Sen. Leahy (from his web site)

Until now, Vermont’s 2010 political diagnosis has been stable:

1–The governor’s race would be competitive, but Brian Dubie looked like the early front-runner;

2—Democrats, pretty much maxed out in the State Legislature, might lose a few seats, but would easily keep control of both houses;

3—Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep Peter Welch, both Democrats, would waltz to re-election.

No longer. Last week’s sweeping decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission case has altered politics everywhere, even in Vermont. It would be an exaggeration to say that Leahy and Welch are in trouble. It would be accurate to say that their re-elections are no longer certain.

Thanks to that ruling, corporations will be allowed to spend as much money as they choose on political campaigns. Top executives can flood the airways, cables, and post offices with as much advertising as they think their boards and shareholders will allow.

That could be quite a lot, especially for industries whose profit margins depend on what the federal government does – or does not.

That’s almost all of them. But just as an example, let’s take the oil industry. It has oodles of interactions with the government – land use, air and water pollution, anti-trust, tax preferences, and more. It is clear that the industry does not like most of Pat Leahy’s votes – he got a 100 percent rating last year from the League of Conservation Voters — and would be quite happy were he replaced by another senator, preferably a Republican.

The year before last, the five biggest oil companies earned $100 billion in profits. As prices fell last year, so did profits, but they remained in the tens of billions. Halfway through the year, for instance, Exxon-Mobil had earned more than $8 billion. The final 2009 figures have not been reported, but it’s reasonable to assume that the entire industry earned at least $50 billion.

It would not be irresponsible for the leaders of that industry to devote one percent of their profits – half a billion dollars – to political campaigns. It might even be irresponsible for them not to do so. How they would allocate the money remains uncertain, of course, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they would divide it evenly between races for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That’s a quarter of a billion bucks for this year’s 36 Senate races. Until now, corporate political operatives, limited to spending the money specifically contributed to their companies’ political action committees, would have avoided states like Vermont, where the outcome seemed certain. But now that they can spend their own (meaning their companies) money, they can take a flyer on other states.

Of the 36 seats, 11 are in safe Republican (meaning mostly pro-oil industry) hands in the South and West. With $250 million to spend, the oil leaders could decide to get involved in all the other 25 states, spending $10 million in each.

And that’s one industry. Considering all the others who would like Leahy replaced, and who have money to spare, there could easily be $50 million spent in Vermont this year on behalf of Leahy’s Republican opponent.(So far just Len Britton, a relatively unknown lumber store owner; see if some other Republicans start expressing interest).

To be sure, Leahy has raised a lot of campaign money, with $2.56 million in the kitty according to the latest information from the Federal Elections Commission. And he will have more. Labor unions were as liberated as corporations by the Citizens United decision, and there are deep-pocket Democrats in Hollywood and on Wall Street.

But combined, their pockets are not nearly as deep as those on the other side. Leahy and Welch this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, could easily be outspent 2-1.

Well, so what? After all, U.S. Senate seats can’t be bought, can they?

Good question, and the one that no one seems to want to answer. Not President Barack Obama or the others (not all of them Democrats) who have assailed the court’s decision. The problem is that answering the question risks insulting the American people, implying that they are sheep, easily fooled by glitzy – and often dishonest –TV commercials.

Those of us who are not running for anything have the luxury to consider the possibility (because all possibilities should be considered) that the American people deserve to be insulted, though probably no more than any other people.

No, they are not sheep. Sheep make no decisions. People do. But they do not (and this is what everyone, and perhaps especially Americans, resist acknowledging) make all their decisions as completely autonomous actors unaffected by impersonal forces and skilled, calculated, persuasion. “Men are convertible,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, and were they not, businesses would not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to convert them to buy this product or that brand.

And unlike cereal and car ads, political commercials are not bound by truth-in-advertising laws. Kellogg’s may not tell us that Post cereals will give us the rheumatizz, nor General Motors warn us that Toyota brakes will fail unless they can prove it. But candidate Smith can tell us that candidate Jones is a child molester or a peeping Tom whether or not it is true. The remedy here, as it should be, is at the polls, not in the courtroom.

Those of us who believe in democracy have to agree with Lincoln that it is not possible to fool most of the people most of the time. These days, though, it may be possible to fool just enough of the people on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

There is an honest case to be made against any office-holder, including Leahy. But against an incumbent who has gotten more than 70 percent of the vote the last two times he ran, do not expect his opponents or their “independent” supporters to confine themselves to making an honest case.

And do not think that Vermonters are any less vulnerable to hucksterism than anyone else.

Does Vermont coddle the Middle Class?

Gov. Jim Douglas thinks so, and he may have a point.

No, the governor didn’t use those words. But take a look at his budget message of last Tuesday and some of his other recent proposals.

“Maintaining coverage for the greatest number of people will mean scaling back benefits for some,” he said in his speech to the Legislature.

At that point, he was talking about health benefits. But the same theme echoed throughout the speech: In order to protect the services and subsidies that go to the poor, Vermont would have to cut back on those services and subsidies for the not-so-poor.

And while some of those not-so-poor are very low income, many are not. In both tax and social policy, Vermont provides benefits to thousands of people whose earnings are close to – or higher than –the middle of the income spectrum.

For instance, a family of four can get health care assistance in Vermont if its total income is under $68,400. That’s way above the poverty line for a family of four ($21,834 in 2008). It’s even higher than the median household income in the state (about $66,000) before the Recession started.

Then again, it’s less than the median income in Vermont for a family of four. That’s was $71,382 a couple of years ago, one of the highest in the country. Still, by any reasonable definition, a family of four living on $68,000 a year is neither poor nor low income. It’s right there in the middle.

Meaning, at least according to conventional assumptions, it ought to be able to support itself. After all, this is America, the richest country in the world and the one that created mass affluence. Shouldn’t moderately affluent people pay their own bills?

Nor is health care the only example. A large family – two parents and six children – can get state help winterizing its home if its income is higher than $74,000. In all, Douglass said, “nearly one-third of our population receives services from the State… Since the beginning of the decade, overall spending for human services has more than doubled – a growth rate of three-and-a-half times inflation.”

Conventional assumptions, to be sure, ought to be challenged from time to time. As it happens, most Americans no longer live better than their counterparts in many other countries, partly because those counterparts don’t have to pay separately for health care at all. And in this country, health care has gotten so expensive that it could pose a heavy burden even on the moderately affluent.

Still, the case made by Douglas and other economic conservatives is not frivolous. If nothing else, they are asking a legitimate question: In a culture that values (or at least claims to) self-reliance, where should the line be drawn between personal and social responsibility?

Despite the claims of some of his liberal critics, Douglas remains a moderate, not one of those ultra-conservative Republicans who believe – as Newt Gingrich proclaimed in 1995 as he prepared to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives – that government ought to do little more than defend the country and print money. Douglas proposed expanding several state programs in his speech, and did not call for abolishing any.

But he does want to save money, mostly by cutting services to middle-income and even some affluent people and by raising their taxes.

Again, he didn’t put it precisely that way. No sane politician is going to say, “I want to raise the taxes of middle-income and upper-middle-income homeowners.”

But that would be the result of Douglas’s plan to alter the “income sensitivity” provisions of the statewide school property tax. Instead of all households with income under $90,000 protected from paying more than 1.8 percent of their incomes on that tax, those earning between $60,000 and $75,000 could pay as much as 2.25 percent; for households between $75,00 and $90,000, the limit would rise to 3.5 percent.

Of course that might not be a tax increase if local school districts froze their budgets, as Douglas proposed. But they don’t seem likely to follow his advice. Either way, families who earn $90,000 a year, even big families, are in the top 20 percent of all earners. By any definition they are affluent. Why do their property taxes need to be subsidized?

Democrats claim that income sensitivity is not a subsidy, but a method of linking taxes to each taxpayer’s “ability to pay.” It may be that, but it is also a subsidy; whatever the homeowner saves on property taxes because of income sensitivity is made up for by funds from other taxes, mostly the income tax.

And that tax, in turn, is disproportionately paid by upper-income earners. When economic conservatives, including Douglas, complain that Vermont is a high-tax state, what they really object to is that it’s a high-tax state for high earners. Lower and middle-income Vermonters – even those up near the $90,000 range – pay little if any more in state and local taxes than do their counterparts in many other states, especially in the Northeast. But because the state tax structure is relatively progressive, the wealthy pay a bit more. Among other things, they are subsidizing, through income sensitivity, the affluent as well as the poor.

Unless income sensitivity is altered, then, there might be renewed pressure to raise taxes on the very wealthy to help make up for what the merely affluent don’t pay in property taxes. Douglas adamantly opposes any such tax increase. In fact, he wants last year’s small hike in taxes on the wealthy rolled back.

This debate, then, is, among others things, a class conflict. Not the traditional version in which the workers with their pitchforks storm the banks. Not even the more recent brand in which the bankers with their lobbyists and their pseudo-think tanks storm the government and the media.

This class conflict is more nuanced, more interesting, and perhaps necessary. It’s all about precisely who qualifies as “middle class,” who in that middle class deserves tax breaks and government services, and who will pay for them. A healthy debate as long as it does not degenerate into a situation in which everybody is trying to protect his/her own government benefits and tax breaks at the expense of everyone else.

It would be irresponsible to leave this discussion without noting that some of Douglas’s proposed budget cuts would hurt the very poor. For instance, he noted that Vermont’s Medicaid system allows an “unlimited number of emergency room visits” by recipients. “Capping ER visits that do not result in hospitalization at 12 per year will bring Vermont more in line with peer states – saving money to preserve this benefit for everyone in the system,” he said.

No doubt it would. Not only that, but it’s a good bet that some of those emergency room visits, being unlimited and free, aren’t really necessary. But those unlimited visits also probably help explain why Vermont is regularly designated the healthiest state in the union. The most obvious consequence of reducing health care services for the poor is that the poor will become less healthy.

Program Note: The News guy had a personal appointment Tuesday that kept him from Gov. Jim Douglas’s annual budget address to the Legislature in Montpelier. The contents thereof, however, will not be ignored for long. Tune in Friday.

As it happened, Tuesday’s activities did not leave enough time and/or energy for a full post today. But the following correction – or at least clarification –of part of last Friday’s post can not wait. So here it is.

In last Friday’s post (scroll down for the full piece), appeared the following: “Vermont’s old abortion ban remains on the books. It’s 13 V.S.A. § 101, and should (the Roe v Wade US Supreme Court ruling) ever be reversed, (the law) would have to be repealed or abortions would be illegal here.”

Not exactly.

The law is on the books. But so is Beechman v. Leahy, the 1972 Vermont Supreme Court decision invalidating the statute.

Meaning that even if the controversial 1973 Roe decision were overturned (itself hardly likely in the foreseeable future), abortion would not be illegal in Vermont.

At least not unless the Legislature amended the statute to meet the Court’s objection. And a quick examination of both the law and the ruling shows unlikely it would be for the lawmakers to do any such thing.

The statute and the court ruling both relate to the over-all subject of Friday’s post – the introduction of bills that would convey some right of personhood to the fetus. In this context, what is interesting about the law is that while it protects the fetus, it does not treat it as equal to the pregnant woman. If the woman dies, the penalties are harsher than if she does not.

The statute also says that only the person performing the abortion can be punished, but that “the woman whose miscarriage is caused or attempted shall not be liable to the penalties prescribed by this section.”

The court used that provision to invalidate the statute. According to a paper delivered in 2008 by Vermont Law School Professor Cheryl Hanna (Hanna writes more tersely than the court ruling, so she rather than it will be quoted here), “because the Legislature had failed to hold a woman liable for terminating a pregnancy, it had left her personal rights to here…since the Legislature had granted the woman a right to abort, it could not simultaneously deny her medical aid and expect to save her life. By granting her the right to abort, it must also grant her the right to safely

exercise it.”

To resuscitate the statute, Hanna said, the Legislature would probably “have to criminalize women along with providers in order for the law to be deemed reasonable.” It’s hard to imagine any Vermont Legislature taking that step.

This does not mean there is no reason whatever for abortion rights advocates to be concerned about the law still on the books. Beechman does not create a right to abortion under the Vermont Constitution, making it a slightly shakier protection than if it did.

Nor does it mean that laws creating “fetal rights” can not be used to prosecute women (and sometimes men). In one case cited in a document prepared by the National Advocates of Pregnant Women (an advocacy group, obviously, but its examples are backed up by news stories) a South Carolina woman who suffered a miscarriage was arrested and charged with homicide by child abuse.

But it does mean that the suggestion in Friday’s post that the Vermont statute could create a small political problem for Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie in this year’s governor’s race was probably overblown. Dubie may oppose abortion rights. But he’s not likely to veto a bill that the Legislature won’t pass because it won’t have to pass one to keep abortions legal in Vermont, no matter who’s on the U.S. Supreme Court some years hence.