Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
Like the earth just after its creation (according to one account), the 2015 session of the Vermont State Legislature is without form and void.
Not void as in “empty.” The Statehouse is full: 180 legislators, 367 registered lobbyists (not all of them in the building at once), officials of the executive branch, reporters, assorted hangers-on.
But void as in another dictionary definition: “without effect.”
Committees meet, but so far have made few decisions. The House and Senate are in session each day, but only very briefly. Lobbyists, administration officials, reporters and hangers-on bustle about. Each specific bustle must have a purpose, but the aggregate bustling appears aimless, at least so far.
Granted, it is early. This biennium of the Vermont General Assembly, to use its formal name, is just a month old. Members elected last November are still learning their way around. Any day now, things could gel. Leaders, committee chairs, and rank-and-file members could discover a sense of purpose and produce valuable laws and policies.
But perhaps not for a while, because there’s a reason for the inertia and uncertainty which seems to prevail. Leaders, committee chairs, rank-and-filers, and even the lobbyists, reporters, and hangers-on are struggling with this cosmic question: Who’s in charge here?
Usually, that’s not a question. Everybody knows who’s in charge. The governor is in charge. That’s because the governor is … the governor, the chief executive, the official who presents the budget, proposes policies, sets the agenda.
In short, the governor is The Man (and yes, in this context, Gov. Madeleine Kunin was The Man, too, when she was governor).
True to form, Gov. Peter Shumlin presented his budget. He made policy proposals, some of them quite sweeping.
But he has not set the agenda.
It isn’t just that some of his proposals seem on the verge of being rejected. Just the other day, a House Committee squelched (though perhaps not forever) Shumlin’s plan to increase the fee farmers pay for fertilizer to raise money for cleaning up Lake Champlain. Or even that the 0.7 percent payroll tax he wants to create to help pay for health care seems not to have a friend in the Statehouse outside his own office.
No, it’s broader than that. Shumlin is politically weaker than he was a year ago. His unexpectedly close (and humiliating) re-election, followed by his equally unexpected (and humiliating) decision to abandon his cherished dream of statewide universal health care have taken their toll. After being humiliated, chief executives don’t have the clout they had before being humiliated. In this case, one basis of Shumlin’s clout – the assumption that he could continue to be governor as long as he chose – evaporated on election night, when he could manage but a 2,400-vote plurality against an under-funded, inexperienced opponent.
For now, Shumlin is … a guy. A big guy in Montpelier, probably still the biggest guy.
But not The Man.
Which means nobody is. Not House Speaker Shap Smith or Senate President pro Tem John Campbell. Their inability to rise to the level of being The Man has nothing to do with their abilities or lack thereof. It has everything to do with their positions. They are merely leaders of the Vermont Legislature, and in this state, the Legislature is institutionally weak.
Its powers, noted University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson, are “minimal,” in part because it is a part-time “citizen legislature.” Not long ago, Nelson said, the Legislature was made up of “housewives, farmers and retirees,” and while there are more lawyers, entrepreneurs and professors than there were a few decades ago, they are still in session less than half the year, and almost all of them have to spend most of their time and effort on their real jobs.
By conventional political science, Vermont has a weak governor system. Vermont is one of only two states (neighbor New Hampshire is the other) in which the governor has only a two-year term, and one of 18 in which the governor does not get to choose his running mate for lieutenant governor. That’s one reason why Vermont is one of only five states in which the two top executives are from different parties. Shumlin and Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Scott work reasonably well together, but Scott need not do Shumlin’s bidding, as if he had been elected as part of a ticket with the governor.
In many states, the governor gets to appoint either the attorney general or the state treasurer or the secretary of state. Not here, where all those offices are separately elected, meaning none of the office-holders serves at the pleasure of the governor.
But despite those weaknesses, Vermont has a strong governor system because the Legislature is so weak. Except for the House Speaker and the Senate president, no lawmaker has a personal staff. They don’t even have their own offices, desks, and telephones. No one appears even to have thought about giving lawmakers offices in their districts, which many states provide.
Vermont is not alone here. Brian Weberg of the National Conference of State Legislatures said that lawmakers in Wyoming and both Dakotas also lack personal staff or district offices.
Legislative resources around the country “vary tremendously,” Weberg said. In 2010, an NCSL survey found that the Vermont Legislature had a staff of 60. New York’s was 2,700. That was the biggest, but in many other states, legislators have their own offices and personal staffs, and committee staffs include lawyers, economists and experts in various fields.
In Montpelier, each committee does have an office (most of them quite small), and a “committee staff” aide assigned by the non-partisan Legislative Council’s Office. But the duties of those aides are essentially clerical. They are not professional policy experts, lawyers or economists.
These days, nothing is more important in policy disputes than information. The executive branch has the resources to uncover and analyze information, and to present that information as it sees fit. Individual legislators do not, and neither do their committees.
Lawmakers can and do rely on the Legislative Joint Fiscal Office to provide detailed and sophisticated analysis of the state budget and other economic data. The JFO’s output is prodigious. In January alone it produced 10 reports on topics ranging from health care costs to the governor’s budget to school spending.
But by necessity (and by law) the JFO mostly reacts – to budget messages from the governor’s office and changes in the state’s fiscal situation. If lawmakers relied on it to challenge the executive branch’s research capabilities, it would probably need at least three times its current staff of 13.
Maybe if the cast of characters were different, the Legislature would be more assertive. Twenty-five years ago, Garrison Nelson recalled, House Speaker Ralph Wright of Bennington dominated the doings in Montpelier. Thanks to his flamboyant personality, and because “he had an agenda,” Nelson said, Wright sometimes outshone Govs. Kunin, Richard Snelling and Howard Dean.
Neither Smith nor Campbell has a flamboyant personality. Smith, who has never denied that he might be interested in running for governor himself one day, is sometimes quietly assertive. Just last week, he suggested doing away with the Vermont Health Connect system, a central creation of the Shumlin administration.
But Smith is “not a confronter,” as Nelson put it. Neither, it seems, is anyone else in the Legislature right now.
Like planets, government institutions rarely stay formless forever, and something will likely come along to shape up the 2015 session. That something could still be Peter Shumlin, who while weaker than he was a year ago, is a bit stronger than he was six weeks ago.
He’s still the governor. He’s the one who gave an inaugural address and presented a budget. He’s still the one who goes on TV before the blizzards hit. He still knows how to do the job.
Who knows? By the time the legislature calls it quits this spring, Shumlin could once more be The Man.
And if not?
Well, somebody else could step forward. And if not, chaos can be interesting.
