I’ve been slow to the party regarding Compass Vermont, a not-so-new entry into our sadly depleted media ecosystem. I welcome its participation, because we can use all the help we can get on the journalism front. I hope it succeeds, although I have some serious reservations about its real merit.
Which brings me to its latest “scoop” and what it reveals about the limitations of Compass’ approach and the broad hints of serious ideological bent.
Compass’ big reveal? Attorney General Charity Clark sometimes exaggerates her accomplishments.
OH NO.
I clutch my pearls. I reach for the smelling salts. I search for the Captain Renault screenshot. I am shocked — shocked — to learn that a politician is acting like a politician.
You probably heard about the baby race at a recent WNBA game. Yeah, the one where all the babies sat unmoving at the starting line until one of them got up and walked, allegedly for the first time ever, all the way to the finish line. It was a heartwarming moment, at least until the Internet trolls started accusing the baby’s parents of cheating.
Well, the Vermont Democratic Party’s competition for the top of the ticket reminds me of that baby race, except it’s been going on for close to a decade. We’re all staring at these babies waiting for one of them to make a move.
And now, suddenly, one of them has made a move. Unfortunately, the move was to walk off the race course.
Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas has announced she’s running for a third term, presumably against H. Brooke Paige, the world’s most elegantly dressed tomato can. (This development was apparently of interest only to WPTZ-TV. I’ve seen no other reports on her announcement. Hell, VTDigger ran a story about Copeland Hanzas today that somehow didn’t even mention her 2026 declaration.) But there are three things more important to us Vermont Political Observers than the fact that she’s running for re-election.
Gov. Phil Scott continues to tiptoe the line when it comes to the rank berserkitude of the Trump administration. He got a lot of press coverage for his refusal to approve Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s request for Vermont National Guard personnel for administrative assistance. Since then, it’s been pretty much prudence slash appeasement.
Frankly, I don’t give him much credit for the ICE decision. They only wanted 12 people to basically do secretarial work. (I guess someone’s got to fetch the coffee.) It was such a small-stakes request that I wondered why ICE even bothered. Were they trying to get a foot in the door for bigger asks down the line? Or were they doing Scott a favor by making a request he could safely refuse?
Whatever, Scott’s subsequent actions make it clear that we shouldn’t be giving him a membership card in The Resistance anytime soon. In context, the ICE decision looks more like a brief tactical pivot than a sign that he takes Trump seriously as an existential threat to democracy.
It’s been obvious since January (if not before) that Gov. Phil Scott has adopted a very different tone when it comes to That Man in the White House. It used to be that Scott felt no qualms about openly criticizing Trump. Lately, his approach has been decidedly more circumspect. I used to chalk this up to a new realpolitik in which the November election gave him many more Republican allies in the Legislature, most of whom are avid Trumpers. In response, Scott had to be more careful.
Now? I think Phil Scott is bending the knee, taking the coward’s way out, keeping his head down, sacrificing principle in favor of expediency. He doesn’t want to join the likes of Harvard, UPenn, immigrants, transgender folk, Stephen Colbert, the Washington Commanders, and Rosie O’Donnell in Trump’s crosshairs.
Two points. First, Scott’s transportation secretary refusing to cooperate with Attorney General Charity Clark’s lawsuit over cutbacks in federal funding for electric vehicle infrastructure. Second, his staunch defense of state cooperation with Trump’s immigration regime despite the fact that his own Department of Corrections is having a hard time dealing with the feds’ extraconstitutional thuggery.
Also this: A carefully worded statement from Clark that hints at a broader Trump-avoidant stance by the Scott administration.
No one besides us pathological Vermont Political Observers will have noticed, but July 1 was not just Bobby Bonilla Day, it was also a milestone in the 2026 gubernatorial campaign: the only campaign finance filing deadline in the year 2025. In fact, the next deadline isn’t until March 15, 2026 — not much more than two months shy of the filing deadline for major party candidates. But then, we do love our myth that nobody runs for office until June of an election year.
In other words, it’s going to get late early. Which makes it especially disappointing for campaign finance sickos (raises hand with pride) that Tuesday’s deadline produced no hints whatsoever about the race for governor in 2026.
Going into the day, I was expecting that Treasurer Mike Pieciak might report a decent-sized pile, like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if only to pre-empt a potential flood of Democratic candidates and an unpredictable dogpile primary á la 2010, when Jim Douglas was retiring and an entire generation of Democrats entered the race. Well, five Democrats, anyway. Four of ’em finished within four percentage points of each other, and Peter Shumlin won (by two-tenths of a percent over Doug Racine) with less than one-quarter of the vote. And we all know how that turned out (cough) EB-5, single payer health care, Scott Milne (cough).
I’m allowing myself a little historical tangent because it’s much more interesting than the great big nothing we got in Tuesday’s filings. The details follow. If you like disappointment, read on.
Charity Clark is in a unique position. At a time when our democracy and our system of government are under threat from The World’s Biggest Golf Cheat, she is Vermont’s chief legal advocate. More so than, say, our other Democratic statewides, she has the authority to take action. And the responsibility.
So far, she has followed the Bill Sorrell playbook: Signing on to 13 lawsuits against the Trump administration filed by coalitions of Democratic attorneys general. She also gave a nice speech at Saturday’s lawyers’ rally in Burlington. (In which she oddly referred to the rule of law and the separation of powers as “kind of one of our major brands” as if the Constitution is a consumer product.) That’s all fine, but it’s kind of the least she could do.
Stepping forward on her own would take some courage, but would also be the smartest political move she could make. Setting aside right and wrong for just a moment and focusing on the politics, which is after all the remit of this popstand, Clark is one of a number of top-tier Democrats presumed to be angling for higher office. But she appears to lag behind Treasurer Mike Pieciak (but then, don’t we all?) in terms of profile, connections, and fundraising prowess. If she wants to run for governor or the next Congressional opening, she’ll need to raise her public profile and differentiate herself from a potential swarm of primary candidates.
The best way for her to do that — and also, ahem, do the right thing — is to find ways to lead the fight against Trump. Even purely symbolic moves would help.
Today I wrote an email to Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark urging her to take all possible steps against illegal detentions by ICE and the Border Patrol. Indivisible Blue State Defiance has set up a simple way to send an email to your attorney general. (It also put me on BSD’s mailing list, I’m sure.) The process begins with a form email, but you can customize it to your liking before it’s sent. I did a pretty thorough rework of the opening paragraph to make it more pertinent to Vermont.
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?”
Welp, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders has gone and stepped into it. Big time.
When news broke of her directive that all Vermont’s public school districts would have to officially attest to their compliance with Trump administration orders against diversity, equity and inclusion policies and curricula, my own Outrage-O-Meter didn’t quite hit the red zone. Saunders’ message was more nuanced than it seemed at first blush; it sought simple attestation rather than any actual changes to policy, program or curriculum. It was kind of a “cover your ass” situation. These days, many a larger and more respected institution than the Vermont Agency of Education has been engaged in similar ass-covering maneuvers.
But man, did it kick up a shitstorm, and Saunders found herself walking the whole thing back, not once but twice, within a few days and with the help of Attorney General Charity Clark. This, after some districts indicated they would not comply and the public education community as a whole reacted with confusion and anger.
And I get it. Saunders’ original missive wasn’t clearly written, it asked superintendents to sign their names to attestations that might or might not satisfy the federal government. Plus the Trump administration’s own “guidance” is a poorly-executed study in opacity.
The real problem is that Saunders’ unforced error played into the perception, warranted or otherwise, that Saunders was imported from Trumpland for the purpose of Floridafying our school system. It reinforced educators’ fears about her true intentions and those of the Scott administration. And that may have repercussions for her ability to lead the public education system in the future.
It’s pretty obvious to any Vermont Political Observer, capitalized or otherwise, that the skids are being heavily greased for Treasurer Mike Pieciak to be the next Democratic nominee for governor. But I’d like to point out a small but telling piece of evidence that should not go unremarked upon.
Last week the Vermont Bar Association held a meeting in Manchester, and the occasion was marked by near-universal castigation of the Trump administration’s assault on the legal system (as reported, after the fact, by VTDigger). Members unanimously approved a statement affirming their support for the rule of law. In addition, Digger reports, more than 200 Vermont attorneys and elected officials have signed a statement “supporting the independence of the judiciary and outlining 15 instances of the current administration allegedly disregarding the rule of law.” The statement also announces a rally for lawyers opposed to Trump’s trample on May 3 in Burlington.
Prominent people quoted in the article include Reiber, Attorney General Charity Clark, Bar Association board president (and former deputy AG) Josh Diamond, former assistant U.S. Attorney Scott McGee, Bennington attorney David Silver, and his daughter, attorney* Natalie Silver…
… and Treasurer Mike Pieciak.
Okay, Pieciak is, in fact, a member of the Bar, so technically he qualifies. But he hasn’t been an active attorney since February 2014, when he took a position in the Peter Shumlin administration. He’s been in state government, not as an attorney, ever since.
*Correction: Silver is not an attorney. She is a law school graduate awaiting her law license.
The Vermont Political Observer. 