Tag Archives: Seth Bongartz

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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Public School Reform As If the Public Schools Mattered

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The House Education Committee has set aside a fair bit of time this week for discussion of H.454, which sets out Gov. Phil Scott’s education reform plan in a brisk 194 pages. It is to be hoped that the committee’s deliberations will be centered first and foremost on what’s best for Vermont’s public school system. Because nobody else seems to be doing so.

Take the governor, for instance. (Please, says Henny.) He pays lip service to improving education, but his focus is clearly on cost containment. Radically centralizing the system is no guarantee of better quality. (It’s no guarantee of savings, either; the move to statewide negotiation of health insurance for public school personnel hasn’t prevented its cost from skyrocketing.) Doing away with local school districts in favor of five massive regional districts is clearly aimed at cutting administrative costs. And don’t get me started on the provision of H.454 setting minimum class sizes at 15 for grades K-4 and 25 for grades 5-12.

Those are minimums, mind you. What would the average class sizes be? 20 in the lower grades, or 25? 30 in the upper? 35? Cautious administrators will want a margin of error above the state-mandated minimums. And what happens when a school dips below the minimum? Does it close down? Put some crash test dummies in desks and hope no one notices?

Frankly, I wonder why any Republican who represents a rural district — which is the vast majority of Republican lawmakers — could support this plan as written. The class size provision alone would trigger a massive wave of consolidation that would hit rural Vermont especially hard. (Maybe that’s why H.454 has a mere five sponsors while H.16, the Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Heat Act, has 55 and H.62, to repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act, has 29. There hasn’t exactly been a stampede among legislative Republicans to sign on to the governor’s plan.)

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The Curious Case of the Senate Education Committee

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I haven’t written about the Legislature’s newly reconstituted committees because there’s been a lot of other stuff going on. But there’s one committee that really caught my eye, and that’s the Senate Education Committee. Since education funding and structure are likely to be the dominant (and most contentious) issues in the new session, this panel will play a key role.

The Senate’s Committee on Committees chose to split the panel right down the middle — three Democrats and three Republicans. It’s pretty unusual. for the majority party to voluntarily relinquish its customary right to occupy most of the seats. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth said the intention was to create a committee that would “put out bipartisan bills.”

Sounds noble. It also puts the Republicans on the spot. They can’t just sit back and vote “No” on Democratic proposals. If they don’t come to the table and negotiate, then nothing will get done.

Still, the Democrats are ceding power when they didn’t have to. Usually, a policy committee would craft bills favoring the majority’s agenda and then see the bills get watered down as they meander through the legislative process. In this case, the compromising will begin immediately. But that’s not what’s bothering me the most about the education panel.

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Going Down All the Rabbit Holes With a Republican Candidate for State Senate

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Joe Gervais has returned to the political stage. The extremely unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for a House seat in and around Manchester is now running for state Senate in Bennington County. Two years ago in this space, I covered the extreme views ineptly concealed behind a façade of common sense conservatism, such as election denialism, Covid conspiratorialism, and belief in the thoroughly debunked canard that vaccines cause autism.

But that was a mere appetizer for the main course we have on today’s menu. Gervais is once again running as a fiscally conservative Republican of the kind that would make Phil Scott proud… but he made the cardinal mistake of revealing his true self in a blog on Substack called “Vermont Musings.”

And boy, are his views ever extreme. Among the most extreme I’ve seen in Vermont politics, and that includes the likes of Art Peterson, Gregory Thayer, and John Klar.

Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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More Money Than Sense, and Other Notes from the Latest Round of Campaign Finance Reports

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August 1 was another campaign finance deadline, the last before our August 13 state primary. As usual, there was plenty of interesting stuff to be found. And as usual, there was a dearth of coverage in our sadly diminished media ecosystem. VTDigger waited a few days to put together a solid campaign finance database helmed by its longtime (by Digger standards) data reporter Erin Petenko. But any effort, by anyone, to identify trends or develop insights? Haven’t seen any.

Meanwhile, those who follow me on Elon’s Hellscape know why I’m late to the party. After doing a fair bit of spadework around the deadline, I came down with Covid. It was a pretty severe case for a few days and I’m still on the mend, but I feel able to put words on the screen for the first time since last Thursday.

Anyway, got some things to say. Let’s do the toplines first and then get to the details.

  • While the vast majority of candidates have trouble scratching a few bucks together, there are a few who have more money than they know what to do with. The primary’s one week away, early voting as been going on for roughly a month, and they’re sitting on large quantities of unspent cash.
  • Many of these hopefuls have been generously funded by a cadre of Burlington-area business types, who may look at their investments post-primary and despair at the improvidence of their strategery.
  • Two candidates got a rocket strapped to their backs by those business leaders in July. John Rodgers, running for lieutenant governor, and Rep. Pat Brennan, running for state Senate. They went from near zero on July 1 to huge, nigh unspendable hauls on August 1. Congrats, I guess?
  • Gov. Phil Scott’s campaign has far outstripped Democrat Esther Charlestin. Why his people are bothering to beat the bushes, I don’t know. I remain convinced that he’d be better advised to mothball his campaign and start a PAC — or a Super PAC — and spread his influence around.
  • The oddities around Thomas Renner’s campaign for lieutenant governor continue to proliferate. His fundraising slowed to a trickle in July, but he spent very little and has a sizeable unspent reserve. I still don’t know what his campaign is about. Or who’s running it, for that matter.
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Who’s Spending: Another Look at Mass Media Filings

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One week ago, I wrote about former senator John Rodgers’ five-figure spend for ads on WDEV radio plus other candidates’ investments in mass media. Several candidates have since reported mass media expenditures; here’s a look at the highlights.

Reminder: The next campaign finance reporting deadline is August 1, but candidates are required to promptly report mass media buys of $500 or more when they occur close to an election.

Let’s start with Rodgers. I noted that if his WDEV buy was part of a broader strategy it could pay off, but by itself it’s a questionable move. It’s a lot of money to spend on a diminished medium and an outlet that only reaches a fraction of Vermont. Well, so far it stands alone: Rodgers has not reported any more mass media spending.

The biggest mass media report from the past week comes not from a candidate, but from the Child Care Victory Fund, a political action committee affiliated with Let’s Grow Kids Vermont. The Fund is apparently trying to protect incumbent lawmakers who supported Act 76, the 2023 bill that made a “quantum leap” in child care investments, and now face primary opposition.

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Stealth Republicans: Pin That Extremist to the Wall

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We can end the competition for Best Moment in a Political Debate in 2022. We already have a winner!

The honorees are state Reps. Kathleen James and Seth Bongartz of Manchester, whose star turn came in an October 12 candidates’ debate on Vermont’s best community access TV service, gnat-tv. The forum featured the three candidates in the two-seat Bennington-4 district. Pictured from right to left (in the photographic sense only): James, Bongartz, gnat-tv moderator Andrew McKeever, and Republican candidate Joe Gervais, seen here desperately wishing he was somewhere else.

Gervais is a Covid denialist, vaccine truther, and 2020 election conspiratorialist among other things. Oh, and he sees the hand of God in random cloud formations.

Throughout the debate, he did his best to conceal his extreme views behind the usual façade of run-of-the-mill Republicanism. But near the end (just before the 49-minute mark in the one-hour program), James calmly rolled out a devastating attack.

When you and I met for the first time on primary night, outside the Arlington polls, you told me you believed that Trump had won the 2020 election and that basically it had been stolen by massive national voter fraud, and that was disturbing to me… And I’ve gotten a call from a constituent who said that you told her that you were at the Capitol on January 6th, the day of the insurrection. And you’re campaigning on honesty and transparency, and I want to know if you were in Washington DC at our nation’s capital on the day that a violent mob attacked it

Ouch!

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