Tag Archives: Mari Cordes

Welcome to the N.Y.S.V.E.C.U. Part 2: The Addy Indy Gets the Scoop

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See previous post. This week brings us so much media news that I didn’t try to make it fit into a regular edition of “News You Should View.” The first installment of the News You Should View Extended Cinematic Universe featured bad content; this one features a small newspaper trumping the big boys.

The Addison County Independent is one of Vermont’s best local newspapers. Unfortunately, its content sits behind a rigorously-enforced paywall and I choose not to subscribe to every paywalled content farm in the state. But over the weekend I was driving through Addison County, and picked up a print copy of The Addy Indy at the redoubtable West Addison General Store (complete with well-aged and uneven wooden floors).

And there on the bottom of the front page was a significant story about Vermont politics that I have yet to see in any other outlet. It informs us that Gov. Phil Scott is treading into the gray area when it comes to naming a replacement for former state representative Mari Cordes of the Addison-4 district, who recently relocated to Nova Scotia.

I’m not linking the article because rigorous paywall, but since I paid two bucks for the physical paper (which is impressively thick, their sales department must be doing something right), I figure I can spill a few beans.

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Let’s Take a Moment to Marvel at the Dispassionate Reasoning of Vermont Conservatives

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Thankfully, the tide appears to be ebbing on the Great Statehouse Trans PANIC! of 2025. It’s been days since the Vermont Daily Chronicle could gin up any fresh angles on the ridiculous story. Which, as a reminder, featured a group of Christian conservatives whining — inaccurately — that their free speech rights had been trampled by a handful of trans folk dancing around a Statehouse meeting room. As we previously noted, there is no First Amendment right to deliver speech in a given location or on a given medium.

But before we consign this fiasco to the dustbin of history, we should take note of two particularly ridiculous attempts to exploit this mildest of contretemps. First, a tiny extremist “parental rights” group unwittingly exposing the absurdity of its own claims. And second, the head of the Vermont Republican Party claiming that state lawmakers have a solemn duty to maintain a perfect attendance record.

This will involve a bit of exposure to the rantings of SPEAKVT, a group of far-right rabble-rousers in the Essex-Westford school district. The group’s president Marie Tiemann put out a statement about the March 12 “detransitioning” event sponsored by SPEAKVT and the Vermont Family Alliance. Funny thing, her statement is kind of a self-own.

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PANIC! At the Statehouse

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You know the funny thing about all those conservatives who carry pocket Constitutions everywhere they go, many of whom revere our founding document as divinely inspired?

The funny thing is, they have no idea what the First Amendment says or means. Are those pocket Constitutions ever actually read, or are they just fetish objects?

Latest example: The ongoing kerfuffle over a March 12 incident at the Statehouse, in which an event sponsored by the far-right Vermont Family Alliance was interrupted by a handful of dancing transgender folk. (To judge by available footage, it was the mildest, most unthreatening “disruption” I have ever seen in my life.) Eventually the meeting was shut down by the Sergeant at Arms. Conservatives instantly went into full tizzy mode over the trans folk’s alleged interference with VFA’s First Amendment rights.

I haven’t addressed this before because I thought it would go away (as it should), but the right-wing echo machine has cranked itself up to eleven. So I guess I have to explain this. Slowly.

The First Amendment guarantees your right of free speech. It does not guarantee your right to a particular platform. There is no Constitutional right to hold an event in Room 11 of the Statehouse, just as there is no Constitutional right to express your views in the pages of the New York Times or on a given social media platform or on a specific streetcorner or in a crowded theater.

The VFA folks could have gone out in the hall or out on the front lawn. Or anywhere. They didn’t have to be deterred by a few counter-protesters dancing around. Which, from available video evidence, is absolutely all they did.

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Phil’s Friends: A Homegrown Mom for Liberty

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As noted previously, Gov. Phil Scott and former gov Jim Douglas were scheduled to hold a meet ‘n greet this evening for Republican legislative candidates in Addison County. They’ll be lending their names and “moderate” reputations to a passel of far-right hopefuls with, um, no hope of winning in a deep blue county.

Take Renee McGuinness, pictured above. Please, take her.

McGuinness is one of two Republican candidates in the very Democratic Addison-4 district, currently repped by Mari Cordes and Caleb Elder. It last elected a Republican in 2016, and the two incumbents cruised to re-election in 2022 by a wide margin. (Elder made an unsuccessful bid for state senate this year; Herb Olson joins Cordes on this year’s Democratic ticket.)

McGuinness is known in Statehouse circles as an advocate for the Vermont Family Alliance, a very conservative organization aligned, in worldview at least, with the notorious Moms for Liberty, which seems to be plummeting earthward after a brief ascent to political influence in Ron DeSantis’ Florida. MFL has been identified as “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Doubtless VFA is too small to have attracted SPLC’s notice.

VFA touts itself as a parental rights group, fighting against government intrusion into parents’ “natural right to make decisions” about their children’s upbringing. Which sounds kind of benign on the surface, but their idea of government intrusion is pretty darn broad.

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Trying to Remove One Hand from Our Health Care Pocket

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If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you might think “pharmacy benefit manager” is a job title for some anonymous mid-level health insurance executive. Like, say, the guy pictured above. But no, a pharmacy benefit manager is a corporation that sticks its big fat nose into the middle of America’s misbegotten prescription drug system and snorts up all the loose cash it can.

That’s my definition anyway. If you’re a high-priced lobbyist for the national PBM trade association, things look a little different. “Pharmacy benefit managers exist for one purpose: to drive down cost of prescription drugs,” said Sam Hallemeier of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA). PBMs, he continued, “reduce costs for insurers and consumers, reduce waste, and improve patient care.”

Wow, I hadn’t realized that PBMs are charitable enterprises that simply want to make the world a better place.

Oh wait, they’re not. The PBM marketplace is dominated by three large firms that are owned by three of America’s largest for-profit health care firms: Caremark, operated by drugstore chain CVS; Express Scripts, operated by insurance giant Cigna; and OptumRx, brought to you by insurance giant (and sworn foe of spaces between words) UnitedHealth. These mega-corporations are in business to make profits. If their PBMs are holding down costs, you can bet your life they’re doing it for their own benefit, not yours or mine.

You may wonder when I’m going to get to the Vermont political point of this. Well, the Legislature is considering a bill, H.233, that would impose substantial new restrictions on PBMs. And while our state has a track record of disappointment when it comes to health care, this thing might actually stick.

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This Is Not the End (UPDATED)

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The House and Senate steamed ahead with their motel voucher-free budget, but they fell critically short at the very last hurdle. Thanks to a group of Democrats and Progressives unwilling to evict thousands of Vermonters because “it’s time” or “we just couldn’t find the money,” the House came short of the margin needed to override a gubernatorial veto.

The final tally: 90 votes for the budget, 53 against. House leadership will have to persuade at least three members to abandon their principled stand in order to win an override vote. And Gov. Phil Scott appears bound and determined to deliver a veto.

Update! The official roll call shows that 17 Democratic/Progressive lawmakers voted “No” on the budget. That means leadership will have to flip at least six votes to override a veto, not three. Working on a fresh post about this.

So what happens now? The Legislature is adjourned until June 20, when a three-day override session is scheduled. If Scott does veto the budget, leadership will face a choice: Convince three or more dissidents to join the Dark Side, or craft a compromise on housing that will meet their demands. Looming ahead of it all: The requirement that the state must have a budget in place when the new fiscal year begins on July 1.

One big fly in the ointment: Nearly half of the 1,800 households in the motel voucher program will have already been evicted by then. The program’s eligibility standards tighten at the end of this month, so a last-ditch fight to save the program will come too late for more than 1,000 people facing unsheltered homelessness in less than three weeks.

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A Faint Glimmer of Light

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Finally!

After months of dire warnings from housing advocates, after several weeks of repeated posts on This Here Blog (starting on March 26), a handful of lawmakers has finally stood up and taken notice.

With a single week left until scheduled adjournment, six members of the House Democratic caucus announced they would not vote to override a gubernatorial veto of the FY24 budget unless there was funding for a transition strategy from the motel voucher program to a replenished supply of permanent housing.

This takes real guts. They’re taking a public stand in opposition to Legislative leadership, which has been 100% committed to ending the voucher program by the end of June despite the fact that two thousand-plus Vermonters would be kicked out on the streets. The budget has sailed through the House and Senate, and is now before a conference committee tasked with crafting a consensus spending plan.

And now comes a squadron from the Rebel Alliance with Rep. Mari Cordes playing the part of Luke Skywalker, determined to drop a proton torpedo down the hatch of the budgetary Death Star. It’s inspiring, but it also leaves me wondering why it took this long.

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The Democrats’ Union Problem

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Four Democratic/Progressive candidates for the House, including two incumbents, have declined endorsements from the Vermont State Employees’ Union, citing “harmful inconsistencies in the organization’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement.” (The four are Reps. Mari Cordes and Selene Colburn, and Democratic candidates Emmy Mulvaney-Stanak and Taylor Small.)

Or, to put it another way, the VSEA’s kneejerk support for its members — even the rotten apples threatening to spoil the bushel.

Protecting its members is a core mission for every union. But there can and should be exceptions to the rule. It’s really in the best interest of the union (and the labor movement) to ensure that the bad apples are removed before they harm the reputation of all its members. Kind of like when the Major League Baseball Players’ Association blocked meaningful action to address baseball’s rampant steroid problem. Was it really in the best interest of non-using MLBPA members to allow the cheaters to go on damaging the game?

No, but the PA acted on first instinct. And when the VSEA staunchly claims that all the problems in Vermont’s corrections system are on management, and asserts that its members are blameless? They’re doing the same thing. And it must be said, DOC members wield a lot of power in VSEA. So much so, that if I were a VSEA member in some other state agency, I’d be upset over the union’s inaction when scandalous behavior is unearthed at state prisons.

This creates a dilemma for Democratic officeholders.

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