[T]here was more hold-your-breath drama in the Vermont Senate this week when the paid sick leave bill rose back up again. Meanwhile, in the House, a resurrection of another kind may be in the making.
Swing votes, a Sanders big win, and Speaker Shap Smith’s political future were topics highlighting this week’s edition of “Inside the Golden Bubble.”
The sick leave bill snuck out of the Senate after senators — for the second week in a row — debated whether to let businesses with five or fewer employees be exempt from the bill. After Sen. Bill Doyle, R-Washington, said he wanted to change his vote after the bill had already passed and support the exemption, Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell had to find another senator willing to switch the other way and go against the exemption.
Campbell found that vote with Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, who said he changed his mind because of pressure from constituents, not Campbell. He was the deciding vote.
“I don’t do what Senator Campbell asks me to do all the time,” Sears said, “unless I want to. I mean, he knows that. I’ve been around him for however many years he’s been here. There’s nobody else’s bidding in here,” Sears said. (The governor acknowledged he lobbied Sears, too.)
Sears said he thought others would change their vote with the additional time. He said he was surprised he provided the swing vote that essentially killed the exemption.
Shumlin was happy the sick leave bill passed the Senate, and that it will apply to even the smallest businesses. He also expressed continued confidence that a bill to legalize recreational marijuana would reach his desk, even though the bill may not have the support of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where there are three solid nos on the seven-member committee. He said the bill will move forward, that the media was “looking for drama.”
In a 20-minute interview Friday, the governor also defended his proposal to require the courts to speed up the review process for mentally ill patients the state believes should be forcibly medicated.
Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, strongly criticized the governor’s forced drugging proposal, which could reduce the court-review process to two weeks. Donahue, who has been hospitalized in the past for depression and is considered the Legislature’s leading authority on mental health issues, said the governor’s proposal was not following the more recent medical recommendations and had inappropriately tied it to money.
Donahue said governor’s methods amounted to “bullying.”
Donahue questioned why changes were being proposed when the modifications the Legislature made two years ago have barely taken effect. The governor disagreed and said Vermont’s protocol was one of the longest in the country. An average application for involuntary medication takes 128 days to complete. An expedited application takes 47 days.
The forced medication measure is also strongly opposed by the chair of the House Human Services Committee, Ann Pugh, D-S, Burlington.
Donahue is a member of the House Committee on Health Care. Acknowledging limited computer knowledge, she said couldn’t understand how the state’s health care exchange continues to have problems.
How can the problems continue for so long, she wondered, and it “seems incomprehensible to me” given how many complex financial transactions happen worldwide every day that this system still has issues, years later.
Donahue said the committee is reviewing whether to stay with the state exchange. The question, she said, is whether to keep trying to fix the current system or cut losses and find another exchange to join that is working, or the federal exchange.
“I don’t think there’s any question that it remains a fiasco,” Donahue said, “but we’ve put an awful lot of money into it and to walk away is a pretty scary decision.”
Shumlin and Speaker Shap Smith spoke about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ ability to translate people’s frustration with the economy into a winning strategy as he pursues the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Sanders beat Hillary Clinton this week by 20 points in the New Hampshire primary.
Smith said Sanders was “capturing that concern” of the economically anguished middle class. Shumlin, though, wondered if voters in states with more diverse populations, while angry, might not want Sanders’ medicine.
“They don’t necessarily want a revolution,” said Shumlin, who along with Smith, supports Hillary Clinton.
Smith, who dropped out of the race for governor to care for his wife, who was diagnosed with cancer, may be having second thoughts. The buzz in the building has been he might jump back in the governor’s race or run for lieutenant governor if his wife’s treatments, which will end in a few months, are successful.
“I’m very focused on family and on this job, and we’ll see what happens later,” he said.
