The Green Mountain Party platform starts off with a section called “taking big money out of politics,” which proposes “a 55 percent tax on any money sent to lobbyists.”
Unless that money is sent from out of state. Then the tax would be 90 percent. Political donations from out of state would also be taxed at a 90 percent rate, and there would be a “90 percent tax on all (political action committee) money either from instate or out of state.”
That’s provocative. It’s far-reaching. It’s potentially remunerative to the state treasury.
Except it’s almost surely unconstitutional.
Allen Gilbert, the executive director of the Vermont ACLU, pointed out that the state once did levy a 5 percent tax on lobbyist fees (essentially a sales tax), which was rejected as unconstitutional in 2001 by the Vermont Supreme Court.
The court said “it is beyond dispute that lobbying directly involves core political speech that lies at the very heart of what the First Amendment was designed to safeguard.”
Gilbert said that as far as he knew, no one had tried to tax contributions to campaigns or political action committees, but he suspected that these also “would be rejected as an unconstitutional limit on First Amendment freedoms. Taxing speech is usually seen as a non-starter.”
Well, nobody’s perfect.
The Green Mountain Party is brand new, and its platform, in the words (via email) of party Chairman Neil Johnson “is not complete or polished at the moment.” So perhaps the party, its platform, and its leaders should be given time to do that polishing before the rest of us subject it and them to critical analysis.
Besides, the details of the new Green Mountain Party are less interesting than its emergence. In announcing the formation, Johnson, a realtor from Waitsfield, told VTDigger reporter Jasper Craven that he was (these are Craven’s words, paraphrasing Johnson) “sick and tired of the Democratic and Republican parties in Vermont.”
Well, who isn’t?
And not just in Vermont. Millions in most of the other 49 states would substitute their own state’s name at the end of that sentence. Or the name of the whole country. Locally, regionally, nationally (and cosmically for all we know), the Democratic and Republican Parties are not held in high regard these days. An increasing number of people feel – or at least an increasing number of people seem to be expressing the feeling – that neither major party really speaks for them or represents them.
Starting another party, then, would seem to make perfect sense, especially in Vermont, where it’s so easy to do. All a new party’s organizers have to do is create committees in 10 towns.
That’s 10 of 250, assuming the cities and gores are considered “towns” under the statute, but the five unincorporated areas are not, Not an onerous task. Once the party organizers register their town committees with the Secretary of State’s Elections Division … Poof! They have created a minor political party.
Despite how trouble-free the process is, though, Vermonters by the dozens are not starting new political parties. Technically, the state has but one “minor,” party. It’s the Libertarian Party, whose candidate for governor, Dan Feliciano, got 4.4 percent of the vote in last year’s election, perhaps as much because he was a pretty appealing fellow as for his party identification.
Vermont also has two other parties – Liberty Union and Progressive – which for reasons too complicated to ponder here are considered “major,” though the Liberty Union contender for governor got 0.9 percent last year and no Progressive has been elected statewide unless he or she also ran as a Democrat.
But outside Burlington, where four of the 12 City council members are Progressives, neither the Progressives nor the Libertarians nor Liberty Union matters much politically. In last year’s election, in which a personally unpopular Democratic incumbent ran against a politically clumsy Republican, the two of them together got 91.5 percent of the vote.
Granted, it was a very low turnout, perhaps itself a sign of discontent with the major parties, if not with the entire political establishment. But that low turnout was exacerbated by some peculiarities of that campaign, which would take too long to explain in detail here.
Even with the low turnout, those results bring up an interesting question: Is it possible, all the anti-party rhetoric notwithstanding, that the Democratic and Republican Parties do speak for and represent most voters?
Or at least speak for them and represent them enough to serve as workable mechanisms for voters to express their political preferences?
Parties in this country have always been coalitions, sometimes uneasy coalitions. For decades, the Democratic Party nationally was the choice of most African-Americans and the most virulent white racists. Even now, both nationally and in Vermont, it is the preferred party of most labor union members who favor massive construction projects, even those that might bury acres of wetlands, and of environmentalists committed to preserving those wetlands.
Just as the Republican Party, nationally and in Vermont, is the preferred party of both free-market purists who oppose “corporate welfare,” and businesses looking for every government subsidy they can get.
By and large, these factions have learned to work together on the issues that unite them, and to fight about, compromise, and if necessary paper over the issues that divide them. No voter is going to be entirely satisfied with any party, or even with any candidate. Every voter has to choose the party and the candidate who come closer to representing the voter’s views and interests.
It’s not a matter of choosing “the lesser of two evils.” Nobody running for office in Vermont is “evil.” They have different ideas, different outlooks, and are pulled in different directions. So are the voters, none of whom is going to find a party or candidate entirely to his or her liking.
The question is whether in this increasingly individualistic era, in which so many people want things their own way, these coalitions can survive. Democracy requires a certain amount of self-abnegation. These days, more people seem unwilling to abnegate.
So perhaps the Green Mountain Party is the signal of things to come. Maybe more disgruntled Vermonters will start forming their own parties pushing their own special interests, with their own colorful names. There’s a Monster Raving Loony party in Britain. Somebody might try that one.
More likely, though, the next governor is going to be either a Democrat or a Republican. Whoever he or she is, nobody will be entirely pleased. Nobody ever has been.
