Senate Reapportionment, a.k.a. The Incumbency Protection Act of 2022

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Random Unrelated Illustration

If there was ever any doubt that the state Senate is a club unto itself, well, a close look at the chamber’s likely reapportionment map will make things perfectly clear.

First, the circumstances: After weeks and weeks of vaguely-defined “discussion,” the committee burped out its map in a 26-minute-long hearing on Thursday. Seriously, before Thursday, the agenda for each of its previous 13 meetings merely said “Committee Discussion.” At least they were open hearings, I guess.

According to VTDigger, the hearing was not warned in advance as required by law, and the map wasn’t made public until after the hearing. A procedural fail to be sure, and a worrying one by a committee chaired by Sen. Jeanette White, who chairs the Senate Government Operations Committee. You know — the one that deals with open meetings and public records laws?

Aside from process flaws, the map itself is problematic in many ways. At virtually every turn, it bows the knee to incumbency — even when doing so is a setback for the Democratic Party. You know, the party that allegedly controls the process?

If this map is enacted, it will be harder for the Democrats to keep their Senate supermajority. It will help Republicans pick up some ground, but maybe not right away; and the new Chittenden County map is the best thing to happen to the Progressive Party since David Zuckerman became lieutenant governor. (It also gives the Republicans a real shot at a Chittenden seat for the first time since Diane Snelling left the chamber.)

The newly created, three-seat Chittenden Central district includes Winooski and part of Burlington. It seems custom-made to give the Progs a real shot at winning all three seats.

Looking at the committee lineup, this may have been a case of Prog/Dem Sen. Chris Pearson pulling one over on sleepy Democrats’ eyes. He was the only member from Chittenden County, which is weird in itself. There were four Dems on the committee: the barely-there Jeanette White, the almost-a-Republican Bobby Starr, everybody’s friend Alison Clarkson, and quiet second-termer Andrew Perchlik. The two Republicans were part-time Vermonter Brian Collamore and the politically savvy Randy Brock. In sheer political terms, Pearson and Brock could run rings around the other five.

And it sure looks like they did just that.

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Dregs of the Ballot: The Essex Brigade

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Three seats on the Essex-Westford School Board are up for grabs on April 12, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a trio of stealth conservative candidates hiding their true agendas behind a thicket of bland rhetoric. It’s the usual stuff: Parental involvement, transparency, focus on basic education, financial responsibility, defusing “tension” and “divisive issues” in the schools.

This stuff is right out of the national conservative playbook: Right-wing candidates running for school board behind the same list of inoffensive ideas.

And concealing their true beliefs and agenda.

As I have before, I will state again: Conservatives have every right to run for any office. But they ought to be transparent about who they are and what they believe. When they hide their true selves, they are subverting the electoral process — and tacitly admitting that they can’t win if they are open about their agenda.

The three hopefuls from Essex and Essex Town all have military backgrounds. Two of them are people of color. Great, a little diversity — but only in heritage, not in platform.

The election is nonpartisan, but the Essex Republican committee has endorsed them and referred to them as “our candidates.” This is the committee that thinks the civic embarrassment Liz Cady is a peachy keen school trustee.

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Big Money in the Democratic LG Race (And Other Campaign Finance Notes)

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The big takeaway from the first campaign finance deadline of 2022 (for state candidates only, not federal) is that the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor is going to be a heated affair. All four candidates raised respectable amounts of money, with a couple of them clearly rising to the top.

Disclaimer: Fundraising is not the only measure of a campaign’s health. Organization and grassroots appeal are also key, but it’s very hard to measure those and very simple to read financial filings, So we look for the missing keys under the streetlight where we can see.

Leading the pack is former state Rep. Kitty Toll, widely believed to be the choice of most party regulars. She raised $118,000, which is quite a lot for this early in an LG race. She had 323 separate donors, 227 of them giving less than $100 apiece.

Coming in a sollid second is former LG David Zuckerman, with $92,000. Patricia Preston, head of the Vermont Council on World Affairs, raised $89,000 with a big fat asterisk: $23,000 of her total came from in-kind donations. That’s a very high total, and it means she has far less cash on hand than it appears at first glance. Rep. Charlie Kimbell is a distant fourth with $44,000 raised.

You want deets? We got deets.

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The Sleaze-Adjacent (At Best) World of Richie Rich

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We’ve met this guy before. Brock Pierce, child actor, failed gaming entrepreneur, wealthy cryptocurrency investor and possible independent candidate for Pat Leahy’s U.S. Senate seat. (He’s registered as a candidate but says he’s only thinking about it.) A later installment of this blog covered the mystery of whether he really lives in Vermont.

But now there’s a half-hour YouTube video that gets deep into the details of Pierce’s career, and boy, they are sketchy as hell. “The Bizarre Case of Brock Pierce” is by Georg Rockall-Smith, a Britisher who produces videos about strange-but-true stories. And he himself says that this is one of the strangest things he’s ever come across.

The short version is that wherever Pierce goes, he’s skirting the edges of the law and consorting with questionable folks. He never actually gets in trouble himself — partly because he’s bought his way out of legal scrapes — but over and over again, he winds up fighting lawsuits and hanging with the wrong kind of people. It happens so often that to call it coincidence beggars credulity.

The cast of characters in this video includes a convicted child sex offender, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Epstein. Yikes.

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Feelin’ Kinda Disposable

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We have yet to arrive at the near-future dystopia described in Paolo Bacigalupi’s incredible novel The Windup Girl, but there are signs we’re moving in that direction.

In the novel, Earth has been catastrophically altered by climate change. Civilization is in ruins. Only the wealthy have the means to rise above the misery of daily life. The rest are, well, nobody cares about them.

Aside from steadily worsening climate change and our desperation to maintain the flow of cheap fossil fuels undercutting our inadequate efforts to mitigate the damage, we’re stepping across the threshold of a new phase in the Covid-19 pandemic: From now on, students and school personnel won’t be required to mask up. Data gathering is slacking off, and Covid-related restrictions are being dumpstered in our haste to Get Back To Normal.

I’m sure many will see the Bacigalupi citation as overly dramatic, but I’m beginning to glimpse a future where Covid is always a dangerous presence, taking a toll on the most vulnerable among us. And we become, if we haven’t already, inured to death tolls that used to scare us half to death. Figuratively. And we accept that many, many people will be disabled by long Covid. There’s a lot of bad news on that front, which I’ll get to.

I see a future where people like me will wear masks all the time and will abstain from crowded situations indefinitely. I’ve found myself wondering if I’d ever eat in a restaurant again or attend a concert or travel for recreational purposes. I sure don’t feel safe doing any of that now, and I have no idea when I will. And I find myself wondering if people like me matter anymore.

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A Curious Erasure

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Chelsea Edgar didn’t have an easy assignment. The Seven Days reporter was given the task of writing a comprehensive take on the life and times of the late Peggy Luhrs, pioneering feminist, antiwar activist and, in her later years, a loud and unapologetic TERF. Luhrs lived a long time and accomplished many things. But she was a source of hate for the transgender community.

Doing right by all of that is a tough balance to strike. But there was one big area where Edgar and her editors absolutely fell down on the job.

Not a single transgender person was quoted.

Five friends were quoted, as well as five community activists, some of whom work in the LGBTQIA space. Luhrs herself was quoted at least seven times, and there were multiple examples of her harsh rhetoric. (One of her friends uttered a toned-down version of the TERF point of view.) The conservative Republican Bradford Broyles even got the chance to call trans women “biological males.”

But no room for transgender people. We should have heard from trans women at least; many of them were directly affected by Luhrs’ hateful actions.

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GlobalFoundries Gonna Try Again For That Thing They Say They Don’t Need

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Hey, remember when the state Public Utility Commission ruled against GlobalFoundries’ request to become its own electricity provider? Well, the PUC gave the company until March 11 to come back with a new filing.

For those keeping score at home, that’s tomorrow.

And yes indeed, I’ve been told that GlobalFoundries will file for reconsideration by the PUC despite the fact that it had insisted it would go ahead with its plan without PUC approval.

In its February ruling, the PUC said it had the authority to grant GF its independent status, but not to give GF an exemption from Vermont’s renewable energy standards. After the ruling, GF said it would go ahead without that exemption because meeting the RES targets would be no problem.

I guess the overlords of Essex have had a change of heart. Which isn’t too much of a surprise, since they’ve done that before.

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Farewell to One of the Good Ones

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I’ve got nothing bad to say about Emilie Stigliani, the now-departed executive editor of the Burlington Free Press. She’s smart, energetic, open-minded, and apparently a poet as well, who knew. She’s now departed for Sacramento after nine years at the Freeps, the last three as ExEd.

Stigliani’s job was the professional equivalent of pushing the boulder up the mountain and waking up the next morning back at the bottom. She presided over the paper at a point well into its decline phase, as ad revenue and subscriptions dwindled away, newsstand sales essentially disappeared, and her corporate bosses continued to expect handsome profits off the ever-diminishing operation.

None of that was her fault. Nor was it her fault that, during her tenure, I canceled my online subscription because the Free Press had become all but irrelevant to my work and my interests.

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I Think They Used to Call This “Whoredom”

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The good people of Brattleboro must be wondering “What in hell happened to our local newspaper?” Because the Reformer’s owner, Belarusian native and skillionaire currency trader Paul Belogour, has begun exercising Rich Guy’s Prerogative over the paper’s content.

Last week the Reformer published a despicable opinion piece by Belogour entitled “War is the Answer” in which he explained why the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a good thing. Well, actually, he didn’t say “invasion.” He said “the war between Russia and Ukraine,” which is exactly like saying “the battle between lion and antelope.”

That was bad enough, but at least it was labeled “opinion” and carried the usual disclaimer “The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.” But now the paper has published a “news” article that’s essentially a handjob for the boss.

The story, entitled “Refugees to be housed at Belogour’s Bulgarian hotel; his pro soccer team opens doors to displaced women, children.” Said soccer team is also in Bulgaria. It doesn’t even try to connect the story with Brattleboro, because there is no connection.

And it carries the weakest possible disclosure. Belogour is identified, deep in the article, as the owner of Vermont News & Media. Astute readers will know that’s the parent company of the Reformer, Bennington Banner and Manchester Journal. The rest of the reading public will not make that connection. It’s a deceptive, inadequate disclosure. But I bet it made the boss happy.

Those pieces are bad enough. What we don’t know is how many pieces have not been published. Newspapers have wide latitude when it comes to running wire service copy and syndicated columnists. If there was a ban on coverage of the global communitys reaction or the humanitarian disaster or Russian aggression or the heroism of Ukraine’s president, we wouldn’t be able to tell.

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Après Balint, La Sécheresse

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The Vermont Senate’s seniority-heavy lineup is about to become a serious problem. That’s because current Senate President Pro Tem Becca Balint, seen above possibly contemplating the task of herding the caucus cats, is leaving the Senate to pursue a bid for Congress. And win or lose, she won’t be in the Senate beyond this term.

Which means the Senate will have to replace her no later than next January. And I’m here to tell you exactly how shallow the talent pool is. And that’s because so many senators have overstayed their sell-by dates.

Out of the 30 senators, a full 16 are basically too old to step into the top spot*. They’re not necessarily too old to be effective lawmakers, but they’re clearly on the downslope and I doubt that any of them would even want the job.

*For the record: Brock, Clarkson, Collamore, Cummings, Kitchel, Lyons, MacDonald, Mazza, McCormack, Nitka, Pollina, Sears, Sirotkin, Starr, White.

Before I get accused of ageism, let me expand on that cold assessment. Most of the senior senators are comfortable in their roles. They are not looking to take on a new level of responsibility. Heading the Senate caucus is a big, troublesome job. You’re always putting out fires or facing the press or twisting a fellow senator’s arm. It’s also something you tend to take on when you’re set on climbing the political ladder, not when you’re fat and happy.

Look at the last several Pro Tems. John Campbell was 47 years old when he assumed the office. Peter Shumlin and Peter Welch were in their primes, and clearly had their eyes on higher positions. There were a couple of short-time Republicans in the mid-90s; John H. Bloomer served from 1993-95; Stephen Webster succeeded him for a single term. Bloomer was 63 when he became Pro Tem; he had had a successful political career and would certainly had continued if he hadn’t been killed in a car crash in January 1995. Webster was 52 when he succeeded Bloomer; he would continue his political career well beyond his time as Pro Tem.

Before them, and four years of Peter Welch, there was Doug Racine, a relative youngster when he became Pro Tem. Tim Ashe was in his early 40s, and Balint was 53. All these folks, save Webster, were far younger than today’s cohort when they led the chamber. It’s no job for old men. It is a job for the ambitious. Of the past seven Pro Tems who survived their tenures, only two (Webster, Campbell) did not seek higher office. And Campbell got the job largely because of his lack of ambition; senior Senators had a very free hand under his, cough, “leadership.”

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