Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[S]o little is going on at the Legislature these days that something big must be brewing.
Or maybe that’s just the conspiracy theorist interpretation. Since so little is visible to the naked eye, are major plots being hatched behind closed doors?
Probably not, if only because hatching major plots behind closed doors is pointless. If the plot has public support, there’s no need to hatch it in private. If it doesn’t, hatching it in private is all but guaranteed to make sure it never does.
On the other hand, private meetings certainly are under way, seemingly most of the day. It is possible to sit in the Statehouse cafeteria and watch one House member after another, including most of the committee chairs, walk singly or in twos or threes along the hallway to Speaker Mitzi Johnson’s office.
The route to the office of Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe is not as easily or frequently observed. But these last several days, that office door has frequently been closed, with a “meeting in progress” sign that looks almost exactly like a hotel “do not disturb” sign hanging from the door knob.
It isn’t as though the lawmakers are doing nothing at all out in the open. The Senate has been convening in the mornings, the House in the afternoons. They refer bills to the appropriate committee, concur in proposals of amendment from the other house, suggest amendments to the other house, now and then even pass a bill.
Committees have been meeting, too, both before and after the floor sessions. They listen to administration officials, their own Legislative Council lawyers, lobbyists for or against one proposal or another. Every now and then, they pass a bill, sending it to the floor, or sometimes just to another committee.
All of it at a relaxed pace. For the moment, the Vermont State Legislature, or at least the part of it open to the public, is a stress-free zone.
“If they got down to business, we could be out of here next week,” said one of the more astute and experienced Statehouse habitués.
The Legislature will not end its 2019 session next week. It budgeted itself through May 17, and just as “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” (Parkinson’s Law) the lawmakers will find it necessary to take up the time they have allotted themselves.
Meanwhile, there are all those private meetings. They may or may not be stress-free zones. The relaxed pace does not mean an absence of tension both between the two houses and within each body.
As usual, the tensions arise over the controversial bills: paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, a waiting period for buying a handgun, legal marijuana sales, helping low-income people stay warm, delaying forced mergers of school districts.
So far the House has passed the family leave bill but the minimum wage measure remains in committee. The Senate has passed a minimum wage increase but is holding off on the family leave bill. The combination inspired one lobbyist to suggest that “there’s a game of chicken going on between Tim and Mitzi” over those issues and a few others.
That’s possible. It would also be quite normal. Even when they are of the same party, legislative leaders can have competing interests and obligations. If nothing else, each one has to satisfy (or at least not excessively displease) his or her own members.
By something close to consensus agreement in the Statehouse, Johnson is the one with the more fractious majority. It’s bigger, and more than 30 of the 93 Democrats in the House are in their first term. Some in this “Newbie Caucus” (a phrase its members sometimes use) are less committed to the liberal agenda than most Democrats.
If there are divisions among the even more dominant Senate caucus, they are less evident. But one observer who has close ties to Senate Democrats said the other day that he thought “Tim (Ashe) has an Emerge problem.”
Emerge is an organization that (says its website) “recruits, trains, and provides a powerful network to Democratic women who want to run for office.” So what this observer (a male, but with no apparent misogynistic impulses) meant was that some women in the Senate – especially Becca Balint, D-Windham, and newcomer Ruth Hardy, D-Addison) – are trying to push Ashe farther than he would like to go on some issues.
For now, most of the tensions remain out of sight. The lawmakers do not hurry on their way into meeting their leaders, nor do they seem distraught after they leave. Perhaps one explanation for this relative tranquility is that while the bills under consideration are important, they are not necessary.
What is necessary is passing a budget. The House has passed a budget bill. The Senate is making some changes, some of which the House will accept, some of which lawmakers will fight about. Gov. Phil Scott has indicated some displeasure with the budget (too much spending in some areas, not enough for his economic development plans) but has not threatened a veto.
There are no guarantees that he will not. Someone noted that Scott can be stubborn, and that in his first two years as governor “stubbornness worked well for him.”
But Scott is also politically adept, and he probably knows that any hint that he might veto the budget is just what would rally those less-liberal House “newbies” and any dissenting senators around their leaders. Tranquility is likely to last at least a few more days. Perhaps nothing big is brewing at all.
