Gotta start using air quotes around that appellation for our chief executive, because he seems to be going out of his way to antagonize the Legislature and prepare the fields for another bushel of his administration’s chief cash crop, gubernatorial vetoes. It’s funny, after all that talk about coming to the table and working across the aisle, he’s back in his comfort zone: confrontational mode.
You know, if Phil Scott was a politician — which he continually insists he is not — I’d say he had absorbed the lessons of the 2024 election and decided the path to victory was in demonizing his opponents. It’s smart politics. But it’s anything but nice.
Exhibit A: VTDigger reports that the Scott administration has finally, belatedly, delivered its full public education reform plan in actual legislative language.
On February 25. Almost two months into a five-month session. Three days before the Legislature adjourns for Town Meeting Week. Little more than three weeks before crossover, when any policy bill must have been passed by one chamber if it’s to have any real chance of passing the other this year. It’s just not possible for lawmakers to give due consideration to such a massive reorganization in such a short window of time.
You’d probably have to be pretty deep in the weeds of Vermont politics, or perhaps a resident of Manchester, to recognize the name “Jim Ramsey.” (Pictured above with a slightly better known figure.) He’s only been involved in #vtpoli for a few years, but he’s been on a sharp upward trajectory that culminated on Saturday with his election as the new chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, replacing the prematurely departed David Glidden.
Well, technically Ramsey is the interim chair, filling out the remaining months of Glidden’s two-year term between now and November, when Ramsey will doubtless be elected permanent chair.
Members of the party’s state committee held a special meeting via Zoom on Saturday morning to choose Glidden’s replacement. Two people were nominated: Ramsey and former state senator Andy Julow, who was a late entry in the race.
If you needed any evidence that Ramsey had the inside track, you got it from VDP state committee member Susan Borden. In formally nominating Ramsey, she noted that he’d been endorsed by Treasurer Mike Pieciak, Attorney General Charity Clark, and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. The vote wasn’t close; Ramsey took 38 of the 45 votes cast. Julow received the other seven. In pre-vote remarks to the committee, Julow more or less acknowledged his longshot status. But even so, it’s telling that a former officeholder from the most populous region of Vermont finished a poor second to a guy from Bennington County who’d only been active in state party politics for about five years. It seemed clear that Ramsey was the choice all along.
And having heard his pitch to party leaders and learned a bit more about him, I can understand why.
The folksy Son of the Soil pictured above is Sam Douglass, senator-elect from the Orleans district. Or, as I find myself thinking of him, Senator Scofflaw. Because while he claims to be a “fierce advocate,” he was shockingly blasé about his legal obligations to report campaign finances accurately and promptly. Makes you wonder about his fierceness, not to mention his devotion to fiscal responsibility.
Because his campaign finance filings are the opposite of “responsibility,” and include numerous violations of state law. Fortunately for him, the penalties are laughably small and rarely enforced. Otherwise he’d be in a heap of trouble. As it is, maybe some Concerned Citizen will see fit to file a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office, for all the good that will do.
Let’s start with the fact that Douglass has yet to file his Final Report, which was due on December 15. And there’s a real need for a final accounting, because his most recent report leaves many questions unanswered.
His post-election filing, submitted on November 19, shows a serious imbalance between income and outgo — and not in the way you’d expect. The Douglass campaign has reported raising nearly $41,000 and spending only $27,460. Did he really leave one-third of his bankroll on the table in a race against Democratic Rep. Katherine Sims, who raised more than $76,000? Or has he failed to fully report his expenditures?
Vermont’s campaign finance law and the Secretary of State’s reporting system can be a challenge, but when you run for public office you are obliged to follow the rules. Besides, Senator Douglass is going to be responsible for writing the laws. Shouldn’t he be capable of obeying them?
As the Scott administration’s school governance plan vanishes slowly into the Great Lost Swamp of ill-begotten ideas*, it’s time for a history lesson.
*You might think this premature, but Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth and the House Democratic caucus have said that universal school choice, a core feature of the Scott plan, is a non-starter.
Confession first: I didn’t remember this event. A reader reminded me of it.
Way back in 2019, then-education secretary Dan French let loose a trial balloon that sank quickly and without a trace. But in every important aspect, it was a precursor to this year’s plan — albeit an even more dramatic rethinking of how the public school system is organized and funded. What it tells me is that the Scott administration has been thinking along these lines for years. And now, likely emboldened by Republican gains in November, the admin is publicly promoting a modified version of the French plan.
Last week, the Budget Adjustment Act sailed through the House on more or less a party-line vote, with Republicans raising whiny objections over a penny-ante increase in funding for the General Assistance Emergency Housing program. Gov. Phil Scott did his share of whining as well, and there’s been some talk of a possible BAA veto. Which, if it happens, would be utterly ridiculous.
But amidst all the Republican whining, the most ignorant, shameful, bigoted remarks actually came from a Democrat. Stay tuned for more on that.
This all happened against the backdrop of a tremendous piece of journalism that dropped the day of Scott’s comments and the day before the House’s BAA debate: a story by Vermont Public‘s Liam Elder-Connors and Seven Days‘ Derek Brouwer exploring how many unhoused people have died in Vermont, a statistic the state has so far declined to keep. With that story on the front page, it was a bad time to bitch about an extra $1.8 million in motel vouchers.
The two reporters found that “at least 82 people in Vermont… died between 2021 and 2024 while appearing to reside in an emergency shelter or outdoors.” That’s almost certainly an undercount; no one in Vermont officialdom tracks that number, nor does anyone seem interested in doing so. Outgoing Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine said it would be “very challenging” to collect such data.
Not as challenging as, say, sleeping outside in the dead of winter, but sure, let’s only keep the easy statistics.
The long, slow rollout of Gov. Phil Scott’s education plan took another step yesterday, as Interim Education Secretary Zoie Saunders* testified before the House Education Committee about the governance portion of the plan. Her testimony was met with widespread befuddlement, as reflected in a series of “What the heck does this mean?” questions from majority Democrats on the committee.
*She dropped the “Interim” when she introduced herself to the committee**.
** It has been pointed out that Scott has appointed Saunders permanent secretary. Okay, but her entire appointment is still subject to a court ruling, so it remains to be seen whether she’s permanent or done.
Before we get to the sources of that befuddlement, we must mention the poison pills contained within Scott’s plan. First, it would implement statewide school choice and throw the doors open for unfettered expansion of the current “approved independent schools” system. Every public school student would have to be offered some measure of choice. That’s a nonstarter for Democrats, or it ought to be, because it poses a very real threat to the finances of actual public schools.
Second, it would centralize power over the education system to a remarkable degree. Local school boards would be gone. There would be only five large school districts. Each local school would have a “School Advisory Committee” with very little authority. Most of the state Board of Education’s powers would be assumed by the Agency of Education. And the current “boards of cooperative education services,” created and administered by school supervisory unions, would be replaced by “Education Service Agencies” controlled by the Agency of Education. According to the Scott plan, one of the purposes of this move is “to limit mixed messaging.” In other words, to stifle dissent.
One (anonymous) Democratic lawmaker suggested to me that House committees ought to just send this plan directly to the House floor and watch as Scott and Republican lawmakers — almost all of whom represent small, rural school districts at risk of disenfranchisement and school closures — try to explain themselves, or risk serious injury as they back away from the plan as quickly as possible.
To say this plan is doomed is to indulge in understatement. Besides the presence of poison pills, there are other signs that Scott doesn’t intend for this plan to be taken seriously. What he wants, I suspect, is for the Democrats to reject the plan so he can accuse them of refusing to face the issue. He has asked them to “come to the table,” but he has laid out a buffet of awfulness. It’s not an invitation; it’s a trap.
Update. Within 24 hours of this post going live, the governor announced his first (and so far only) concrete response to the Trump presidency: an interagency task force to assess the potentiial impacts of Trump tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Must have been a complete coincidence, right?
You might think that the deliberately shambolic start of the second Trump presidency would have been a major topic at Gov. Phil Scott’s January 30 press conference. After all, in a very short period of time Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders, many of dubious legality and/or constitutionality, that are designed to radically recast or possibly euthanize the federal government. The one most directly pertinent to governing the state of Vermont was Trump’s since-withdrawn threat to put an immediate halt to a wide range of federal payments. (The threatened imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports would have had a profound effect on Vermont, but they hadn’t been bruited as of January 30 and have since been put on hold.)
You might think the specter of Trump would have dominated Scott’s presser, but you’d be wrong. The topic of the day was, shocker, “affordability,” especially with regard to Scott’s housing plan and his extremely modest tax reduction plan. Which, at $13.5 million, would average out to a scant $20 a year for every Vermonter.
(Of course, it wouldn’t be distributed evenly. The three elements of his plan are (1) an expansion of the Democrats’ child tax credit, (2) an end to state taxation of military pensions, and (3) an end to state taxation of Social Security benefits. The latter two, aimed largely at retirees, seems an odd way to address Vermont’s demographic challenges. Our biggest demographic shortfall is in mid-career adults, who are mainly too old to benefit from a tax credit on young children and not old enough to benefit from the other two provisions.)
Neither Scott nor his officials voluntarily addressed how Trump setting fire to the federal government might impact Vermont. None of the assembled reporters asked a single question about it until the 44-minute mark in a 47-minute presser. Almost an afterthought, then. But Scott’s response was highly informative — for what he didn’t say, more than for what he did.
We already knew Gov. Phil Scott has called for a full-scale retreat from fighting climate change. But in his January 30 press conference, he made it clear he not only wants to eliminate any mandatory emissions reduction targets this side of 2050, avoid any potential legal challenge over the state’s failure to meet 2025 or 2030 targets, extract all the teeth from the Climate Action Council, implement a much more permissive measuring stick for emissions, and weaken the Renewable Energy Standard, but he overtly stated he wants no further action at all for another two years.
Yep. He had already tasked his officials with devising a plan to meet the 2050 emissions targets. But in his presser, he specified the delivery date for that plan.
December of 2026.
Sure, let’s put a freeze on climate policy while his administration takes its sweet damn time coming up with a 25-year plan — and finalizes it after the next election. When Scott might well be on his way out of the corner office. If this term is his last, this marvelous two-year effort is bound for the dustbin of history.
But really, the point is not to create an actionable blueprint. It’s to take himself off the hook for climate action anytime soon.
Our brand new lieutenant governor has yet to learn the fine art of sitting within camera range during a big event. During Gov. Phil Scott’s budget address Tuesday, John Rodgers spent most of his time looking bored, which isn’t a great thing when he’s supposedly cheerleading for his fellow Republican,.
In fairness to Rodgers, it wasn’t the most inspiring of occasions. Scott’s much-touted budget address was kind of a tepid affair. The freshly reinforced Republican ranks in the House and Senate gave the governor some hoots and whistles as he entered and departed, but only managed a pair of half-hearted standing ovations during the speech.
I guess we shouldn’t expect anything different after eight years of this guy. But he and his minions have been talking a lot about bold action in 2025. And while there were bits of bravery peeking out here and there — like pushing his fairly radical public school reorganization plan and officially calling for a full retreat on climate action* — there was a hell of a lot more incrementalism. A whole bunch of initiatives with teeny-tiny price tags (on the scale of a $9 billion dollar budget), many more in $2-3 million range than anything truly impactful.
*”Brave” and “stupid” are not mutually exclusive.
There was also one huge omission. Scott never once mentioned the threat posed by Donald Trump to the federal funding that pays for so much of what state government does. He didn’t address any contingency planning or possible budgetary adjustments. It was a glaring omission on the very day when VTDigger reported that Team Scott “is trying to understand the potentially sweeping statewide impact” of Trump’s broad freeze on federal spending.
Maybe that’s because many of Vermont’s new Republican lawmakers are diehard Trumpers, and Scott might have gotten an unfortunate reaction from his “friends” if he said anything that even hinted at criticism of Trump’s scorched-earth approach to governance.
It’s been two and a half months since Election Day, which means I’m way behind the Political Observer curve in terms of looking ahead to the next election.
Or perhaps the 2028 election, depending on when Gov. Phil Scott decides to retire undefeated. Because until that happens, there won’t be a serious contest for the Democratic nomination — and when it happens, we’re going to see a political stampede the likes of which we haven’t seen since Jim Douglas’ retirement in 2010 touched off a five-way contest in the Dem primary.
If you think it’s Way Too EarlyTM for such talk, well, let me tell you, the engines have been revving for some time now. Recent examples: Former Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger’s emergence as the public face of Let’s Build Homes, a nominally bipartisan slash nonpartisan organization promoting the cause described in its name; and the obligatory tongue bath given to Lt. Gov. John Rodgers in the cover story of last week’s Seven Days, which touted the notion that this crusty, ornery Son of the SoilTM was suddenly transformed into gubernatorial timber by his extremely narrow plurality victory over David Zuckerman. Which I don’t buy, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.
In reality, the race to succeed Scott began at least two years ago and maybe four, when Mike Pieciak left his post in the, ahem, Scott administration to run for treasurer and immediately succeeded his predecessor Beth Pearce as the person most likely to get a standing ovation at party meetings. Pieciak’s been fundraising far beyond his minuscule needs ever since, and the only plausible explanation is that he’s preparing to run for governor as soon as Scott steps aside.
A more pointed signal of Pieciak’s intent could be seen in his November 19 campaign finance report: a $3,000 payment made on November 6 to Silver Strategies, LLC.
The Vermont Political Observer. 