Tag Archives: Steven Heffernan

With All Due Respect to the Junior Member from Addison, That’s 14 Minutes the Senate Will Never Get Back

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I’m beginning to think of Sen. Steven Heffernan as the Mr. Magoo of the Vermont Statehouse, especially since I learned on Wikipedia that Magoo was originally intended to be “a mean-spirited reactionary.” That would have been an interesting choice in 1949 when the Red Scare was raging, but the character was recast as an amiable bungler before the first cartoon was made. Heffernan manages to encompass both the “mean-spirited reactionary” bit with the daft digressions of the Magoo so familiar to us children of the Sixties.

The reactionary was on display in Heffernan’s May 15 musings about having sex with dogs. He pivoted to his Magoo persona on Tuesday, and baffled his fellow solons with a lengthy objection to a bill that no one seemed able to follow and he was at a loss to explain.

At issue was H.710, one of those bills that causes deep slumber in anyone besides fanboys of lawmakin’ trivia. The title itself makes you think Mr. Sandman is sprinkling fairy dust on your eyelids: “An act relating to defining electricity generating facilities.” What it would do is allow multiple renewable energy generators located contiguously to be defined as a single plant. Say, if there are three solar arrays sited next to each other, they could be considered a single facility under state law.

The bill passed the House on a 108-30 vote. The Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee rewrote the bill and approved it unanimously. Senate Appropriations also gave unanimous consent. It was on the Senate’s Tuesday agenda, and that’s when Heffernan offered an amendment to delay the bill’s effective date by two years. He explained himself in a long, discursive statement that he appeared to be reading for the very first time, so halting and unsteady was his delivery.

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Steven Heffernan is a Sad Excuse for a Man, and a Worse Excuse for a Senator

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Addison County Sen. Steven Heffernan, seen here being endorsed by our allegedly “moderate” governor, has done it again. He’s outed himself as a bigot, and is now trying to avoid the political damage that should result. Last time it was bravely ducking out of the Senate chamber when the roll was called for PR.4, which would add an equal protection clause to the state constitution. This time, he’s trying to explain why he’s not an ignorant bigot after making remarks on the Senate floor that were clearly both ignorant and bigoted.

And I do hope somebody asks Phil Scott if he has any second thoughts about the quality of his endorsements. Because Heffernan has revealed himself as an archconservative far away from our political mainstream in general and the politics of normally blue Addison County in particular.

The remarks in question were delivered on the Senate floor last Friday, May 15, and went unreported in the media until top Democrats started raising holy hell about them. Even now there’s been absolutely minimal coverage — an outrageous state of affairs when compared with the brouhaha over much milder remarks made by former senator Sam Douglass. Heffernan’s statements in the official record were far more toxic than anything posted by Douglass on Young Republican message boards.

The only story I’ve seen was tucked at the bottom of VTDigger’s “Daily Briefing” column for today, Wednesday May 20. The piece included Heffernan’s lame effort to explain himself, which beggars credulity. There’s been zero reporting from Seven Days or Vermont Public or even The Addison Independent as of this writing.

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Lest We Forget: The 15 Who Didn’t Support PR.4

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This November, we’ll all get a chance to vote on adding an equal protection clause to the Vermont constitution, something our state sorely needs — especially in a time when the federal administration is actively fighting equal protections. The equal protection amendment known as PR.4 has now cleared every hurdle in the marathon course required of constitutional amendments — passage through the Legislature in two successive biennia, which takes a minimum of three years to accomplish.

The final vote came last week in the House, and the tally was 128 in favor and 14 against. The corresponding vote in the Senate was 29-0 — with Republican Sen. Steven Heffernan taking the coward’s way out and ducking into the restroom when it was time to cast his vote.

I’m not making that up. It comes straight from VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson, who reported that Heffernan “got up from his seat right before the roll call vote was taken… because his stomach was feeling ‘agitated’.”

It’s a convenient and time-dishonored way to avoid going on the record. Heffernan barely bothered to devise a convincing cover story, telling Robinson “My pizza hit at the right time, I guess,” and acknowledging that the timing was “convenient.”

Especially when you’re a conservative lawmaker about to seek re-election in the blue precincts of Addison County, right?

Well, He Just Made the List — of Republicans whose records deserve closer scrutiny in this election season. The List also includes the nine Republicans who voted against a bill to establish a state vaccine registry. And since no one in the media thought it worthwhile to name the opponents of PR.4, well, I’m happy to oblige.

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Repeat After Me: “It’s Only a Movie”

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Sen. Chris Bray seems to have contracted a mild case of the fantods regarding his prospects for re-election to a [checks notes] seventh term in office. He’s raised quite a bit of money, and he’s spent even more than he’s raised. Before the August primary, he and fellow Addison County Sen. Ruth Hardy spent big against a challenge from Rep. Caleb Elder that, frankly, was doomed from the start. As I said in my previous post, incumbent senators just don’t lose unless they’ve committed gross malfeasance, aged beyond the electorate’s tolerance, or done something equivalently heinous.

And now, Bray is spending beyond his means against a surprisingly well-funded challenge from Republican Steven Heffernan (and a not-nearly-so-well-funded challenge from Republican Landel Cochran). And I get it; in his position, he shouldn’t be taking anything for granted. But I’m here to tell you that Bray ain’t losing. Heffernan’s odds are roughly equivalent to a snowball in a very hot place.

Look. Besides the fact that incumbent senators never lose, there’s the district. It’s been a full generation since Addison sent a Republican to the senior chamber: Tom Bahre in 2000, the year of the great civil unions backlash. Since then, two Democrats every two years for a grand total of 22 elected Dems to zero Republicans. In 2022, Bray and seatmate Ruth Hardy each received more than 33% of the vote, while third-place Republican Lloyd Dike lagged with 16.4%. Republicans have routinely finished far out of the running in Addison, except for those years when the GOP didn’t even bother to field candidates.

Yes, Heffernan is a more credible figure than Dike, one of the radical right hopefuls who co-signed a 2022 newspaper ad denying that global warming exists and asserting that greenhouse gases are actually good for us and the planet. Heffernan isn’t one o’ them. But he’s not winning, either. Not in Addison, not in a Senate race against two established Democratic incumbents.

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The Barons of Burlington Are Trying to Buy the State Senate

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Pictured above is a curious sort of politician: He presents himself as a simple farmer, a rural populist who gives voice to the voiceless — meaning people who live outside the Burlington area. But John Rodgers, former Democratic state lawmaker turned Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, has seen his campaign picked up off the mat by major backing from Chittenden County elites. The Barons of Burlington, you might say.

These same people are writing batches of four-figure checks to a handful of Republican candidates for state Senate who have some chance of winning. The goal, clearly, is to kill the Democratic/Progressive supermajority in the Senate and end the truly historic string of veto overrides in the current biennium. It’s a longshot; the Republicans would need a net gain of four seats to end the supermajority. But if Rodgers wins, they’d only need three because the potential tie-breaking vote would be in their back pocket.*

*Correction: THe tie-breaking vote might be useful but not for veto overrides. If there’s a tie on an override, it’s already lost.

A few months ago, this Barons of Burlington thing was kind of cute. Like, can you really expect to swing an election with a sprinkling of large donations? Now, it’s looking like a serious, coordinated effort beyond anything I’ve seen in my 12+ years of walking this beat. I mean, all these people writing identical checks to the same handful of candidates? It’s beyond anyone’s notion of coincidence.

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The Business Elites Expand Their Portfolio, and Other Notes from the 9/1 Campaign Finance Filings

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Well, those Burlington-area business types have slightly expanded their playing field as they try to weaken the Legislature’s ability to override gubernatorial vetoes. They’d backed a handful of centrist Democratic challengers to Dem/Prog incumbents (most notably Stewart Ledbetter and Elizabeth Brown*, only to see them all go down to defeat. (A similar effort was made by Brattleboro businessfolk in support of an unsuccessful challenge to Rep. Emilie Kornheiser.) They also backed some Republican hopefuls with a chance to knock off Democratic incumbents in November including LG candidate John Rodgers, two state reps running for Senate, Pat Brennan and Scott Beck, and the uncle-and-nephew tag team of Leland and Rep. Michael Morgan, running in a two-seat House district currently split between the two parties.

*We’d previously noted that Brown spent an appalling $35 per vote. It was actually $35.42, for those keeping score at home.

And now that same bunch of Vermont-scale plutocrats is throwing their weight, in the form of four-figure donations, behind Rep. Chris Mattos, running for Senate in the Chittenden North district currently repped by Sen. Irene Wrenner, and Steven Heffernan, Republican Senate candidate in Addison County. (A district that, according to Matthew Vigneau, solid Twitter follow and bigger election nerd than I, hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since the year 2000. Which was the year of the great civil-unions backlash that saw Republicans win in multiple unexpected locations, so grain of salt required.)

I haven’t come across any similarly blessed Republican candidates for House, but I didn’t do an exhaustive search. Then again, perhaps these low-grade plutocrats have decided (as have I) that the House is a lost cause for the Republicans.

So who’s giving how much to whom?

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