We’re a day into the latest session, and not to be a kneejerk contrarian, but the last thing we should have is low expectations. Low expectations lead to low results, and there is reason for optimism from the legislature this season. In fact, all the pieces are in place for a perfect storm, of sorts – but in the opposite sense of last year.
Last year, by the time the session began, impeachment was a grassroots juggernaut. Where I suspect Shumlin wouldn’t have minded a whit passing it on day one and moving on, there’s no question that the pressure from Welch, Leahy, Sanders and Symington to hold the line and ignore the rabble was intense. As a result, that progressive grassroots energy was not only squandered for no good reason whatsoever, it was repressed and supressed until it exploded, and people like Welch and Symington (and Shumlin) have been dealing with the shrapnel wounds ever since (Leahy, as usual, was insulated, even though his office was perhaps the most actively involved in the suppression of the issue).
This year, though, is different.
While the energy issue doesn’t have quite the grassroots juggernaut presence of impeachment, it is the grassroots snowball rolling into 2008. Shumlin and Symington played it smart last summer and didn’t cave, holding fast on the issue even when some of their own turned on them and supported the Governor’s veto. In the wake of the admnistration’s catastrophic mishandling of the Climate Commission’s report (including its couldn’t-be-better-for-Democrats timing), he is on the defensive and legislative leaders have an opportunity that it sounds like they may not be squandering. Rather than regrouping, scaling down and coming back to the table with reduced expectations, Shumlin and Symington are talking of using the momentum to go the opposite route by enacting more comprehensive legislation than last years H.520, under the banner of enacting the Commission’s recommendations.
What does this mean if they can do it effectively? Expanding their approach could allow them to make legislation that can more cleanly be packaged as an economic-stimulus and job-creation bill, as well as an environmental one. There’s even the potential for cost shifting that could add a fair tax element, if they go that far. Now these efforts may or may not come to fruition, but if I were Shumlin or Symington, I’d do whatever it took to make sure that they did.
However – also on the agenda front and center is the expansion of Catamount – and this is a dangerous gambit. Symington has so consistently oversold Catamount that its limitations all read as promises unkept at best, and incompetence at worst. This only adds to the incentive for the Douglas administration to screw up its implementation. Douglas is so practiced in pressing Symington’s buttons (not that she makes it difficult), that all he has to do is give the program a media-spotlighted ding here, and a dent there, and he can count on her complaining that the Governor is being mean and its all because he’s out to get her. Ugh.
If Symington is smart, she’ll defer on those matters and punt to Shumlin. Shumlin has some single-payer cred, was not part of the legislature that passed Catamount and effectively makes the case that Catamount is simply a band-aid on the system, but one that can help people, as well as make them more comfortable with the idea of government-brokered insurance, thereby thematically smoothing the road for single-payer (which he feels will need federal support to be a viable alternative). Symington personalizes Catamount even more than other issues, so she should never talk about it. Talking about anything else is better. Fake a heart attack if the question comes up… something.
The Governor will be fairly predictable, so hopefully the legislative leadership is predicting and preparing. He’ll continue his attempt to co-opt the energy issue, and will have no problem contradicting his positions and statements on last year’s H.520 if he thinks it helps him do that.
He’ll go full steam ahead with a liberal divide-and-conquer strategy by exploiting and deepening the rifts between affordable housing advocates and environmentalists. This is a no-brainer for him, as he can easily attach his unrestricted growth/sprawl agenda onto that of the housing advocates. If he splinters the liberal coalition in the legislature, it then makes it easier to translate that splintering into gains on whatever his greenwash energy proposals may be.
Expect him to also spend a lot of energy on changing the subject. He’ll talk taxes in ways that he knows nothing will come of, just to keep attention shifted from energy, and to put Dems on the defensive. Nothing will come of it because, as always, he has no ideas on how to address public frustrations on the tax system, other than simply winning re-election on it. But there will still be a lot of talk.
So let’s keep expectations up. They should always be high. If things go better than last time (and they’ve just got to go better than last time), there will be opportunities for netroots and grassroots involvement (and I’m willing to bet legislative leaders will be a bit more willing to listen than last year… hopefully they’ve figured out that making Sanders’, Welch’s and Leahy’s lives easier at their own expense isn’t necessarily in anybody else’s best interest).
There was the first good synergy we’ve seen in ages around last year’s veto override attempts. I’m confident we can build on that, and to maximize that effort, GMD will likely be giving extra attention to some of the weeniecrats in the legislature. The national blogosphere has been actively targeting what have been called “Bush Dog” Democrats, an obvious play on the term “blue dog Democrats” which has been used to describe conservative D’s who more often than not vote as Republicans.
In Vermont, we have a few of what we can call “Jim Dog Democrats” that have a history of standing in the way of successful Democratic policies and priorities, instead choosing to ally themselves with Governor Douglas.
So be it. Jim-Dogs should consider themselves on notice.
