Budget stalemates with Democrats — including a record number of vetoes — dominated Phil Scott’s first two years under the Golden Dome, but it was an April afternoon on the steps of the Statehouse that provided for many the defining moment of his first term as governor.
That day, the Republican Scott signed into law three gun control measures. But not before spending a half an hour facing a barrage of boos, heckling, and obscenities as he methodically laid out his reasons for supporting the measures. Some in attendance or watching on the internet worried about the governor’s safety.
Former Barre Mayor Thom Lauzon, a fellow moderate Republican, called it Scott’s finest hour.
“He lost some conservative Republicans that day,” Lauzon said. “But he gained some Democrats. For life.”
Scott went back on a campaign pledge and supported the measures after a student threatened to shoot up a Fair Haven school, not long after 17 died in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Before that, Scott had maintained gun restrictions should be enacted at the national level.
“I was proud of him, proud of him as a friend. That was courageous for him to do, but he felt it was the right thing to do,” Lauzon said.
Sen. Philip Baruth, D-Chittenden, perhaps the strongest voice for gun control in the Statehouse and a critic of Scott’s way of handling the budget, also thought the day — the ugliest he’d seen at the Statehouse — was a profile in courage.
“How he handled that particular day, I give him endless credit for the courage he showed,” said Baruth.
While his change of heart on guns has earned him bipartisan acclaim, Scott’s first term has also been marked by conflict, and what many have described as a combative relationship with the Legislature. In his efforts to fulfill his signature pledge to hold the line on tax increases and new fees, the governor has relied heavily on his veto pen and prompted an unprecedented budget standoff, bringing the state to the brink of a government shutdown.
Scott views his success in warding off tax increases as the largest accomplishment of his first term and gives lawmakers credit for eventually working with him, even if they did so grudgingly.
“Think about it, we went through two years without raising a single tax or fee. I didn’t just do that, the Legislature accomplished that, we did it together,” he said during an interview at his Berlin campaign headquarters Friday.
“We proved that we could work together. It was a bumpy road admittedly, but at the end of the day, we accomplished a great deal.”
Rounding the corner of his first two years in office, Scott is facing re-election and a challenge from Christine Hallquist, a Democrat and the former CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative, who is pledging to enact many of the liberal policies Scott has struck down as governor: a $15 minimum wage, a paid family leave program, and legislation to crack down on polluters.
But Hallquist faces a tough climb to the governor’s office. A VPR-Vermont PBS poll published earlier this month showed Scott with a double digit lead over his opponent.
Even though Scott saw a drop in popularity after he signed the gun measures in April, like Lauzon, political analyst Eric Davis thinks Scott likely gained more on the left than he lost on the right. Davis said Scott also angered some conservatives and won over some moderates by pushing back against President Trump on issues including trade and immigration and calling for “civility” in politics. Quietly signing a bill legalizing recreational marijuana in January, also angered many in his party.
Sen. Joe Benning, a lawyer and one of seven Republicans in the upper chamber, said he thought the gun legislation was “sloppily written” and an understandable overreaction by Scott that has without question cut into his Republican base. Benning, the Senate minority leader, said the session was otherwise a success for Scott, in particular keeping his promise to hold the line on state spending and rejecting increases in taxes or fees.
Former Republican Governor Jim Douglas, said he thinks Scott needs to repair his relationships with Second Amendment supporters and sportsmen he isolated with his pivot on gun control.
“He needs to build those bridges,” Douglas said. “He’ll get there.”
Scott said he’s talking with the disgruntled gun rights supporters he meets around the state.
“Walking into a convenience store and (having) someone call you a traitor, I mean that’s not easy and I get defensive. But then I have to take a step back and confront and explain,” Scott said. “I owe it to them, because I know I disappointed them.”
Any loss of Republican support could be a bigger problem two years from now in 2020, Davis said, should Scott seek a third term. Turnout in the blue-leaning state in a presidential election year is always much higher and securing a third two-year term has been historically difficult for governors to do.
If re-elected, Davis added that Scott faced several challenges.
He will need to work to build more consensus to carry out his education plan, which involves shifting education funding from K-12 to early education and secondary education costs.
And the economic gap between Chittenden County and the rest of the state also appears to be widening. Schools, churches and general stores are disappearing in rural towns, making it potentially more difficult to attract new people to rural parts of the state.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Scott’s primary plank was to “make Vermont more affordable.” He vowed to slow state spending and reject any increases in taxes and fees. Legislators and observers on both sides of the aisle say Scott has been successful in fulfilling that vow.
Depending on where you stand, he has either been an overdue financial steward or an inflexible chief executive who irresponsibly flirted with shutting the government down. Baruth called Scott’s maneuvering during the last budget standoff “Tea Party politics.”
The heart of this year’s budget impasse was a disagreement between the governor and the Democratically controlled Legislature over how to allocate millions of dollars of surplus revenue. Scott vetoed the budget bill twice because he wanted to use the funds to fully buy down property tax rates. Lawmakers wanted to use the money to pay off unfunded teacher pension debt, and argued that using one-time money to pay for an ongoing expense was poor fiscal management.
After weeks of disagreement, Scott agreed to let the third budget produced by lawmakers become law, just five days before the state would have seen a government shutdown. The final bill harnessed an additional $20 million of surplus revenue to buy down the residential tax rate, but left a 4.5 cent increase in the nonresidential property tax rate.
Scott said Friday that his administration probably could have improved its relationship and communication with lawmakers in the first term. But he added that the last two years have been his first as governor, and that they were also House Speaker Mitzi Johnson and Senate Pro Tem Tim Ashe’s first years in their roles. This made building relationships harder, he said.
“Got off on the wrong foot in a number of different areas, in reflection, maybe we could have done better,” he said of his administration’s relationship to the legislature. “But I’m not sure how considering the dynamics of the first year term.”
Ashe and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
Sen. Becca Balint, D-Windham, the Senate majority leader, said she hoped Scott would “take advice from different people” if he’s re-elected.
“He’s not being well served by some of his people,” she said. “Either not well served or he’s not taking the leadership to turn them down.”
She said Scott’s chief of staff, Jason Gibbs, accusing the Joint Fiscal Office of partisan politics was “a real low.”
In Balint’s eyes, Scott has lost some of the goodwill he built up during his 10 years in the Senate and six as lieutenant governor.
“The governor wants to be civil and not be divisive but the guy he’s hired to do the day-to-day work on that is pretty divisive,” she said, referring to Gibbs.
But Balint praised Scott’s courage on signing the gun legislation. She also highlighted his humanity and leadership for a public signing of a law mandating gender neutral bathrooms.
“He understood the importance of this for regular people,” said Balint, admitting she got choked up at the ceremony. “I was really proud of him that day.”
Montpelier insiders have also questioned Scott’s budget tactics. One Montpelier lobbyist who closely observed the budget battle said that in their view, Scott’s decision to drag out the budget impasse likely “trashed” his administration’s relationship with Democratic leadership in the Statehouse.
While Scott pushed to hold the line on state spending, even supporters say he fumbled a proposal in his first year to change the state’s teachers’ health insurance. He pressed the idea too late in the session without building support first, critics said, and the issue forced the Legislature into overtime. Even Scott admits that the proposal came too late in the session. A statewide teacher healthcare benefit made it into the final budget in Scott’s second year because the interested parties felt part of the process.
“I think in some ways we were able to stumble into some areas of agreement after some unnecessary conflict,” said Baruth, the chair of the Senate Education Committee. The governor’s posture, he said, prompted Democratic lawmakers to hold back as bargaining chips items they knew the governor would want.
“It infects the whole process,” Baruth said.
“Even if the budget passes unanimously, you don’t feel like the other side is operating in good faith so you have to cover your bases and start holding off things they want to one side,” he said.
Scott has largely been able to carry out his will in the Statehouse because there have been enough Republican House members to back him if he threatens or issues a veto. Republicans have to keep more than 50 members in the 150-member House, if they want to maintain the numbers to sustain vetoes in the next legislative biennium. If they fall below, Benning thinks the mood under the Golden Dome will get more contentious because, he said, Democrats will smell blood in the water and try to push through proposals of their liking.
In addition to budgets, Scott vetoed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and a paid family leave bill. He also turned back a bill that would have regulated toxics in products and another bill that would have made it easier for individuals exposed to toxic chemicals to have responsible companies pay for medical expenses related to the exposure.
“I can’t wrap my head around why he thought that would be bad for business. He has his three prong stool and one of them is helping people who are vulnerable,” said Jon Groveman, policy director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. He said the toxics bill veto was Scott’s worst.
Groveman said Scott has said the right things about the environment, but his actions don’t often back up the rhetoric. On climate change, for example, he said Scott stood up to Trump, set up a climate change commission but Groveman said it hasn’t done much.
And then there’s the EPA-ordered cleanup of Lake Champlain, for which Scott’s administration hasn’t come up with a long-term funding source, a requirement that was ordered by the Legislature.
“Water funding has been a real failure,” Groveman said. “Sticking to his rhetoric is not only penny-wise and pound-foolish, but it’s also shut off meaningful conversation and action.”
Scott’s administration has contended the cleanup can be done with existing resources and continues to hold out hope payments to allow an electric transmission line under Lake Champlain will bring a cleanup bonanza.
Burlington businessman Ernie Pomerleau, a longtime Scott supporter, admits there was hard work ahead on the lake cleanup. He and others are working on establishing stormwater districts.
But Pomerleau’s bromance with Scott appears even stronger these days, after the governor signed the gun control measures into law. He was already sold on Scott because of his willingness to hear out businesspeople’s point of view.
“He’s my man,” Pomerleau said. “I am so impressed with his integrity, his principles, his honest straightforwardness.”
Later, Pomerleau added: “I like that he drives a pickup, that he drinks local beer…and that he is the complete antithesis of what we have down in Washington.”
The Trump factor
The moderate governor’s first term has been defined by the distance he has drawn between himself President Donald Trump.
Scott’s condemnation of the president came swiftly and immediately — before either of the politicians were elected in 2016. When Scott was campaigning for governor and the national Republican Party was fielding more than a dozen candidates for president, he announced early on that there were two GOP contenders he could not support: Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
“He did it early and disposed of the issue,” Douglas said. “I think that settled it. You don’t see any Democratic strategy to try to tie him [to Trump], because it wouldn’t be true.”
Since his election, Scott has continued to voice his opposition to Trump, further driving a wedge between himself and the conservative president.
Following the violent riots at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017, Scott criticized Trump, who was slow to denounce hate groups and bigotry in the days after the event.
In March of last year, he signed S.79, a bill that prohibits state and local police from participating in some federal immigration enforcement efforts, after Trump issued executive orders signaling an immigration enforcement crackdown.
Many Democrats said that although it has been politically advantageous for Scott to mark the distance between himself and the president, who is deeply unpopular in Vermont, it’s clear the governor genuinely opposes Trump.
“I think to his credit, he really finds, like most Vermonters, much of the president’s rhetoric and actions to be really objectionable,” said Bill Lofy, a Democrat, and Gov. Peter Shumlin’s former chief of staff.
“Obviously it’s not enough to define yourself in relation to national politics,” Lofy continued.
“The challenge for any governor is to really define what his or her legacy and lasting impact on the state will be and I don’t see a lot of evidence that the governor has defined that for Vermonters, at least not yet.”
Scott says his long-term vision has been clear: to improve the Vermont’s struggling demographics by attracting more people and encouraging Vermonters to stay in-state. The linchpin of that plan so far has been his fight for affordability.
“I’m not going to apologize for standing up for Vermont taxpayers or being a fiscal conservative,” he said. “And I believe that’s what Vermonters, I believe that’s what they expected me to do.”
