First, the obligatory note about Famous Quotes. They’re all a lie, apparently.

This one is either an “Afghan Proverb” or it was said by Benjamin Hooks or John C. Maxwell or James M. Kouzas, take your choice. I’m just surprised it hasn’t been attributed to the Grand Champions of “I Didn’t Actually Say That”: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Yogi Berra.

Whoever said it, it applies here. The Democratic leadership of the House and Senate played a very dangerous game when they jammed through H.454, the “education reform” bill that’s all about squeezing the public education system and protecting the interests of Vermont’s big private schools. Yeah, they won. They got their grand bargain with Gov. Phil Scott. But at what cost?

It’s almost unheard of for a major bill to pass a legislative body with most of the majority lawmakers voting “No,” and that’s exactly what happened here. Virtually all the Republicans voted in lockstep with the governor, while most Democrats in the House and Senate spurned their leadership and rvoted against H.454.

There’s a reason such a maneuver is almost unheard of, and it’s expressed in my headline. “This broke the Democratic caucuses” is what one majority lawmaker told me, and added that House and Senate leaders “are isolated and insulated from their caucuses.”

Need I say that this is an unhealthy situation, and that it bodes ill for the 2026 session and the November elections? Need I add that leadership needs to put in some serious time mending fences? They should, but based on past performance I have little confidence that they will.

And if you’re willing to dismiss the above comments as coming from a disgruntled anonymous source, allow me to point to publicly posted commentaries from Sens. Ruth Hardy and Martine Larocque Gulick, each sharply critical of the process and of their leadership. Gulick’s commentary is especially poignant because she should have been chair of the Senate Education Committee. She was its vice chair last session ,and when the chair, Brian Campion, retired, she should have been promoted. But leadership bypassed her in favor of the just-elected Seth Bongartz, a 19-year member of the Burr and Burton Academy board. If we’d had Gulick instead of Bongartz, the whole process would have unfolded very differently. One has to wonder why Senate leaderhip cooked the books in a way that put the public schools at a disadvantage in the reform debate.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth defended the bill and the process in a speech before his chamber’s final vote. His remarks can’t be read online because for some reason, the Senate Journal (the chamber’s official record) for Monday, June 16 has yet to be posted. But Seven Days paraphrased his words:

Baruth said he was voting “enthusiastically” in favor of the conference committee report because it represented six months of hard work and compromise. People who characterized the legislation as a last-minute effort were ignoring all of the joint meetings between the House and Senate, expert testimony, and negotiations that went into it, he said.

Sorry, but I’m calling bullshit here. That “six months of hard work and compromise” was almost entirely tossed out the window — repeatedly — as the finish line approached. H.454 was, in fact, “a last-minute effort.” As a reminder, after “months of hard work,” Bongartz’ committee produced a bill that couldn’t attract majority support on the Senate floor. It was kicked to the curb without a vote. Leadership cobbled together a new version of H.454 that was much closer to the bill passed by the House.

(Also, according to former senator Andy Julow, Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck cast a key vote in favor of that bill on the condition that he be appointed to the conference committee. Julow was speaking on “There’s No “A” In Creemee,” the podcast he co-hosts with Chittenden County Democratic Chair Joanna Grossman.)

That was clearly, in retrospect, a maneuver designed to subvert the process. Senate leadership did not support their own bill. They made this clear when they included Bongartz and Beck to their three-member delegation. Bongartz and Beck have deep ties to two of the state’s biggest private schools. Those two quickly dropped the Senate’s own bill and promoted rewrite after rewrite that prioritized protecting those private schools’ interests over real education reform.

None of this had anything to do with those “six months of hard work.” The final version of H.454 was hastily written and rammed through in just a couple of days.

This became clear when the bill was challenged on the Senate floor by Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky. She said the bill was “objectionable,” which in this context means its consideration was out of order because conference committees are supposed to work from the House and Senate versions of legislation, not introduce significant new material. Lt. Gov. John Rodgers agreed, and ruled the bill “objectionable.”

Baruth then asked the whole Senate to suspend the rules and allow action on H.454. The Senate did so, and the vote proceeded.

But Vyhovsky’s argument was valid. Baruth referred to conference committees’ tendency to “color outside the lines,” which makes it sound like this committee slipped into a gray area just a bit. Not true. It completely ignored “the lines” and drew new ones of its own. Which put those “six months of hard work” right into the dumpster.

Unfortunately for Baruth, his fellow senators aren’t dumb enough to be taken in by this hogwash. He got his win, but did he forfeit the trust of his members? If the caucus held a vote today, would Baruth be re-elected as Pro Tem? I have serious doubts about it.

Once H.454 got through the Senate by hook or by crook, it moved quickly through the House — perhaps a little too quickly. Many members were taken by surprise when a vote was called on the bill without any debate. House leadership insisted that they followed correct procedure. Maybe they didn’t actually break the rules, but they bent ’em pretty bad. If more than a few lawmakers were caught off-guard by the vote — especially on a bill as consequential and contentious as H.454 — then the process may have been okay by Robert’s Rules, but let’s just say leadership wasn’t especially eager for a lengthy floor debate.

Technically, the bill passed the House on that vote. But because some members felt hornswoggled, leadership allowed a floor vote on whether to immediately send H.454 to the governor. That kinda-sorta became the House’s vote on the bill, and most Democrats voted “No.”

Afterward, Independent Rep. Troy Headrick penned an open letter to House leadership saying that holding a vote without any debate constituted “a misuse of authority” that was “damaging not only to the legitimacy of this bill, but to the integrity of our deliberative body.” Now, Headrick isn’t exactly the most compliant of lawmakers, but there was plenty of similar sentiment among the majority of the Democratic caucus.

Let’s just say that neither House nor Senate leadership covered themselves in glory. They got the win, hooray. Now they’ll have to deal with the fallout of a process that most of their own members see as fundamentally flawed and rigged, and a bill that fell short of upholding a core Democratic principle: the importance of a robust public education system.