Belated weekly roundup of the best reportage in Vermont, postponed due to the education reform vote and related stuff. Reminder: Although this post is coming out on June 18, it only covers material posted/published/promulgated no later than the 15th.
Glenn Russell strikes again. The best part of VTDigger’s Friday story about Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature coming together on an education reform bill? Glenn Russell’s photograph. Not reproducing it for copyright reasons, so click on the link and enjoy.
Mmm, that’s the good stuff. In a single image, Russell perfectly captures the House-Senate conference committee dynamics that led us down this prickly path. The three Senate conferees are pictured. Two of them, Sens. Seth Bongartz and Scott Beck, strike identical poses, leaning forward, peering intently over their pushed-down glasses, holding copies of draft legislation, looking more than a bit skeptical of their House counterparts. The third Senator, Ann Cummings, leans away from the table with an expression that says, quite clearly, “I want nothing to do with these jamokes.”
In case you haven’t been reading me lately, Democrat Bongartz and Republican Beck share a common background and purpose. Both have substantial ties to the private schools that hoover up public education dollars, and both repeatedly centered those private institutions in what was supposed to be a discussion of how to improve the public schools. To capture all that in a single image? Chef’s kiss.
So the Legislature, in all its not-quote-infinite wisdom, has approved H.454, the sweeping “education reform” bill. In doing so, it pressed a gun firmly to its own neck. This bill threatens to backfire big-time if they don’t fix it next year, so in passing this bill they set themselves up for an even more contentious education debate — this time during an election year.
Yeah, no pressure.
As I’ve noted previously, the bill’s best feature is its raw unpalatability. To me, it’s virtually certain that H.454, in its current form, will never take effect. It’s political poison in so many ways that lawmakers will have no choice but to reopen this Costco-supersized can of worms next January.
Monday’s the big day, or so they tell us. The full House and Senate are scheduled to vote on the education reform Grand Bargain, which will never take effect in its current form even if it survives the big votes.
Still, major drama. The vote is not a sure thing by any means, despite the unified support of Gov. Phil Scott and Democratic and Republican legislative leadership. Many members of both parties realize the bill would negatively impact their local schools — districts in Democratic areas could see significant spending cuts, while rural Republican districts could see a wave of school closures and higher property taxes. The Democrats are also hearing it bigly from school officials and labor union constituencies.
Maybe legislative leadership can crack the whip firmly enough to scratch out a win, if only with the threat of a midsummer return to the Statehouse at the behest of Gov. Phil Scott. But as I wrote previously, leadership’s best argument is that they can all come back next year and overhaul the overhaul. In other words, hold your nose and vote for it, just so we can declare victory and get the hell out of here. Inspiring.
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.
I try to limit my use of bad language, I really do. But there are times, and this is one of them.
Gov. Phil Scott, alleged “nice guy” and “moderate” who has insisted that protecting Vermont’s most vulnerable is a pillar of administration policy, just went and did what we expected him to do all along: He vetoed H.91, the Legislature’s carefully crafted replacement for the motel voucher system Scott has been complaining about for years.
Our mainstream media outlets have been saying for weeks that Scott’s stance on H.91 was unclear. In doing so, they ignored the obvious signal from Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson that a veto was in the cards from jump street. Almost a month ago, Samuelson delivered a memo to legislative leaders expressing serious concerns about H.91. That should have been all the foreshadowing needed to conclude that we were inevitably going to end up where we are today, with Scott killing a good-faith effort by the Legislature to do the thing he and his administration should have done long ago: Propose a voucher replacement plan of his own.
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.
Phil Scott has been a denizen of the Statehouse for almost a quarter century. He was first elected to the state Senate in 2000, taking office in January 2001. He was a senator for 10 years, and served as vice chair of one committee and chair of another*. He then served three terms as lieutenant governor, whose duties include presiding over the Senate. Then he became governor, where he’s been ever since.
*His Wikipedia bio mentions, as the signature achievement of his time as chair of the Senate Institutions Committee, that he “redesigned the Vermont Statehouse cafeteria to increase efficiency.” Really? Is that the biggest thing he accomplished as a committee chair? Huh.
So it’s safe to say that if anyone knows how the Statehouse works, it’s Phil Scott. He has seen and done it all. He knows how stuff gets done, and how stuff doesn’t get done.
Which makes it all the more curious, or downright stinky if you prefer, that one of his top officials tried to blow up a legislative debate at the last possible minute. It was a thouroughly counterproductive tactic, unless the goal was to deliver a killshot to the bill in question.
The top official is one Jenney Samuelson, Secretary of the Agency of Human Services. On Friday, May 17 she delivered a memo seemingly aimed at derailing H.91, which would create a replacement to the oft-maligned General Assistance Emergency Housing program, a.k.a. the motel voucher system. For those just tuning in, that’s the system Scott and Samuelson have been criticizing nonstop for years without ever proposing an alternative of their own. This year, the House’s patience finally came to an end. It put forward a plan of its own in the form of H.91.
Every spring there comes a moment when you suddenly realize, “Wow, the legislative session is just about over.” For me, that moment came last week, with a bunch of stories about progress on major bills. A look at the calendar made me realize that in many other years,adjournment would have already adjourned. We’re well into overtime already.
We’re also getting a pretty clear idea of what history will make of the 2025 session, and it’s exactly what we all could have predicted last November 6, when Republicans decimated the Democrats’ veto-proof legislative majorities. No longer was the majority secure in its ability to override vetoes.
And they have legislated accordingly, trying to pass major bills that would be acceptable to the all-time record holder for vetoes by a Vermont governor. Scott, meanwhile, has pursued his customary course: Sitting in the balcony, tossing Jujubes at the stage, and emitting a squid-ink cloud of uncertainty around what he’d be willing to accept.
The result is a disappointment to anyone hoping for progressive lawmaking, but an entirely predictable one. What else could the Legislature do, really?
You know it’s a weird day when THIS pops up in your email inbox.
The guy on the left is, of course, Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, who spent 2024 cosplaying as a Republican in order to win Vermont’s bucket of warm piss, and has lately been pivoting madly to the left with his openly anti-Trump public statements, almost as if he plans to run for governor on the Phil Scott plan whenever an opening next presents itself. On the right is Jason Lorber, former Democratic state representative, standup comedian, and all-purpose consultant for hire. Two peas in a bipartisan pod, right?
So why did this too-large-for-comfort image appear in my inbox? It was sent by a reader who is, I suppose, on Lorber’s email list. The accompanying text announces a standup gig featuring Lorber on May 15 at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier. And guess who his opening act is?
Why, John Rodgers, widely known for his, uhh, comedic stylings?
Gov. Phil Scott continues to urge Vermonters to take a chill pill and ignore the bull rampaging through the china shop. He tells us to stop focusing on “the rhetoric in D.C.” — without identifying the source of the rhetoric. He did so once again last week in an interview with Vermont Public’s Michaela Lefrak which was faithfully, painfully, completely transcribed on VP’s website. Feast your eyes on this cornucopia of good talkin’.
Well, what— again, we have to wait for whatever the action is he takes against us here in the state, and react to that. And I, I think we have been doing that, but, but for all of us to fall into that trap, I think, is, would be unfortunate and it takes away from all the problems that exist here in Vermont today, that we’re not doing because we’re focusing on the rhetoric that he, he wants to stir up, and I don’t believe we can live in chaos for the next three and a half years. They just have too much to do, too much to accomplish right here in Vermont.
Winston Churchill would be proud.
Anyway, the governor couldn’t be wronger about this. First of all, we’re going to be living “in chaos for the next three and a half years” no matter what. Donald Trump is going to keep waving all the red flags and eroding our democracy and our federal government even if we take Scott’s advice and whistle resolutely past the graveyard.
Trump is a bully. He backtracks when confronted, and then seeks the soft spots in our defenses. It’s exhausting and yes, it takes a lot of time, but we don’t have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for rhetoric to turn into reality. Just ask immigrants, refugees, and transgender folk if they’re feeling secure these days.
Even when it’s nothing more than “rhetoric,” it creates tremendous uncertainty across the board. As Public Service Commissioner Kerrick Johnson told a legislative committee in February, “It changes daily in terms of the program. It changes daily in terms of the program and the people we’re required to work with. It changes daily in terms of the interpretation of the language and what’s being sent.” How the hell can the state do its job in that environment?
But c’mon, it’s gone far beyond mere rhetoric in more ways than I can count. Still, I’ll give it a try. What follows is a list of specific actions taken by the Trump administration that have already had a measurable impact on Vermont and Vermonters. I dare the governor look over this list and gabble placidly about “rhetoric.”
The Vermont Political Observer. 