Dark, toxic, political.
Within weeks of Vermont legislators’ return to the Statehouse this winter, these were the words that people were using to describe the atmosphere in the building. Lawmakers, staffers, lobbyists and observers alike were in agreement that tensions felt higher than in recent memory.
Part of the shift seemed tied to the sheer heaviness of the subject matter at hand.
Administration officials had recently projected that double-digit property tax increases would be needed to fund the state’s public school system. The anticipated hike threatened to further sap Vermonters’ earnings, even as housing costs and inflation were already burdening many households.
Though Vermont remained one of the safest states in the country, increased attention to public safety had sparked a debate over criminal justice reform. And months after a historic flood deluged the state last summer, communities were still reeling.
“People came into the building feeling the stress of having gone through the floods and … the stress of affordable housing, the stress of the cost of health care, the stress of public safety,” House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, told VTDigger shortly after the conclusion of the 2024 legislative session. “And I think people were carrying a little weight on their shoulders.”
The call to lawmakers was clear, Krowinski said: “We need to come here and address it.”
But as the session progressed, it was more than weighty policy debate that increased the pressure in the Statehouse. Exchanges between Republican Gov. Phil Scott and leaders of the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority took on a new sharpness.
Over the following months, Scott took to the podium in his Statehouse ceremonial office — not far from the House and Senate chambers — on a weekly basis to poke and prod at Democrats’ legislative agenda. They weren’t listening to him or the 71% of Vermont voters who elected him, he argued, as they forged ahead with priorities that didn’t mirror his own.
Within the administration, according to Scott spokesperson Rebecca Kelley, “there was more of a strategy this year for him to just make sure Vermonters knew what was happening.” And press conferences were that venue for Scott to speak directly to Vermonters.
“We get why they were feeling the tension,” Kelley said. “The governor was taking what he would say to (legislators) normally and saying it more publicly than he normally had. … He brought the argument to the people, and I think that did create a lot of tension and discomfort for legislators.”
Throughout the session, according to Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, Scott made a habit of “criticizing us at every press conference, every chance he had.”
“The word aggressive comes to mind, but also bordering on a certain new slight ugliness in the tone,” Baruth told VTDigger in an interview earlier this month.
The pro tem described the Scott administration’s demeanor by evoking a condition that afflicts the college students he instructs during his day job as an English professor at the University of Vermont: senioritis.
“In other words, you get to the high part of your career, and you start playing with the rules and you start going for broke in ways that you wouldn’t have three or four years ago,” Baruth said.
For his part, Scott agreed that there was a shift in the building this session. Two days before the Legislature adjourned, on May 8, Scott told reporters, “I’ve never seen one like this, or experienced anything like this.”
“There’s a lot going on and a lot moving that I never thought would move,” Scott said, expressing surprise that lawmakers had pursued so many disparate initiatives, instead of focusing on projected property tax increases. “I thought the Legislature would see the wisdom of maybe, let’s just get through this. Let’s help fix that for Vermonters and not push forward with all the other tax and spending initiatives.”
“That didn’t prove to be the case,” Scott continued. “It seemed like they had doubled down at that point.”
A frequent pattern repeated itself at those weekly press conferences. Scott would implore Democratic leaders to meet him in the middle on policy, but then acknowledge Democrats’ sizable majority. (Democratic and aligned lawmakers represent more than two-thirds of the votes in both chambers, giving them a theoretically veto-proof majority, though in practice Scott’s vetoes are sometimes sustained.) He would end with a quip that he, as governor, only has “one vote” — his signature or veto — and that the Legislature didn’t need him to get its bills across the finish line.
Take, for example, one exchange at an April 17 press conference. The Scott administration had, days earlier, come forward with a proposal to punt the state’s property tax hike to a future year. When it became clear that legislators would not move forward with the plan — fearing the consequences to the state’s bond rating — Scott took a jab at legislators, calling them “part of the problem.”
Pressed on whether he would propose an alternative plan that appeased concerns over a credit downgrade, Scott replied, “Well, then they ought to get creative and figure a way to make it work without affecting our bond rating. They’re smart people.”
The result of that ongoing dynamic, political observers noted, was a rift between the legislative and executive branches deeper than seen in recent years.
“There was definitely a breakdown in communication among the two branches, and then just not a lot of interest in repairing it,” Rebecca Ramos, a lobbyist for the Necrason Group and a former Senate chief of staff, told VTDigger this month.
Krowinski told VTDigger that she tried to bridge the divide. She described a meeting with the governor in which she said she told him, “If we just keep going back and forth, this is going to get hotter and hotter. And what we really need to do is work together to find solutions, because people are counting on us to do that.”
Asked about Krowinski’s recollection of the meeting, Kelley said she had not attended it but that she had “never heard about anywhere in which the speaker offered to compromise with us on any position.”
According to Krowinski, Scott’s rhetoric this year was “a tone that I have not seen at this level in my time in this role.”
“I’m disappointed that that’s how the governor was showing up,” she said. “We prefer that we try to work together.”
During his eight years as governor, Scott has vetoed a record number of bills: 46, as of Tuesday afternoon, and that count will likely grow before the Legislature briefly returns on June 17 to consider potential overrides. Scott’s veto count far surpasses a previous record set by former Gov. Howard Dean — a Democrat who, ironically, floated his own gubernatorial comeback recently, citing “the atmosphere of anger and disrespect which permeates Montpelier.” (Dean ultimately opted not to run, he announced last week.)
At a press conference last week, not long after the legislative session came to an end, Scott insisted that he takes no pleasure in issuing these vetoes.
“I want to be clear, I would rather come to an agreement before a bill comes to my desk and avoid a veto altogether,” the governor told reporters. “But I have a responsibility to take the time to weigh the good against the bad. If I can see the benefits to Vermonters across the state, I try to find a way to get to yes. And sometimes it takes a veto so I can finally get legislators at the table to find a compromise.”
“Despite what some will say,” he continued, “I really do try hard to meet legislators in the middle.”
As Scott has racked up his vetoes, his support among voters has only grown. In 2022, he won reelection by his largest margin yet, and he consistently polls as the most popular governor in the country. Scott’s staffers have often pointed to this support as evidence that Vermont voters, despite their liberal tendencies, want to see a moderating force check the Democratic Legislature’s inclinations.
Even as Scott’s popularity has increased, so has the size of the Democratic majority — making veto overrides more common.
A two-thirds majority, according to Baruth, is an important check against executive overreach — and “senioritis can’t compete against the Founding Fathers’ vision of checks and balances.”
If he could pinpoint a moment in time when the governor’s tone shifted, Baruth said, “It seemed like it was after last year’s veto override session,” when legislators overrode a record six vetoes in one day.
“I think at that point, they had their own existential moment where they said, ‘We have to get super aggressive and go after these people,’” Baruth said.
For the administration, too, last year’s veto session was “eye-opening,” according to Kelley. In the leadup to that veto session, Kelley said, the administration’s offers to compromise “wouldn’t even be discussed with us.”
The only bill last year on which legislative leaders would work with Scott, Kelley said, was the budget.
“In order to be able to override him, they had to come to a compromise with the progressives on emergency housing,” Kelley said. “And the governor actually worked with them so they could come to that compromise, and his veto was overridden. And that was the only thing all session where they did that.”
If the tone shifted after last June’s veto session, Baruth said, tensions reached a fever pitch during the confirmation process of Scott’s pick for secretary of education, Zoie Saunders.
From the start, Saunders’ nomination drew skepticism from legislators and outrage from supporters of Vermont’s public schools, who questioned Saunders’ years working as a charter school management executive and lack of experience inside public schools.
The criticism, Scott’s administration said at the time, was unfounded and hostile. Just days before the Senate was slated to take its confirmation vote on Saunders, Scott called on the chamber to delay, decrying a “toxic and unproductive” atmosphere.
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, in an interview with VTDigger earlier this month, agreed that tensions were high in the runup to the Senate’s floor vote. Senators ultimately voted 9-19 on her confirmation. But Campion pushed back on the idea that the animosity came from senators themselves.
The days before the vote featured aggressive opposition from “a lot of people, not in the building, but from outside sources,” Campion said. He pointed specifically to a campaign email sent by Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman days before Saunders’ confirmation vote, in which the Progressive/Democrat erroneously tied her to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political public school agenda.
Campion told his colleagues on the Senate floor that he had “never witnessed, in my 14 years in the building, character attacks toward what I consider a very, very good person.”
Baruth was unequivocal in his assessment of the governor’s handling of the confirmation. In the runup to the vote, he said, senators “kept their powder dry.”
“But the governor, from the minute he announced her nomination, started attacking us for the toxic atmosphere — which is what produced the toxic atmosphere,” he said.
The real showdown came immediately after the Senate cast its vote, denying Saunders the job. Within minutes, Scott appointed her as interim secretary — allowing her to fulfill the same duties as a cabinet secretary without being subject to Senate confirmation.
“He didn’t even do us the respect of waiting,” Baruth said. “He did it in a very in-your-face fashion, moments after we voted.”
As for what comes next, Baruth said it’s largely dependent on how this summer and fall’s elections transpire. Scott is running for reelection and is already campaigning on the message that he feels duty-bound to remain in office to counterbalance the Democratic supermajority.
“I cannot step away at a time when Vermont’s Legislature is so far out of balance,” Scott wrote in his reelection campaign announcement.
If anything, the rhetoric in Montpelier appears to have only put wind in the governor’s sails. At a May 1 press conference — weeks before he announced his reelection campaign — a reporter asked Scott if the Statehouse’s toxic atmosphere made him any less likely to run for a fifth term.
“In some respects, some of what we’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks would lead me to jump back in, because I think that we can do better,” Scott said at the time.
Next session, if he wins a fifth term as governor, Kelley said, Scott “will always be there, ready to try to find compromise.”
“He is just asking legislators to come toward the middle,” she said. “And I think that is always possible, especially if there’s a new Legislature, especially if there’s time to reflect over these next few months.”
Scott has, in fact, told reporters that he intends to recruit more moderate candidates to run in legislative races, in hopes of chipping away at Democrats’ legislative agenda. Though Vermont’s filing deadline for major party candidates is just days away, it appears there will be a sizable number of open legislative races this election cycle. In the Senate alone, at least five of the chamber’s 30 incumbents are opting not to run again.
“If we lose a seat, two seats, three seats in the Senate, it will make our ability to override very tenuous,” Baruth told VTDigger. “If the House loses 10 or 15 seats, that’ll make theirs very tenuous and, at that point, who knows what behavior we might see?”
Ramos had a different read on how the next two years will look under a fifth Scott term.
“I think this is just a wait-him-out game at this point.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s 2024 legislative session was marked by deep rifts between Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature.