Category Archives: Vermont State Senate

Vermont Democrats Spend a Pleasant Tuesday Slappin’ Around the Most Popular Governor in the Country

Leave a reply

Well, that didn’t take long. The Legislature had scheduled a three-day session to try to override the eight vetoes delivered this year by Gov. Phil Scott. Turns out they only needed one single day.

In that day, the Legislature overrode five of Scott’s vetoes and deferred action on the others. They failed exactly zero times. They didn’t come close to failing. Five overrides in one day sets an all-time record and, as Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman pointed out in a post-session press release, “In Vermont’s history, there had only been 14 veto overrides. With these five overrides, the legislature has increased that number by more than 33%.”

All in a day’s work. Facing down the most popular governor in America.

Oh, and there was also the indignity of attaching metaphorical training wheels to Scott’s administrative bicycle. In the bill to extend the motel voucher program for some recipients, the Legislature imposed strict reporting requirements on Team Scott, as if lawmakers didn’t trust the admin’s ability or inclination to do its frickin’ job.

I mean, all they had to judge by was two years of administration failure on that front. No wonder they’re demanding receipts this time.

Continue reading →

It’s Impossible, Except That It’s Not

3 Replies

Now that a judge has tossed a spear into the chest of those who hoped to prevent The Great Unhousing, the next political step will be the upcoming veto override session in the Legislature, scheduled for June 20-22. The House and Senate will be trying, among other things, to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of the FY2024 budget.

They should have a comfortable margin of victory, but 17 Democratic/Progressive lawmakers have promised to vote against override of any budget that doesn’t extend the motel voucher program and build an offramp to better housing solutions. This week, I’ve had two conversations that shed contradictory light on the pending budget debate: One cast doubt on the very idea of reopening the budget, while the other basically called bullshit on the first.

Scenario number one. The budget override attempt will be an up-or-down vote on the budget as adopted by the House and Senate. No changes allowed. That wouldn’t prevent leadership from negotiating with the 17 between now and then, but they couldn’t amend the budget before the vote. The best they could do is craft a Plan B to expedite the process after an override failure.

Now, let’s assume the override fails. At that point, the power swings to Gov. Phil Scott. Counterintuitive, but here’s why.

Continue reading →

You Know, It Was a Pretty Great Session Except For That One Horrible Thing.

3 Replies

In fairness to legislative Democrats, at least for a moment, they did accomplish quite a lot this session. They went much farther than they have before in standing up to Gov. Phil Scott and daring him to [obligatory journalism phrase] wield his veto pen over and over again. In that sense, they lived up to the promise made to voters that, if given a bigger supermajority, they would enact a progressive agenda over the governor’s objections.

Too bad they pulled up short on the most urgent humanitarian imperative of 2023. And too bad that their many legitimate accomplishments will be overshadowed by their willingness to unshelter some 2,500 Vermonters.

It’s as though they got a custom-tailored tuxedo and got all spiffed up and then, just as they were heading out the door, they shit their pants.

And then went to the prom anyway, thinking that no one would notice the stink and the stain.

But wait, this post was supposed to be “in fairness to legislative Democrats.” Okay, then. Let’s look at what they accomplished.

Continue reading →

Bobby Starr [Reportedly] Goes Off the Deep End

5 Replies

When last we saw nominally Democratic Sen. Bobby Starr, he was pontificating about all the supposedly “able-bodied” homeless folk livin’ it up in state-funded motel rooms when they oughta be goin’ out and gettin’ a job. Or, as he put it, “The able-bodied, it’s time to go to work and have a place for them to work and earn and provide for their own, as far as I’m concerned.”

That was his argument for ending the motel voucher program on schedule this summer. He didn’t say we’re coddling the ungrateful lazy poors, but that was the umistakable message he was sending. Shades of the Welfare Queen.

But wait, there’s more!

Starr reportedly expanded on his asshattery in a conversation after the hearing with Brenda Siegel, housing advocate and 2022 Democratic candidate for governor. We’ve only got Siegel’s word for this, although she says there were other witnesses. But there are good reasons to believe her; she’s still lobbying for a voucher extension in the FY24 budget, and has no motivation at all to slander a lawmaker, not even Bobby Starr.

Siegel posted her account of the exchange <a href="http://<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fbrendasiegelvermont%2Fposts%2Fpfbid0rStfwv74gYMA1rKx3UFnDaWsvUzieQtoUrvkzrr164kvwReLXmS63nun9cxGRuLKl&show_text=true&width=500&quot; width="500" height="296" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share">on her Facebook page. Highlights follow.

Continue reading →

Turtle Season

6 Replies

In January, when a new legislative session begins, ambitious agendas are rolled out. Big bills are proposed. Committees are ready to get down to work. This year, hopes were especially high on the Dem/Prog side, thanks to their historically large majorities in the House and Senate.

And then stuff starts to happen. Things get complicated, or are perceived to be complicated. The days rush by like the old movie trope of a calendar’s pages flying in all directions. Now, suddenly, time is short, hopes are muted, compromises are made, bills are sidetracked, and the aspirations of a new session lay in tatters. Yes, it’s Disappointment Time.

Necessary stipulations: Lawmaking is hard. It takes thorough consideration. It takes time, a commodity that’s always in short supply. Building majority support is complicated work, even when a single party holds all the cards. The Vermont Democratic Party is not a monolith; lawmakers have their own beliefs and constituencies. Many a Democratic lawmaker would have been a Republican before the VTGOP went off the rails. Now they’re moderate Democrats who often don’t support the party’s agenda.

That said, the VDP puts forward a platform every two years and urges people to give them money and elect Democratic majorities so they can get stuff done, not so they can think about it and decide that maybe it’s not such a good idea after all and they need to give it more study. It’s definitely not so they can parrot Gov. Phil Scott’s assumptions about public policy, and there’s a hell of a lot of that going on right now.

So let’s take a look at some of the areas where the Brave Hopes of January have given way to the Turtling of March.

Continue reading →

Ashley Bartley, Badass

4 Replies

Her political career is little more than a year old, but State Rep. Ashley Bartley (R-Fairfax) has already established herself as a force to be reckoned with. For starters, there’s the fact that she launched her bid for office while giving birth.

It was, I think, eight hours into birth, that I turned to my husband and asked how he would feel if I ran for the Vermont House of Representatives. His response, which pains me to say was the correct one; “let’s get through the next 72 hours before we talk.”

Said husband is Jeff Bartley, former executive director of the Vermont Republican Party, now a member of the band of exiles alienated by the VTGOP’s hard right turn. He probably thought he’d heard it all until that moment.

Anyway, they did have the talk and she ran for office.

And, skipping ahead to the end, shortly after taking office in January, she lost her job for the apparent crime of Being a Legislator.

Bartley told her story Wednesday afternoon to the Senate Government Operations Committee. (Written testimony here, YouTube video here, Bartley’s testimony starts at the 46:40 mark.) The panel is considering S.39, a bill to raise lawmakers’ pay, entitle them to health insurance coverage, and — among other things — give them legal protection against the professional retaliation that befell her.

Continue reading →

Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

2 Replies

Turns out that in writing my post “Paul Dame Measures Once, Cuts Twice,” I myself was guilty of measuring once and cutting twice.

In his weekly screed to VTGOP members, Dame had some complaints about how the Democratic majority had reshuffled committee memberships and structure. One of them was about the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. Dame bemoaned the absence of Republicans on said committee, and I snarked back that Republican Sen. Richard Westman was on SNRE.

Well, he’s not. Dame was right. No Republicans. What’s more, the new committee looks to be substantially to the left of the previous version, thanks to the additions of new Senators Anne Watson and Becca White.

Dame remains wrong about the other stuff, but that doesn’t excuse my mistake. I was wrong, and I apologize. I’ll add a correction to the post itself.

Paul Dame Measures Once, Cuts Twice (Updated with CORRECTION)

3 Replies

Update! Dame’s essay has been posted on True North Reports. The “Donahue” typo is fixed, but nothing else.

Update Update. I got something badly wrong. I wrote that Sen. Richard Westman is a Republican presence on the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. He is not. Dame was right about that, and I apologize for my mistake.

I could write a blogpost every week about VTGOP Chair Paul Dame’s weekly email to party members, but that would be a big waste of my time and yours. Once in a while, though, it’s too good to pass up.

Take this week’s message. Please, take it. It’s entitled “Democrat Steamrollers” because (1) he’d rather be ungrammatical than refer to the Democratic Party as “Democratic,” and (2) he sees the Democratic majorities in the Legislature running roughshod over everything. In his essay, he takes three big swings and misses all three. Yer Out!

Dame’s complaints begin with the reassigning of Rep. Anne Donahue from the Health Care Committee to Human Services. The House majority had “punished” Donahue “by stripping her of her [Health Care] Vice Chair position and assigning her to another committee entirely.”

A few things. First, he’s deeply concerned about Rep. Donahue’s status but he couldn’t be bothered to spell her name correctly. That’s right, he called her “Donohue.”

Second, exiling Donahue to Human Services is a pretty damn soft landing. That committee is also heavily involved with mental health care, so she’ll still have a chance to put her knowledge and passion to good use.

Third, the Dems’ alleged machinations are picayune compared to what Dame’s fellow Republicans in the U.S. House are doing with their majority. So far, I’ve heard no hint that Speaker Jill Krowinski has ordered a bunch of investigations of Gov. Phil Scott’s family.

Finally, whatever the Democrats may have done to reduce Republican influence is nothing compared to what the Republicans did to themselves by running an incompetent campaign and allowing the Dems to win a supermajority!

Enough of that. Let’s get on to the real whoppers.

Continue reading →

Storm Clouds Above the Statehouse

Leave a reply

There is much to be said about Gov. Phil Scott suddenly pulling a voluntary paid family leave program. For instance, that he has never ever pushed this issue at all unless the Legislature is actively considering a universal program. This isn’t a principled position, it’s an artifice meant to draw votes away from the Dem/Prog caucuses.

But something else, something subtler but equally discomfiting, is on my mind at the moment.

There are signs that the House-Senate tensions of past years are flaring back up again. If so, key legislation could fail because of differences between the two chambers, real or imaginary. If that happens, they’ll be disappointing the voters who elected record numbers of Dems expecting them to get stuff done.

This tension was minimized if not eliminated in the current biennium, thanks to the efforts of House Speaker Jill Krowinski and outgoing Pro Tem Becca Balint. It’d be a shame if Balint’s departure triggers a return of the bad old days.

The usual sniping between House and Senate is most often expressed in senators’ apparently innate sense of superiority. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen senators speak of state representatives as if they’re misbehaving kids on a school bus, and treat House legislation as if it’s toilet paper stuck to their shoes.

The most prominent example of the House-Senate tension has been the twin battles over paid family leave and raising the minimum wage. The House has preferred the former, the Senate the latter. The result: No paid leave program and woefully inadequate movement on minimum wage. On two occasions the Legislature has passed watered-down versions of a paid leave program and Scott has vetoed them. The inter-chamber differences have done much to frustrate progress toward enacting a strong paid leave program over Scott’s objections.

And now, here we are again with an apparent House-Senate rift on paid family leave.

Continue reading →

The State Senate Approaches a Demographic Tipping Point

3 Replies

Seems like I’ve been waiting forever for the Vermont Senate to undergo a demographic shift. Every two years there’s been talk of a retirement wave, but it never materializes. Senators consider stepping aside, then realize they’re indispensable. (They’re not.) And the voters rarely eject an incumbent except in cases of overt criminality (Norm McAllister) or advanced senescence (Bill Doyle).

The shift has been painfully incremental until this year, when almost one-third of all senators decided to bow out. The nine incomers are younger, five of them are women, and one is a person of color: Nader Hashim joins Kesha Ram Hinsdale and Randy Brock as the three non-white members of the upper chamber.

(The tiny Republican caucus managed to get older and no less male. Its two youngest members, Corey Parent and Joshua Terenzini, will be replaced by a couple of old white men.)

Got more numbers to plow through, but here’s the bottom line. The Senate is on the verge of a historic shift, but it’s happening in slow motion. We might reach the tipping point in two years’ time. We’re not quite there yet.

There are still plenty of tenured members in positions of power. They account for most of the committee chairs. But only — “only” — eight of the 30 senators will be 70 or older. At least 13 will be under 65, which doesn’t sound like a lot but in the Senate it definitely is.

The incoming Senate President Pro Tem, Phil Baruth, straddles the age divide. He’s only — “only” — 60. But he’s entering his sixth two-year term, so he’s familiar with the Senate and the elders are comfortable enough with him to make him their leader. As a senator he’s been a strong policy advocate unafraid to ruffle feathers, but as Pro Tem he’ll know he can’t push his caucus too far too fast.

There are the preliminiaries. Now let’s dive in.

Continue reading →