Tag Archives: Kesha Ram Hinsdale

Our Housing Crisis May Be Unsolvable

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I’ve been thinking about the need for a plausible, recognizable Democrat to step forward as a candidate for governor with a campaign focused on a big policy idea. This is because so many Dems seem to be playing into Gov. Phil Scott’s hands instead of carving out a recognizable alternative, and because the Vermont Democratic Party has been weakened for years by the lack of a strong, unifying voice at the top of the ticket.

Also because the only Democrat to actually win the governorship in the last quarter-century was Peter Shumlin, who staked his fortunes on single-payer health care and won a hard-fought 2010 primary and three straight statewide elections. He’s the only Democrat to be elected governor since Howard Dean in the year 2000. Some of you weren’t even born then.

So I was casting around for a big policy proposal that could turbocharge a gubernatorial campaign, and I remembered a post of mine from February 2024 which floated the idea of a $250 million housing bond. That’s right, take our solid bond rating and gamble it on the sensible proposition that building more housing would pay off in economic growth and higher tax revenues. You know, like a TIF writ large. It’d be an idea tailor-made for Treasurer Mike Pieciak, who has the expertise to craft such a plan while preventing the wise heads at S&P from catching a bad case of the fantods. And who needs to give voters a reason other than “Everybody likes Mike” to vote for him.

But now, in light of two recent news stories, I worry that a massive housing bond would amount to nothing more than pissing into the wind, that there simply may not be a way out of our housing crisis. At least not without structural economic changes on a scale much larger than our B.L.S.

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We’re About to Find Out, Yet Again, How Terrible the Legislature’s Ethics Regime Truly Is

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Hey, look: Somebody filed an ethics complaint against two state senators!

We wouldn’t know this, of course, except that the complainant announced the action in a press release. You’d never hear anything about it from official sources, because the Senate’s ethics process is a black hole from which no light can ever escape. Likewise the House’s process, but that’s another story.

The complaint was filed by Geo Honigford of Friends of Vermont Public Education. The targets, familiar to devotees of this here blog, are Sens. Seth Bongartz and Scott Beck. Honigford points out that both men have strong affiliations with private schools receiving public tuition dollars, and both lobbied aggressively for the interests of those schools in recent negotiations over public education reform.

I suppose you could think of Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth as an unnamed co-conspirator, since it was Senate leadership that chose to install Bongartz and Beck on the House-Senate conference committee on education reform. Or maybe his right hand, Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, could be included as well. She must have had a role in choosing two pro-private school senators to the committee.

Oh wait, Ram Hinsdale is chair of the Senate Ethics Panel, which will consider Honigford’s complaint. Right, right, probably best to leave her name out of it.

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Doing Something, Vermont Mainstream Edition

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Pretty obvious move today. We made a donation to the brand-new Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund, launched on Thursday by a group of prominent political figures. Mostly Democrats, but Thom Lauzon, the mayor of Barre and longtime Friend of Phil, is on the “Team,” as is former Republican lawmaker turned lobbyist Patti Komline.

Oh, heck, here’s the whole list, in the order they appear on the VILDF website.

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It was a Press Conference, a Rally, a Call to Arms

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A crowd big enough to attract the ire of any passing fire marshal jammed into the Statehouse’s normally placid Cedar Creek Room for an event that was inspiring, worrying, and kind of all over the place. (More on the curious backstory of this event later. Stick around if you can.)

Technically it was a press conference led by state Senate leadership, but about 300 people packed into the room to cheer on the speakers as they called for due process under law, freedom for Mohsen Mahdawi, unlawfully detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a fight by any nonviolent means necessary against Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and justice.

There were statements and there were questions from the press, like any normal press conference. But there was also an awful lot of enthusiastic response from the crowd. And for maybe the first time at such an event, the featured lawmakers acknowledged that working through the legislative process would be far from enough. “What it’s going to take is slowing ICE down and coming close to illegal interference,” said Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale.

State Sen. Becca White, pictured above, led the crowd in “an oath of nonviolence and peaceful protest.” The voices filled the room as she led a brief call-and-response:

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A Thoroughly Predictable Outcome of a Subverted Process

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Many, many, many words were spoken in Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Education Secretary Zoie Saunders before the Senate Education Committee, most of them by Saunders herself. And then, after nearly two hours of jibber-jabber, her nomination was approved on a 5-1 vote, with Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale on the short end of the ledger.

The full Senate will have the final say (its vote is scheduled for Thursday), but we all know where this is going. Saunders will be confirmed less than a year after the 2024 Senate rejected her on a lopsided 19-9 margin. Immediately following that vote, Gov. Phil Scott effectively overrode the Senate’s power to advise and consent by installing Saunders as interim secretary. And once the Legislature was safely adjourned for the year, Scott named her permanent secretary. That move was challenged, fruitlessly, in the courts, so she continued to serve. And she will continue into the indefinite future.

I can’t really blame the Education Committee for voting yes. It was a profoundly weird situation, having to confirm a nominee who’s already been in office for almost a full year without major missteps or scandals, at least none that we know about. It’s too long a time to suddenly decide she should be here at all, and too short a time for a true accounting of her tenure. (Nor was there any chance to hear from other witnesses who might have offered alternative views of Saunders’ effectiveness.) In a lengthy opening statement larded with the arcane language of bureaucracy, Saunders ticked off a laundry list of initiatives, every one of which was a work in progress with few if any measurables on offer.

Neither is there any evidence, in this very limited hearing, to kick her out. Ram Hinsdale’s vote was more a token protest than anything; it was clear from the opening stages of the hearing that a majority of the committee would approve Saunders. The only other possible holdout, Sen. Nader Hashim, made it clear in his first statement that he would be voting yes “unless something totally bonkers happens in the next 45 minutes.” Committee chair Sen. Seth Bongartz, the third Democrat on the six-member panel, said almost nothing until the very end of the proceedings, and then he opined that “The governor has the right to appoint the people he wants… unless something egregious emerges.” The fix was in, and had been from the moment the Senate’s Committee on Committees created an Education Committee evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and brushed aside last session’s vice chair, Sen. Martine Laroque Gulick, in favor of the obviously pliant Bongartz.

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Democrats Be Democrattin’

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VTDigger’s post-Mearhoff political “team” has done itself proud in the early days of the new year, publishing not one, but two, articles outlining a fresh outbreak of an old familiar malady of the left — Democrats in Disarray.

Yeah, I’ve seen this movie before, over and over again. The Dems react to an electoral defeat by watering down their agenda and shifting (if not stampeding) to the center. When, in fact, the lesson to be learned from election victories on both sides is that voters reward authenticity — and are unconvinced by carefully titrated policy positions that have been focus-grouped to death. And by “authenticity” I mean everything from Jimmy Carter’s humble populism to Donald Trump’s extravagant disregard for political norms. (Trump may be a phony and a huckster but he’s consistent about it. He is, as he has told us repeatedly, that snake.)

Digger’s Emma Cotton brings us word of a panicky retreat from the Dems’ climate agenda, while the (at least for the moment) sole occupant of the political beat, Shaun Robinson, reports that quite a few House Democrats are prepared to defenestrate Speaker Jill Krowinski in favor of independent Rep. Laura Sibilia. Enough are against Krowinski or undecided that next week’s election for Speaker may be a close affair.

Both are clear and obvious overreactions to the results of the November elections, which saw many a Democrat go down to defeat — but which left the Democrats with a majority in the Senate and nearly a two-thirds majority in the House. To say that they “lost” the election is to avoid the fact that they still rule the Statehouse roost, and would be fully justified in pursuing an ambitious agenda in the new biennium. Even so, many Dems seem to be running scared. Some of their more influential member are, dare I say, sounding a lot like Phil Scott Republicans. And no, that’s not a compliment.

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The Barons Didn’t Buy the Senate, But They Dramatically Increased the Price of Admission

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Throughout the campaign season I wrote about the Barons of Burlington, a bunch of well-heeled men — well, almost entirely men — and their obviously coordinated effort to buy a bunch of state Senate seats. They wrote fistfuls of four-figure checks to six Republican candidates for Senate plus their choice for lieutenant governor, Democrat-turned-Republican John Rodgers.

So, now that the dust has settled and the campaign finance reports are nearly complete*, it’s time to answer the musical question: Did the Barons buy the election?

*Final reports are due December 19, but the bulk of the money has been accounted for by now.

The obvious straight-line answer is yes. Their seven chosen candidates swept the field, reducing the Democratic/Progressive majority from 23 seats to 17 with the tie-breaking LG vote going to the Republicans.

The less obvious answer is, well, not really. There is abundant evidence that their money didn’t swing the election — that the Republican gains would have happened anyway.

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The New State Senate Will Be… Something

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Last May, I wrote a piece entitled “What Will the State Senate Be in 2025?” The idea was that for the second straight election cycle, the stodgy ol’ Senate was going to see an unusual quantity of churn:

This, in a body that values age and seniority above all else, and normally consigns junior members to purely decorative status. It’s gonna be interesting.

Well, the results of this month’s election will bring even more change to the Senate. It’s kind of staggering when you put it all together. By my count, 18 of the 30 senators will be freshmen or sophomores come January. That’s an amazing number. There were 10 newbies in 2023, and nine more will be new senators in 2025. (One 2023 newcomer, Irene Wrenner, lost her bid for a second term.)

The class of 2025: Democrats Seth Bongartz, Joe Major, and Robert Plunkett; and Republicans Scott Beck, Patrick Brennan, Samuel Douglass, Larry Hart Sr., Steven Heffernan, and Chris Mattos. Class of 2023: Martine Gulick, Wendy Harrison, Nader Hashim, Robert Norris, Tanya Vyhovsky, Anne Watson, David Weeks, Becca White, and Terry Williams.

What’s more, in a body known for very long tenures, only four senators will have served continuously since 2015 (Phil Baruth, Ann Cummings, Ginny Lyons, Richard Westman). Historically, you’d need to serve at least that long before the John Bloomers of the world* would consider you to be a Real Senator.

*Kidding. There is only one John Bloomer per planet.

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A Few Words for Anyone Expecting Full Scrutiny of the Zoie Saunders Nomination

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Welp, the Scott administration has put out a press release trumpeting Zoie Saunders’ first day on the job as Vermont’s education secretary. Nowhere does it mention that her appointment is pending approval by the state Senate, which won’t even begin considering the matter until sometime next week.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The press release says that “Saunders will travel around the state in the coming weeks” and “In the months ahead, Secretary Saunders will kick off a formal listen and learn tour.”

Yeah, the fix is in. The Senate will put on a show of performing due diligence, but honestly, there’s no way in Hell they’re going to send her back to Florida.

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Senate Committee Votes to Unshelter 1,600 Vermonters for Obscure and Arguably Bogus Process Reasons

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One of the necessary quirks of the legislative process is that almost every bill passed by a policy committee must also go through one or more “money committee” — if a bill raises revenue, it goes to House Ways & Means and Senate Finance, and if it spends a damn dime it goes through House and Senate Appropriations. If a bill both raises and spends, it must be passed by all four.

There are good reasons for this. The money committees look at the entire landscape of government spending and taxation and make sure everything fits together. They are fiscal gatekeepers, in essence.

However… these committees can also derail a good piece of legislation without serious consideration of the rationale behind it. And that’s exactly what happened yesterday afternoon in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The potential consequence is a mass unsheltering event in mid-March affecting roughly 1,600 individuals, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Not that anybody noticed, because there were apparently zero reporters present. It was the latest in a series of failures by our ever-shrinking media ecosystem. But hey, let’s get on with the story.

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