I vote to veto the veto session

2024-06-16

Dear friend,

Happy Father's Day!

If you celebrate -- how? I have not yet been told our plans for the afternoon -- we'll see.

And just remember -- it's not a dad bod. It's a father figure.

Oh, you think that's bad? Here's the most profoundly bad dad joke I've ever heard...

It was February 5th of this year, and I was here -- at the Marble Valley Correctional Facility in Rutland, Vermont.

I was there as a guest of Jessica Stannard, the Family Support Programs Coordinator with Prevent Child Abuse Vermont.

Outside Marble Valley Correctional Facility - a blustery February 5, 2024

Prevent Child Abuse Vermont (PCAVT) is a great organization that runs programs to promote and support healthy relationships within families, schools and communities to eliminate child abuse. I encourage you to check out and support their work.

I was there as a volunteer teacher, supporting Jessica, in a class on parenting for incarcerated fathers, called InsideOut Dad. Eight dads showed up to talk with us for two hours about what being a dad means to them. We talked about their kids, how it's hard to be a parent from inside prison, and how it's hard to be a parent outside prison.

In one part of the class, we talked about "stressors" -- what stresses these guys out?

One stressor was that the men there don't feel that the facility encourages rehabilitation, as it's supposed to do. There are few constructive activities to engage in -- this weekly class is one of the few things going on for these guys.

"I thrive in chaos," said another inmate.

He did not appear to be thriving by any measure. But several in the group acknowledged feeling this way. "When things are the same every day, it drives me crazy," said another.

Here comes the dad joke. I asked one inmate...

Tristan: How many kids do you have?

Inmate: I have nine kids officially. And then I have the summer kids.

Tristan: What are "summer kids"?

Inmate: Some are here, some are there.

***
I feel like a walking dad joke today. I've spent my two-year term working every day for Vermonters, and all I've got left is tomorrow's "veto session."

I don't feel good about it. It's a sucky way to govern and today I feel kinda sucky that this, apparently, is the best that Vermont's elected leaders can do.

I don't feel good using the word "sucky" in my newsletter. As much as I try in this newsletter to be real with you, McKenna, about how things are going as one of your Representatives, I try to be positive and constructive. That stance has left me fairly quiet in the last month, as I have struggled to formulate how and what to share about the end of the 2024 legislative session.

On the positive side, we passed a ton of great bills that the Governor signed and that are becoming law. I'll come back to those in a future newsletter. Today, I'm focused more on the Bills Vetoed by the Governor, how I'm going to vote tomorrow, and how we got here.

The phrase that keeps coming back to my mind is this -- when the parents fight, it's the kids who suffer most. Here's what one article from U.C. Berkeley says about fighting around kids:

“Children are like emotional Geiger counters,” says E. Mark Cummings, psychologist at Notre Dame University, who, along with colleagues, has published hundreds of papers over twenty years on the subject. Kids pay close attention to their parents’ emotions for information about how safe they are in the family, Cummings says. When parents are destructive, the collateral damage to kids can last a lifetime.

...In a remarkable 20-year-old study of parental conflict and children’s stress, anthropologists Mark Flinn and Barry England analyzed samples of the stress hormone cortisol, taken from children in an entire village on the east coast of the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Children who lived with parents who constantly quarreled had higher average cortisol levels than children who lived in more peaceful families. As a result, they frequently became tired and ill, they played less, and slept poorly. Overall, children did not ever habituate, or “get used to,” the family stress.

I can attest to this durability of the sleep effect. My doctor in my mid-twenties tested my cortisol levels (via saliva) over a 24-hour period. I detected surprise and alarm in her voice when she called with the results. "Your cortisol levels are supposed to be going down as you approach bedtime," she explained. "Your levels are rising through the evening and hitting a high at 9 p.m."

Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline help get you through a hard moment in the short-term, but in the long-term they leave a rutted road, like the one I was finding at nightfall. The cortisol is released in anticipation of stress, not in response to it. This only creates stress.

My best guess is that when the inmate says he "thrives with chaos," he means that he's used to it and his body knows how to do it. He's replicating as a father the environment he experienced as a child. The cortisol spikes one way or another. And once it does so, it's hard to sit still. Sitting still and being calm can feel like a vulnerability. The cortisol is telling your body there's a threat out there and you'd better do something about it. (See About the time I kicked benzos for more on my journey with night terrors -- the reason the doctor ordered the cortisol test.)

"It is an act of defiance to remain hopeful when things are so dark," said Congresswoman Becca Balint in a speech I attended last night, and I certainly feel very defiant right now. While I'm proud of the Acts and Resolves that I helped pass in the Legislature this year, the veto session highlights some of the rifts in Vermont.

To put a number on it -- 52. That's the record of gubernatorial vetoes by a single governor in Vermont history, held by Phil Scott with only seven years in office. The previous leader was Gov. Howard Dean, who issued 21 vetoes across 12 years.

Scott has issued seven vetoes in recent weeks, and the Legislature is set to vote tomorrow on whether to override them. For the full list of bills and the Governor's veto message on each, here's the current House calendar.

But the numbers and the messages are only part of the story. By all accounts, there has been a breakdown in communication between the executive and legislative branches this biennium (see, for example VT Digger: Vermont’s 2024 legislative session was marked by deep rifts between Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature).

For example, constituents of all political stripes have been telling me that Act 250 reform is a huge priority for them. The Legislature worked overtime last summer and through this winter and spring on H.687, a landmark reform to the major land-use law that governs our state. It's not perfect, but for a bill of its scope and complexity, it covers a lot of ground and I was happy to vote for it.

Scott and his staff did not participate in those sessions and did not add specific, actionable input to H.687 at any point along the way.

Then, at 7:48 p.m. on the Friday going into the Father's Day weekend, the Administration sent around an email to all legislators, subject line "H.687 compromise." The email contained a list of proposals. Some of these seem like good ideas, but all of which are too late in our legislative process to consider. To properly consider these ideas, we would need to reconvene the legislative session and get these ideas in front of the committee of jurisdiction.

Policy work takes time. The time to do this was between January and May -- not June, days before the state's new fiscal year.

There's a narrative out there that Scott's vetoes have proliferated because he's keeping in check the "Democratic supermajority." Both the Senate and the House include more than two-thirds Democrats -- enough votes to override a veto, all within one caucus.

But believe me -- with 104 Democrats in the House, and 150 members, there is a full spectrum of ideological perspectives represented here. Getting any bill passed, let alone as complex a bill as H.687, is an act of listening and consensus-building. The Legislature has done that work on the vetoed bills, and I will stand behind that work tomorrow.

On vetoing H.887, Scott stated that a better bill was possible -- "if legislators will work with me."

I emailed him to ask what he had in mind. I heard nothing in reply.

A week later, when Scott released a "menu" of options for reducing property taxes this year, the biggest item on the menu was one I consider unacceptable -- borrowing from our own education reserve fund. At a meeting to introduce these ideas, Scott did not appear, to the surprise of legislators. (His staff explained that if a handshake was in reach, he would come in later.)

It's too bad Scott wasn't there, because I would have liked to hear directly from my Governor why it would be fiscally responsible to borrow from tomorrow's reserves to reduce our tax liability today.

I will be voting to override the Governor on H.687, H.887, and several other bills. I'm not doing so with a smile on my face. When the parents fight, it's the kids who suffer. That's us -- regular citizens of Vermont who are not benefiting from strong, inclusive dialogue.

The Governor raises fair questions about some of these bills, but he does so too late in the process to constructively consider them.

I hope that somewhere in tomorrow's votes and the conclusion of this biennium is the seed of better dialogue in the future.

What do you think? I always appreciate your feedback.

With kind regards,

Rep. Tristan Roberts
Halifax, Vermont

P.S. For more dad jokes, there's at least one in my recent Father's Day reflection, The last conversation with my father. Also, in hopeful news -- the peonies are blooming! And as readers know, that doesn't happen without all of us.

Note the ant in the foreground, tickling our peonies!