Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[J]ust as nature abhors a vacuum, politics cannot abide tranquility. If elected officials don’t disagree about much, they will squabble over little. If the other party is too weak to matter (or just doesn’t show up for the fight), the dominant party will battle itself.
Those internal quarrels can be the bitterest of all, the same way family feuds can be so bitter.
That’s what happened to the Democrats who control the Vermont State Legislature this year. After winning what party officials claimed were “veto-proof majorities” in both houses last November, the Democrats began the session with enthusiasm and ended it in disarray.
So much disarray that the session has not officially ended at all. The Senate is scheduled to convene Wednesday. The House is scheduled to convene, too, in January, as Speaker Mitzi Johnson quite firmly said Friday evening.
And then quite firmly repeated, despite being asked, urged, and all but begged by Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe to accept the Senate’s last versions of bills to raise the minimum wage and create a mandatory family and medical leave system.
In his last-ditch effort to salvage passage of those bills – and to save face – Ashe effectively humbled himself, issuing a statement acknowledging “the strong negotiating position the Speaker holds.”
She did. Her demand earlier in the day that the Senate agree on the two measures by noon or the House would “wrap up and go home” won the support of almost all the 150 House members. When she made good on her threat (after giving Ashe a couple of hours beyond her deadline), only Rep. Brian Cina, P-Burlington, spoke against the motion to adjourn, and on the voice vote only Cina and one (or maybe two) others said no.
Meanwhile, just a few steps away, the senators were either befuddled or bemused. “This is as dysfunctional as it gets,” said a bemused Sen. John Rodgers, D-Essex/Orleans. “Maybe if we really humiliate ourselves, it will work,” said one of the befuddled, preferring not to be named.
There’s nothing unusual in Vermont, in other states, and nationally about rivalry between two houses of a Legislature, even when one party is in the majority of both. Political leaders tend to be forceful and self-confident (even when that self-confidence is designed to conceal raging insecurities). They like to have things done their way.
But leaders usually try to work together, and sometimes succeed. In 2009, when Republican Jim Douglas was governor, Senate leader Peter Shumlin and Speaker Shap Smith guided their houses as they over-rode Douglas’s vetoes of the state budget and marriage equality. Even when they couldn’t stop Douglas’s initiatives or overcome his opposition, they presented a united front to the public. It was the Democratic Party against the Republican governor.
Ashe and Johnson at least went through the motions of unity during the first two years of Gov. Phil Scott’s tenure, appearing together now and then at press conferences to outline their policy preferences.
This year, they didn’t bother, so instead of seeing policy debates between Democrats and Republicans, Vermonters saw debates between Democrats and Democrats.
As images go, this one does not benefit Democrats. They’d be in better shape if voters – most of whom agree with the Democrats on most issues – saw them advocating those issues while the Republican governor opposed them. Instead, voters saw Democratic infighting and barely saw the Republican governor at all.
Scott decided to stay out of it. He followed the age-old strategy summarized by the slogan, “Let’s you and him fight.”
It worked. You and him (or you and her) fought. The governor didn’t. He didn’t even say which bills he would sign, which he would veto. In his first two years as governor, Scott intervened late in both legislative sessions with ambitious plans to change how the state financed public schools. This year, with even smaller Republican minorities in both chambers, he wisely held back.
In the last weeks of the session, it wasn’t just the governor who was absent. Most of his agency heads stayed away from the Statehouse, making it hard for lawmakers to figure out what would be acceptable to the administration.
Large (if not quite “veto-proof”) majorities of Democrats favored a minimum wage hike and a family leave plan. They differed over the details – how far and how fast would the wage rise, how many weeks of family leave. The differences were not inconsequential. But they weren’t all that far-reaching, either. Had there been a determination to come to an agreement, the usual give-and-take of political negotiation could have produced an agreement weeks ago.
For whatever reason, that determination either did not exist or it was over-come by other factors – institutional or personal bitterness, the innate (congenital?) inclination of Democrats to nit-pick.
Besides, agreement might have led to tranquility, which politics despises.
