Final Reading: U.S. Rep.-elect Becca Balint waits ‘to get to work’

A child lies on the floor to watch members of the Vermont House of Representatives take their oaths of office on the first day of the legislative biennium at the Statehouse in Montpelier on Wednesday. The U.S. House still hasn’t gotten its act together. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Vermont’s U.S. Rep.-elect Becca Balint still isn’t a sworn member of Congress.

Balint was slated to make history on Tuesday, when she and the rest of the 118th Congress typically would have taken their oaths of office. Upon her swearing-in, she was set to become Vermont’s first-ever female member of Congress, as well as the state’s first openly gay member. Her wife, children, parents and siblings all caravanned to Washington, D.C., for the occasion.

But the House’s typical proceedings ground to a halt when Republicans, who had narrowly won a majority in November’s midterms, failed to coalesce around Rep. Kevin McCarthy, of California, as speaker. More than a dozen members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus have consistently defected, spoiling McCarthy’s already narrow path to the speaker’s dais.

Until a speaker is elected, Balint and her 434 colleagues cannot be sworn in. And so she waits: no longer a state senator, and not yet a member of Congress despite her overwhelming victory in November.

In a phone interview Friday morning, just before she returned to the floor to cast her twelfth ballot for the speaker’s race, Balint said she ended the day Thursday feeling discouraged.

“We were three days in with no end in sight,” she said. “And I want to get to work. I want to actually get stuff done, and we can’t. We’re just in this limbo, and that doesn’t feel good for any of us.”

Balint, a former middle school history teacher, admitted with a sense of geeky glee that it is extraordinary to witness history firsthand. When McCarthy failed his ninth attempt to the speakership on Thursday, he surpassed a record set in 1923 for the most ballots cast for a speaker since the Civil War.

“One of the things that we were talking about last night with the kids was that they’ve also been part of history,” she said. “So this stalemate, although it’s really unpleasant and inconvenient for family members, they were pretty excited that they could go back to their school and talk about how this hadn’t happened in this way for so long in history. So we’re trying to make lemonade out of lemons.”

But it’s not all lemonade: Balint’s parents and siblings, who traveled to D.C. to watch her make history, couldn’t stay long enough to watch her take the oath.

On Friday, it appeared that McCarthy had made some progress wooing the fringe of his Republican caucus. By the thirteenth vote, 15 former spoilers had changed their loyalties to McCarthy, though it still was not enough to secure him the post. In the closely divided House, and with Democrats unflinching in their support of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, McCarthy can only afford to lose four GOP votes.

McCarthy’s progress appears to be largely attributed to him having offered even further concessions to the House Freedom Caucus in a series of negotiations. Those concessions include coveted committee assignments for the right wingers, and the implementation of a floor rule to “vacate the chair” — a parliamentary rule that can essentially oust a speaker, and which was ultimately the downfall of former Republican Speaker John Boehner.

Balint said Friday that she’s concerned about the concessions being made to some of the House’s most fringe conservatives.

“This is the result of the fact that the GOP has not dealt with their extremist problem. You’ve got people serving within the conference who still deny the election of President Biden, who still essentially support what happened on January 6th, who did not vote to certify the election,” she said. “Those elements are still there, and they haven’t cleaned their house yet, and so that was playing out across the chamber yesterday.”

The palace intrigue of the whole ordeal is captivating, of course. Ardent viewers of C-SPAN have noticed that, with no speaker in place to dictate the broadcasters’ rules, viewers have gotten the rare treat of close-shot camera angles within the House chamber, revealing members’ body language and facial expressions as they wheel and deal. (Typically, C-SPAN is limited to wide shots of the chamber, or a tight focus around a single speaker delivering a speech.) Capitol Hill correspondents’ accounts of lawmakers’ conversations have bordered on high school cafeteria gossip.

But for Vermonters and everyone else outside of the beltway, this week’s drama has real-world consequences. Until she is officially sworn in, Balint told VTDigger on Friday, her office is unable to get its state office up and running. No emails, no phones, nada. That means Vermont’s lone U.S. representative can’t offer constituent services for the time being.

Congressional offices provide Vermonters assistance with a range of federal government programs, including federal tax filings and returns, veterans affairs, social security benefits, immigration and more. Especially in a state with an aging population, Balint said, these services are vital.

“So we are chomping at the bit to get our constituent services up and running in Vermont, and that won’t be happening until I’m actually a Congressperson and am sworn in and we get everything set up,” Balint said.

For Vermonters who do need assistance from their congressional delegates immediately, Balint said they should contact the offices of U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt. The Senate “is functioning, is up and running,” she said, and so are their stateside offices.

— Sarah Mearhoff

IN THE KNOW

VTDigger columnist David Moats writes that the contrast between the paralysis in the U.S. House and Thursday’s inaugural events in the Vermont Statehouse “couldn’t have been more stark.”

“The political unity enjoyed in Montpelier is owing to the fact that Democrats have achieved a level of dominance that places their agenda front and center with little chance for Republican obstruction,” Moats writes. “Thus, Scott’s inaugural address was noteworthy for the degree to which he embraced the role of government in addressing problems that both parties agree are pressing.”

Read the full column here.

Rep. Brian Cina, P/D-Burlington, invited colleagues Friday to help assemble this session’s Rainbow Caucus, a coalition of legislators who identify as LGBTQIA+ — or, in Cina’s words, “all of the lesbians, all of the gays, bisexuals, transgender, intersex, pansexual, nonbinary, androgynous, queer, two-spirit, the kings and the queens and everything in between, the friends of Dorothy, the family, the children of the rainbow.”

Cina’s announcement on the House floor yielded the parliamentary exchange of the day:

—Cina: Madame Speaker, may I end with a quote from the Scissor Sisters?

—Speaker Jill Krowinski: You may.

—Cina: “Let’s have a kiki.” Thank you.

— Mike Dougherty

ON THE HILL

Friday marked the second anniversary of Jan. 6, 2021, on which a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election.

On the Capitol steps this morning, members of Congress and local Washington, D.C., leaders held a memorial service to commemorate the Capitol Police officers who died defending the center of American democracy two years ago.

Speaking to VTDigger Friday morning, Rep.-elect Balint recounted the scene. She choked up as she described the young son of one of the slain officers who attended. The boy seemed to be about her own daughter’s age, she said. Meanwhile, protesters had assembled nearby.

“We’re on the steps commemorating these officers, and across the street, there are still people chanting and wanting the insurrection to have been successful,” Balint said.

As she was describing the morning’s scene, Balint asked to put the call on hold; her wife was calling. When she returned, Balint said that her family had been walking toward the Capitol and saw that the building was surrounded by police. Balint’s wife had called to see if she was safe inside.

Having been elected this fall, Balint was not present in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But her colleague U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., was, and he has often publicly recalled the events of the day: hearing shots fired, donning gas masks and sheltering in a secure location as protesters ransacked the building.

“Two years ago, I listened to insurrectionists beat on the doors of the House chamber while barricaded inside with my colleagues,” Welch tweeted on Friday. “It wasn’t just an invasion of a building, it was an attack on our democracy.”

In a tweet Friday, Vermont’s senior U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed Welch’s sentiments, saying that the Jan. 6 attack “did not succeed, but the struggle to preserve American democracy is far from over. We must stand together against authoritarianism.”

— Sarah Mearhoff