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.
A very strange thing happened a couple weeks ago at VTDigger. It’s been on my backburner for a while, as other events have clamored for attention. But I didn’t want to let this pass into oblivion without comment.
It was a terrific piece. But it was posted at 7:01 a.m. on Saturday, June 28. Saturday is the lowest day of the week for news consumption. When daily newspapers were actual dailies, the Saturday edition was always the scrawniest paper of the week. And it was the first to be jettisoned entirely when “dailies” became less than that. Weekend TV newscasts are long on canned features, weather and sports. Most of their field people don’t work weekends. They don’t waste their good stuff on Saturdays.
I’ve been in charge of news operations, and I know that all we did over the weekend was fill the space as painlessly as we could. In fact, much of the effort on Thursdays and Fridays was devoted to banking solid content for the following Monday, when the audience/readership starts paying attention again. Digger publishes very little content over the weekend, and what they do produce is generally soft feature material or shared content from other outlets.
This was a big story. The state’s relationship with ICE and the border patrol was a major issue before the Legislature this year. And the article was the product of a public records request — a vital journalistic tool that’s rarely employed these days because it requires a lot of work. Journalists write their PRR’s as broadly as possible so they don’t miss anything. As a result, they often get a ton of material to sort through. Weinstein did the scutwork and found a bunch of telling details that added up to a meaty scoop worthy of maximum attention.
First of all, “Declare victory and go home” is apparently one of many “famous quotes” that were never said at all, or never said by the person credited with saying them. (Usually Winston Churchill. Or Albert Einstein. Or Yogi Berra. Peas in a pod.) Details below, if you want to stick around.
Second of all, the “handshakes across the table” picture is not nearly as dramatic or satisfying when it’s taken from the viewpoint of the center-table cameras used to transmit legislative hearings. But I wasn’t there for the Big Moment, so I had to make do.
Now to the business at hand. After weeks of wrangling and repeated brushes with failure, legislative leaders and the governor reached a grand bargain of sorts on reforming public education finance and governance. Sounds impressive, right? But maaaan, the articles about this achievement are chock full of caveats and red flags. The more you read, the less monumental it seems. Really, it looks like a way for all concerned to engage in the Statehouse’s favorite participatory sport, kicking the can down the road.
If you think that’s overly cynical, I give you the words of none other than Gov. Phil Scott, who endorsed the bill and promised to twist Republican arms to try to get it past the entire House and Senate, an outcome that’s far from assured. Here’s how the governor described what this bill would do:
I believe it will put us on a path to stabilize property tax pressure for working Vermonters, while also putting us on a path to much needed governance reform that will unlock more opportunities for our kids.
The Phrase That Pays is “on a path.” This isn’t the actual transformation of our education system. This puts us “on a path” to transformation.
In other words, this bill is never going to take effect in its present form — even if it does pass the Legislature on Monday. Scott also predicted a return to the education reform issue next year, and he doesn’t think it will be any easier than this year.
Need more evidence that Our Betters just wrote themselves a “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Start with the fact that the bill wouldn’t take effect until 2028, a full year later than the governor had wanted. That’s plenty of time for second thoughts and rewrites.
Besides that, the bill is loaded with escape hatches, “off ramps” (Vermont Public’s Lola Duffort), and “is replete with unknowns and contingencies, and requires years of phase-ins and -outs before it takes full effect” (VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein).
Now, that’s lawmaking.
But to even get to the point where those off ramps and contingencies can be deployed, this bill has to survive a vote of the full House and Senate. The governor himself predicted that some Republicans and some Democrats would vote “no.” (Almost certainly some Progressives will as well, but I think Scott sees the Progs as a rounding error or something.) Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, who played a crucial role on the Committee of Conference that produced this bill, plans to spend the weekend urging his fellow Republicans to vote “yes,” and predicted plenty of uncomfortable and difficult conversations. “The conversation will definitely start with a lot of ‘no’s,” he said.
Which makes all the sense in the world. This bill would impose significant tax increases on some districts, mainly Republican ones, and force significant spending cuts in other districts, mainly Democratic ones. It would also lead to widespread school closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Honestly, if I were a Republican lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because it would clearly NOT be beneficial to my constituents. And if I were a Democratic lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because the bill would almost certainly force cuts in the public education system.
You and I won’t be privy to those arm-twistings, but I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that one of the key arguments will be “Don’t worry, this bill will never take effect. We’ll fix it next year.”
Speaking of which, you know what would come in real handy? A fully-empowered Commission on the Future of Public Education, the august body created by the Legislature last year and tasked with presenting a reform plan by the end of 2025. Given the obvious fact that this bill is deeply flawed and probably designed to never take effect, it sure would be nice to have a robust report from the Commission on how to fix this mess.
But wait, the governor and Legislature sidelined the Commission in their rush to Get Something Done This Year, even if it’s not the Right Thing. It still exists, but it’s in a limbo state, with no clear vision of what it’s supposed to accomplish and no institutional backing. Or as VTDigger’s Corey McDonald put it this week:
Now, as education reform proceeds, with only minor input from the body, the future of the commission tasked with studying the future of public education in Vermont is, itself, uncertain.
Well, that’s unfortunate.
For all the wrangling and the weeks of overtime, for all the struggles that split the House and Senate and will certainly divide the Democratic and Republican caucuses on Monday, we are nowhere near consensus on education reform. The governor himself predicted that next year’s debate on education reform will be “just as challenging, if not more” than this year’s. Great.
But hey, the Committee of Conference got its magical handshake moment, and that’s the best they could have hoped for.
Postscript. “Declare victory and go home,” or some variation on that theme, is universally credited to Vermont U.S. Sen. George Aiken. The phrase was a half-serious attempt to bring an end to the Vietnam War.
Except that, well, apparently he never said it. That’s according to Vermont historical journalist Mark Bushnell, who found that Aiken’s actual words were far more circuitous than the punchy, pithy version that now adorns many a QuoteFancy image. Here’s Busnell’s quotation of Aiken from the Congressional Record:
“(T)he United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam war is over — that we have ‘won’ in the sense that our Armed Forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam.”
That thing about “in control of most of the field” was a damn lie, and I suspect Aiken knew it. At best, we controlled the big cities and our military outposts.
But that’s not all. Aiken didn’t actually want us to “go home.” He wanted us to take a step back from aggressive military engagement in favor of “intensive reconnaissance,” whatever the hell that means. One of the causes of our defeat in Vietnam was a lack of reliable intelligence: We were incapable of doing effective reconnaissance because of language and cultural barriers, and South Vietnam was a corrupt basket case incapable of much of anything. According to Bushnell, Aiken did not believe the U.S. could or should leave Vietnam.
So much for our favorite wise man. But hey, you know, he’d probably feel right at home in our current education reform debate.
A couple of notes before we begin. First, the person most responsible for our education-reform brinkmanship is Gov. Phil Scott, who has insisted on creating a crisis atmosphere when what we really have is a situation that requires a carefully considered response. I don’t want this narrowly-conceived blogpost to divert attention from that fact.
Second, I like Phil Baruth, the Senate President Pro Tem. I really do.
However… I’ve been Observing Vermont Politics for 12-plus years, and I have never seen a blunder by a legislative leader as consequential as Baruth’s handling of education reform. We have yet to see how this issue will be resolved, but the question here is: Will this mark the end of his Senate leadership?
The thing that might save him, seriously, is the lack of alternatives in this most junior-ish of senior chambers. Well, that and Senate Democrats’ distaste for intra-caucus defenestrations. But it says here that while Baruth might remain Pro Tem for the rest of the biennium, I wonder if he’ll be leading the Senate beyond that.
Well hey now, got us a bumper crop of content worth your time without mentioning the big ol’ manbaby in the White House. Yes, It Can Happen! And we’ll begin with not one, but two stories from VTDigger. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without Digger, what with the decimation of the rest of our news media. So let’s celebrate the things Digger does well and encourage them to do more.
Official misconduct in the Fern Feather case. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I want to shine a spotlight on Peter D’Auria’s deep dive into the prosecution of Seth Brunell for the murder of Fern Feather — a prosecution that ended with a defendant-friendly plea bargain triggered by police misconduct. D’Auria’s story chronicles all the ways in which this case was mishandled by police and prosecutors. You come away from it feeling mad as hell, and wondering if Feather’s gender identity played any role in how authorities screwed this thing up six ways from Sunday.
Exiting prison is a “bureaucratic morass.” In an example of the routine Statehouse coverage that no other media outlet provides, Digger’s Ethan Weinstein reported on a role-playing simulation of the process of exiting prison and re-entering society. The system “forces individuals to jump through hoops that many of us in this room would struggle through,” said none other than Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml, the person in charge of administering the system. I saw no other reports on this simulation which, in a just world, ought to trigger a thorough overhaul of a system that surely must contribute to high recidivism rates. Probably could also apply to social service programs designed without any input from those who have to jump through an obstacle course’s worth of officially-designed hoops to receive the help they need. “Lived experience,” anyone?
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.
“The parking lot is filled with red, white and blue.” Eh, nope.
Hey, remember the great Trucker Convoys that tied up downtown Ottawa and shut down the Ambassador Bridge because Truckers Mad About Freedom? Yeah, doesn’t that just scream “February”?
Well, it’s March, and I think it’s time to stop paying attention.
VTDigger, WCAX-TV and WPTZ-TV didn’t agree. They sent reporters to cover Freedom Convoy gatherings in Lebanon, NH and Champlain, NY. And having sent the reporters, they felt duty-bound to produce stories — despite the fact that the only “news” was how few people bothered to show up. And both broadcasters devoted more than two minutes to the story, which is an eon in TV time.
The reporters allowed themselves to become stenographers for the convoy movement. Participants were given plenty of time to list their grievances and depict themselves as simple, peaceful, freedom-loving Americans. There was no mention of the chaos and economic disruption caused by the Canadian protests, which was exactly the outcome the American organizers had hoped to produce.
See the image above? That’s a screenshot from WPTZ’s story. While that image was on screen, reporter Liz Strzepa said that the parking lot was “filled with red, white and blue.” Um, I see only six flags, ma’am.
Maybe that was an unfortunate juxtaposition and the lot was much fuller than it appeared. But Strzepa never showed a wide angle. There were many close shots of a few people and a few vehicles, but no establishing shot that would have given the whole picture. Probably because it would have exposed the gathering for what it was: a complete washout.
The Vermont Political Observer. 