Walking from her office to the floor of the U.S. House for a vote in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., was all smiles as she ran into her colleagues.
“Hey, McGarvey!,” she said, embracing Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Ky., before stepping onto an elevator. “I refer to him as my work husband,” she told a reporter, “so it’s important that you meet him.” The elevator descended, before the doors opened again onto a sea of people.
“Max!,” Balint shouted after stepping out into the hallway, pulling in Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., for another hug. “Our freshman class is very close,” Balint explained, referring to the other members of Congress who, like her, first took office in 2023.
For all her sunny greetings, though, Balint said she’d spent the past few days deeply worried. On Tuesday, she joined every other House Democrat in voting, in a slim minority, against a budget framework that would fund President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda.
The measure includes large tax cuts and reductions in federal spending — and Republican leaders have set their sights on Medicaid and food assistance programs to pay for it, an idea Balint called “a betrayal” of working and middle class people on the House floor Tuesday.
Balint has spared little breath criticizing Trump, and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s, sweeping actions to slash the size and scope of the federal government in recent weeks. But the challenge, she said, has been deciding how much of it she should respond to, and in what way, considering also the flood of calls her office has been fielding with concerns from back home.
She worries the deluge is hindering her staff’s ability to provide key constituent services that have nothing to do with politics, like help getting a passport renewed.
“I know it doesn’t feel like enough right now,” she said of the resources her office can provide. “I’ve said to my comms team, ‘Let’s be creative. Let’s try things that have never been tried before. Like, the rules of engagement have changed. What can we do differently?’”
As she made her way through the throng of House members, Hill staffers and wandering reporters, Balint reached into her pocket to pull out her phone, realizing she had inadvertently started playing music on it. It was Taylor Swift, she said — one of her go-to artists.
Which of Swift’s many albums Balint listens to depends on “the atmosphere here,” she said, gesturing at the crowd. In January, it was “The Tortured Poets Department”; more recently, it’s been “Reputation,” an album on which Swift sings, among other themes, about getting revenge.
— Shaun Robinson
On the move
Budget-writers in the Vermont House and Senate have reconciled their differences — albeit minor ones — over the annual mid-year tuneup to state spending. A conference committee approved its version of the “budget adjustment” bill, H.141, around lunchtime Friday, and the full Senate gave that version its blessing shortly after.
Notably, the committee denied a request from Gov. Phil Scott’s administration Friday to alter a measure in the bill that, if enacted, would appropriate $1.8 million to keep more people eligible for emergency shelter under the state’s motel voucher program into the warmer months. Scott has said he’s opposed to the idea.
Secretary of Administration Sarah Clark proposed instead appropriating $2.1 million that would be doled out among individual municipalities, leaders of which would then decide how best to use the money. One of those uses could be paying people’s costs to use the motel program. But the plan drew sharp pushback from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns in morning testimony, with league lobbyist Samantha Sheehan telling the conference committee the proposal would create an undue workload for local leaders at an already busy time of year.
The House is slated to vote on the committee’s work on Wednesday, March 12. (The Legislature is off next week for Town Meeting Day — and so is Final Reading.)
— Shaun Robinson
A key committee has once again voted to delay the next phase of Vermont’s Raise the Age law.
Only months ago, Democrats looked driven to forge ahead with the juvenile justice initiative after years of repeated delays. But after calls from Gov. Phil Scott and his top public safety officials to nix the legislation altogether, lawmakers appear to be seeking middle ground.
“It’s a compromise bill,” Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told his colleagues about H.2 before Friday’s vote on the bill.
The legislation the House Judiciary Committee backed Friday in a 7-2-2 vote does more than just delay Raise the Age. The bill also proposes increasing the age at which kids can be charged with juvenile offenses from 10 to 12.
The entire House will consider H.2 when lawmakers return from next week’s week-long Town Meeting Day break. Read more about debate here.
— Ethan Weinstein
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In the know
The Vermont Department of Health has stopped including data on Covid-19 cases and deaths in its weekly surveillance reports. The department posted on its website recently that Covid data reporting would transition to “to a format similar to other respiratory viruses like the flu.”
The latest surveillance update contains data on emergency department visits for Covid, the proportion of variants from clinical specimens, Covid levels in wastewater sampling and a count of the latest outbreaks. Emergency department and wastewater data suggest that Covid levels are on the decline from a relative surge in December and January.
“Reporting of individual SARS-CoV-2 infections to public health has become increasingly sporadic as testing patterns have changed (including widespread use of at-home testing),” state epidemiologist Patsy Kelso wrote in an email when asked if there was a specific justification for the more recent shift.
Read more about the reporting change here.
— Erin Petenko
Read the story on VTDigger here: Final Reading: Dispatch from D.C..