentence started rattling around my head as I was writing about the many ways in which Trump is already having a corrosive effect right here in Vermont, and about Gov. Phil Scott’s refusal to acknowledge the harm being done or speak out against it.

The last straw was the Friday, April 11 edition of the Rachel Maddow Show, in which she went deep on the crisis in the Social Security Administration the damage Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing at the Department of Health and Human Services.

So. I decided to do something.

Not just one thing. I decided to do one thing every day. Indefinitely.

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