HARDWICK — In a rare group appearance, all three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation came to the Northeast Kingdom Saturday for a special town meeting in which they denounced President Donald Trump’s “grotesque” budget, derided the president’s “dumb ass wall,” called Trump a “pathological liar,” and pilloried the congressional Republicans’ failure to repeal Obamacare.
The gathering of more than 1,000 people in the Hazen Union School gym was more of a rally than a town meeting. As Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., spoke, the crowd erupted into cheers, spontaneous chanting and standing ovations.
And the location was no accident. Trump got the highest percentage of votes in the Northeast Kingdom region where rural, white working class residents are struggling the most to make ends meet. He finished with 49.1 percent of the vote in the three counties, compared with 29.8 percent statewide, and in many towns he beat his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton by double-digit margins.
Unlike congressional delegations in other states that are divided by rivalry and partisanship, Leahy, Welch and Sanders often work together and share progressive political views. All three men said they are dismayed by Trump administration policies that will have a profound impact on environmental protections, worker safety, immigration, and the nation’s economic priorities.
“These are not normal times,” Leahy said. “I get thousands of letters a week from Vermonters. I take people’s names and I call them up and I hear the fear in their voices.”
Leahy accused Trump and the Republican Congress of “treating America like a leveraged buyout” and will “leave a shell company behind.”
“They want to make it a country for the oligarchs,” Leahy said. “Oh, I’m sorry, Bernie, I’m taking your speech away.”
Sanders, who made national headlines as an underdog presidential candidate last year, has made a political career of railing against the corporate elites and policies that allow the wealthiest Americans to pay little in taxes.
Sanders described the dawning of the Trump era as “tough times, unprecedented times for our country. There is no way around that.”
Nevertheless, the junior senator told the crowd he is optimistic.
“I woke up this morning feeling pretty good,” Sanders said. “Not just because we defeated the disastrous Ryan-Trump health care proposal. It wasn’t just that we defeated them, but how we defeated them.”
Sanders said people who rallied against the American Health Care Act deserve the credit for deep-sixing the GOP proposal.
“In Vermont and all over the country, in rallies and town meetings, people stood up and told the Republicans, no we’re not going to give billionaires tax breaks and throw 24 million off health insurance, it ain’t gonna happen,” Sanders boomed into the microphone.
Under the Republican health plan, the wealthiest Americans would have received $660 million in tax breaks over a decade.
In the wake of the American Health Care Act defeat, Sanders said he would propose a “Medicare for all” bill that would guarantee health care for all Americans. While the legislation would have little hope of passing in the overwhelmingly Republican Congress, Sanders said he was undaunted.
Welch, the state’s lone congressman, described the difference between the House handling of Obamacare and Trumpcare. Welch said his committee had 79 hearings and 14 months of debate on the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were engaged for and against President Barack Obama’s bill and eventually the legislation passed. Welch says Obamacare has defects, but it has created more access to health care, stabilized costs and created a health insurance market.
Trumpcare, by contrast, was pushed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a straight 27 hour review without any testimony, Welch said.
“No one could leave until we voted for that bill,” Welch said. “Paul Ryan says there was an open and transparent process. If there was, it was in a backroom.”
“You know what happened?” Welch asked. “Paul Ryan got busted. People figured out, this ain’t no health care plan. This was a tax break plan.”
People age 50 to 64 would have paid five to 15 times more for health care. Community hospitals would have gone broke. And, Welch said, “400 of the richest families in America would have gotten a $7 million check if the plan passed.”
The delegation launched a scathing attack on Trump’s proposed budget cuts. Leahy said the president’s plan was “dead on arrival.”
Sanders decried Trump’s cuts to the Meals on Wheels program, which delivers food to the elderly, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which ensures that thousands of people receive support for fuel costs.
“We have to keep fighting,” Sanders said. “We’re looking at a grotesque budget coming down the pike.”
Trump’s plan guts federal programs and shifts the financial and regulatory burden of government onto the states.
Trump and members of the GOP in Congress have said they will repeal the estate tax and expand tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
The president is proposing a $54 billion increase in defense spending that would be offset by domestic program cuts. A $21 billion wall along the border with Mexico would also come out of federal programs for states.
“We’re not going to cut food for the neediest, we’re not going to cut fuel for the neediest and I am not going to vote for $25 billion for a dumb ass wall,” Leahy declared.
At which point, a small group started chanting “dumb ass wall.”
“We are already spending more on defense than the next 12 countries combined,” Sanders said. “Can you imagine building a new bloated weapons system by cutting back on Meals on Wheels and LIHEAP?”
The senior senator said depriving an elderly person in Vermont a hot meal in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires is “a sick mentality.”
“Not only do we have to take on Trump’s right wing agenda, we have to fight for a progressive agenda, which is what the American people want,” Sanders declared.
From there, Sanders reverted to his stump speech. The American people understand that if you’re working 40 hours a week you shouldn’t be living in poverty, he said.
“We gotta raise minimum wage to $15 an hour,” give women equal pay for equal work and put 13 million people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, Sanders said. College should be free, and Wall Street should pay for it, he continued.
The progressive agenda, is not radical or fringe, Sanders said. Trump’s agenda to cut Medicaid and Medicare is an extreme agenda.
Americans need to stand together and “not let Trump divide us up based on the color of our skin, our religion, or where we were born.”
A member of the audience asked why the delegation didn’t seek a vote of no confidence for Trump who has promulgated “unsubstantiated lies.”
“The point the questioner raised is a deep point,” Sanders said. “You have a president who is a pathological liar. The Wall Street Journal made that point. What if there is a crisis in this country and the president tells the truth. Will anyone believe him?”
Leahy said Trump “flat out lied” when he said Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
Intelligence officials have said publicly “this did not happen,” Leahy said.
The president was trying to change the subject, the senator said, at a time when the press was revealing how deeply involved the Russians were in the 2016 election and in Trump’s inner circle.
Leahy said he is very concerned about Russian influence on the election and the Trump administration going forward.
“Normally, you’d have a tough U.S. Attorney General who’d look into this,” he said, but he has no faith that Jeff Sessions will investigate ties between the president and the Russian government.
