Governor No Prepares to Strike Again — UPDATED With More Potential Vetoes, Yay

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The Vermont Legislature just wrapped up a fairly productive session, all told. Or should I say it will have been productive if Gov. Phil Scott doesn’t whip out the ol’ veto pen (Only in Journalism) and kill a whole bunch of bills.

And by all indications, that’s exactly what he’s about to do.

Might I take a moment to say, once again, that any Democrat who votes for Phil Scott isn’t serious about the Democratic agenda? Because the Legislature will have all it can do to override a couple, maybe three, gubernatorial vetoes. Even when you’ve got a supermajority, overrides are tough. So as long as Scott is governor, the Democratic vision for Vermont will remain frustratingly (or, if you don’t like Democratic policies, hearteningly) incomplete. Especially when it comes to climate change, where the governor is in position to decimate what the Legislature has accomplished.

There’s already been one veto this year, on the flavored tobacco ban. Override failed on a close vote in the Senate. By my unofficial and possibly incomplete count, we are probably in for six more. At least. Here’s the list.

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Congratulations to the VTGOP for Finding a Candidate to Run Against Becca Bal — Oh.

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The Vermont Republican Party’s effort to build a strong statewide ticket are proceeding apace. Mark Coester, who has once before been disavowed by the VTGOP, has announced he’s running for Congress. He is, so far, the only Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Becca Balint.

Coester is seen here in the only video that comes up when you search YouTube for “Mark Coester Vermont.” It’s a 21-second clip of Coester meandering along the U.S.-Mexico border wall, pausing in front of a small section that’s either unfinished or damaged, gesturing at it, and saying “Ran out of concrete?” He’s carrying a big ol’ sidearm, just in case he has to Halt A Incursion or something.

This is kind of normal behavior for Coester, whose campaign website promotes him as a man who would bring “common sense and traditional values to Washington, D.C.” He speaks of government accountability and term limits and 100% Fair and Honest Elections and — my favorite bit — decries “the constant bickering, finger pointing and blame games that go on in politics.”

If you’ve read my coverage of far-right stealth candidates, you’ll recognize the warning signs. This guy is a Trump-lovin’ conspiratorialist.

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I Think I Know Why This Man Is Smiling

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For all of Gov. Phil Scott’s tough talk about the budget and how tight we’ve got to be with our money, you might not guess that he and his top officials are due to get some very healthy raises in the new fiscal year.

The Pay Act, H.889, has been floating serenely through the Legislature to little to no public notice. The House has passed it, and I don’t doubt the Senate will follow along before adjournment. I hadn’t heard a peep about it until Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky tweeted this the other day:

Yep, that’s right, 6.4% pay raises for the governor and all his appointees.

To be fair (if only for a moment), that figure is exactly what state employees are getting in their collectively-bargained contracts. But you know, it might have occurred to the governor and his tight-fisted apparatchiks that a voluntary gesture of self-discipline might be in order. You know, in light of the fact that we allegedly can’t afford to provide enough shelter for our homeless population.

Especially the governor himself. Especially when, as Sen. Vyhovsky pointed out, the Pay Act would make him the second highest paid governor in the country.

That’s right. Humble ol’ Gov. Phil Scott is pulling down a top-of-the-heap salary for leading our brave little state. Emphasis on “little,” because if we compared state budgets and governors’ salaries, Scott would lead the pack by a country mile.

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Man Who Claims to Be Above Politics Does Overtly Political Thing

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It may have adhered, by the tiniest hair on its chinny chin chin, to the letter of tradition, but it absolutely blasted the spirit of tradition right to the moon.

I speak of Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to appoint a Democrat to the seat formerly held by the chair of the House Progressive Caucus. The Progs are furious, and they have every right to be.

Scott’s flimsy rationale is that Emma Mulvaney-Stanak ran for House in 2022 as both a Prog and a Dem. Okay, sure, but c’mon now. Mulvaney-Stanak’s political identification is clearly Progressive. She served on Burlington City Council as a Prog. (For a time, she was the only Prog on City Council.) She ran for mayor of Burlington as a Prog. She served for four years as chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, for Pete’s sake.

I don’t care if she ran for House that one time in the Democratic primary. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is a Progressive through and through, and her replacement in the House should have been a Prog.

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Welcome to the Gubernatorial Spin Zone

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No, I didn’t expect Gov. Phil Scott to accept the Senate’s vote on Zoie Saunders with grace and equanimity. But he shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite the history of that lopsided rejection of his choice for education secretary.

In his press conference one day after Saunders was rejected, he called it “a partisan political hit job” in which Saunders was collateral damage in an attack aimed at himself:

I  think this was a partisan political hit job, so I would say once they get through that and they get their pound of flesh, which they did, it was all against me, that maybe they will come to their senses and see what I see and confirm her, if that’s the path they choose. 

Yeah, well, none of that is true.

A total of 19 senators voted against Saunders because of her scanty resumé. She’d barely served any time at all working in public schools — as a teacher, principal, district staffer, or janitor or lunch lady or bus driver for that matter. And she had little to no experience managing a sizable bureaucracy, which ought to be a prerequisite for being a cabinet secretary of any sort.

And if this was a case of “it was all against me,” then perhaps the governor could enlighten us about all the other times the Senate rejected a gubernatorial appointee. I can cut to the chase there: It’s never happened before.

As if that load of codswallop wasn’t insulting enough, the governor also accused the Senate of failing to perform due diligence:

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“I Am Big. It’s the Pictures That Got Small.”

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Howard Dean floated onto his balcony this afternoon, favored the adoring crowd below with a regal wave, turned his back, and disappeared into the billowing curtains.

Okay, not really. What he did was issue a lengthy, self-indulgent statement about his dalliance with running for governor that didn’t actually make a commitment either way. In other words, stay tuned!

Methinks he’s getting a kick out of having #vtpoli-land hanging on his every word for the first time since he ran for president nearly a generation ago.

All he said about running was that he would hold “a press event when and if I file.” Curiously, he then sent a text to VTDigger declining its interview request because he is “not doing interviews until I file.”

Until, eh? Not “Until or unless”? Freudian slip? Intentional foreshadowing? Misdirection for the sake of drama? Only Dean knows for sure.

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The Goal Isn’t to Prevent Suffering. It’s to Make the Suffering Politically Palatable.

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“I can’t believe this is where we are again.”

Those words came from Brenda Siegel, former gubernatorial candidate and head of End Homelessness Vermont, upon finding herself back in the Statehouse begging legislative budget writers to provide shelter for vulnerable Vermonters.

She spoke at a press conference called today by housing advocacy groups, in the middle of budget deliberations by a legislative conference committee. That panel is hammering out (Only in Journalism) a compromise budget for FY2025, and one of the items at issue is the General Assistance emergency housing program. The House budget includes a fairly robust program; the House also passed a bill to transition from the current bowl-of-spaghetti program to something that makes sense.

The Senate, as it so often has, pinched pennies on the issue. Its budget imposes a cap of 80 nights’ stay in state-paid motel rooms for each household, and caps the total motel rooms available at 1,000 in most of the year and 1,300 in winter. As the advocates pointed out, this would result in hundreds of households losing access to housing. (The Senate also killed the separate transition bill, which means the program would continue to be an ungovernable mess.)

The beauty of it, from a political point of view, is that the pain would be spread out over months and months. Instead of a mass unsheltering that might attract unpleasant media attention, people will be “exited” (such a nice bureaucratic term) slowly over time, a few here, a few there, as they run out of eligibility or the need is greater than the arbitrary room caps. Hey, if the problem is invisible, does it really exist?

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Well, At Least It Wasn’t the Most Violent Thing to Ever Happen in a Senate Chamber

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Wow. Not only did the state Senate reject Zoie Saunders’ nomination as education secretary, it did so on a lopsided 19-9 vote. That’s a damning indictment of how out of touch Gov. Phil Scott was in choosing her. I mean, it’s still unclear whether a Vermont Senate has ever rejected a cabinet appointee, much less by a better than two-to-one margin.

And of course the governor immediately appointed Saunders as interim secretary, effectively flipping the bird at the Senate. This won’t do anything to improve his turbulent relationship with the Legislature, but I doubt he really cares about that. If anything, this might presage a flurry of vengeful vetoes that would vault Scott’s all-time record into permanently unbreakable Cy Young territory. Hooray for Governor Nice Guy!

And, well, if condolences are ever in order for someone who just “won,” it’s for Zoie Saunders. She takes on a daunting challenge with an understaffed Education Agency and with the entire educational establishment wishing she would just go away and with two-thirds of the Senate rejecting her. I am convinced she was not the best choice for the job, but man, she’s sitting at the poker table with a deuce-seven off suit. Brutal.

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Team Scott Tries to Count to 15 and Comes Up Short

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Ruh-roh, Raggy. Something has gone off the rails in Montpelier.

After several days of lobbying the Senate and slamming its critics, the Scott administration has asked the Senate to, um, postpone its confirmation vote on Zoie Saunders, the governor’s choice for education secretary. (The development was first reported by VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein and later confirmed by Seven Days’ Alison Novak.)

You know what that means: They don’t have the votes. Which would be perhaps the most embarrassing failure in Scott’s seven-plus years in the corner office. He’s had vetoes overridden before, but that happens to every governor. These confirmation votes are usually perfunctory. Lower-level appointees have, on rare occasion, been rejected, but I haven’t seen any reference to the last time a cabinet nominee was sent packing. Certainly the administration didn’t foresee any trouble, considering that Saunders quit her job in Florida, moved her family to Vermont, and began working as education secretary, all before her confirmation was in the books.

Still, they should have seen it coming. What did they expect, when they nominated someone who’s patently unqualified for the job?

So of course the governor owned up to his mistake and BWAHAHAHAHAHA no he did not. He blamed the whole thing on “misinformation, false assumptions, and politicization” of her nomination by critics and opponents.

Which is a bunch of Grade-A Joe Biden malarkey. The criticism is focused on Saunders’ lack of experience in public schools, her long tenure at a for-profit charter school operator, and — at least from me — her nearly complete lack of any actual administrative experience.

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Why Is This Guy Chair of the Senate Education Committee? (With Correction)

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By all appearances, the Senate’s confirmation vote on Zoie Saunders (scheduled for Tuesday) is going down to the wire. The Scott administration sure seems to think so, if chief of staff Jason Gibbs’ obsession with Krista Huling is any indication. I’ve also been told that Gov. Phil Scott is making calls to key senators on behalf of his — Only in Journalism Word alert — embattled nominee for education secretary. That’s a level of personal attention he seldom gives to any matter before the Legislature.

If the Senate does reject Saunders, it will be a seismic (another Only in Journalism word) event in our politics. It’s extremely rare for the Senate to reject a gubernatorial nominee. Certainly the administration took that step for granted. (As did Vermont Public.) Otherwise they wouldn’t have let Saunders disrupt her life and career to take the job. One has to wonder if she was fully informed about the risk involved.

If the Senate does reject Saunders due to her stunning lack of experience as (1) a public educator and (2) an administrator overseeing a sizable bureaucracy, it will be in spite of, not because of, the Senate Education Committee’s failure to carry out its responsibility to vet Saunders’ nomination.

Which leads me to the man pictured above, committee chair Sen. Brian Campion, and the rather curious composition of his committee.

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