House Majority Leader Floyd Nease was standing at the edge of the underwhelming crowd of perhaps 125 of the usual liberal suspects decrying Gov. Jim Douglas’s proposed budget cuts outside the Capitol yesterday when Rep. Michael Mrowocki brought him some news.

“Human Services voted not to touch V-Pharm,” said Mrowicki, a Democrat from Putney. “Unanimously.”

Maybe those liberals don’t have to bring out a big crowd to get their way. They’ve got the Legislature.

And maybe the President.

V-Pharm, which helps lower-income, older people pay for their prescription drugs, is one of the state programs on the Douglas chopping block. In his budget address last month, the governor called for eliminating V-Pharm, saving, according to one legislator’s estimate, as much as $3 million.

Forget that, is essentially what the Human Services Committee – including its three Republicans – told Douglas yesterday. Before the process is over sometime in April, that message seems likely to be repeated for a great many of the governor’s other proposed cuts.

Not that anyone should underestimate Douglas. He is tenacious, he has veto power, and he has the Recession. The more the economy declines and state revenues fall, the stronger grows his argument that spending has to be cut simply because there isn’t enough money.

Certainly he has more than held his own vis a vis Democratic legislatures in recent years, each session ending with the governor and the legislative leaders reaching a budget agreement which gave Douglas most of what he wanted.

But this year the Democrats may be made of sterner stuff, for the following reasons:

–Their majorities are even bigger; the 96 of them and just four of the five Progressives and two independents could over-ride a veto;

–Douglas has proposed much deeper cuts, arousing more fervent opposition from the several constituencies in the Democratic coalition;

–The new speaker, Shap Smith, though considered less liberal than predecessor Gaye Symington (perhaps only because he is from Morrisville rather than Chittenden County), gives every appearance of being tougher, politically shrewder, and a mainstream policy Democrat if not an out-and-out liberal, whatever that may be;

–Like Democrats everywhere, those in Vermont have been walking a little taller since January 20.

From the Democratic perspective, the benefits of that last item are not merely psychological. President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan also promises to ship billions of dollars to the states, millions of them to Vermont. Not as many millions since the Senate cut out some spending that were in the bill passed by the US House (some of which may be restored in the House-Senate Conference now under way), but enough to avoid at least some of Douglas’s proposed spending cuts.

Money bills start in the House of Representatives, and Nease said that the House leadership has “put pretty much aside” the governor’s budget proposals of last month and are “writing our own.” The work, he said, is going on largely in the Appropriations Committee, chaired by Martha Heath of Westford, but Nease, Smith, and others are also working on it.

He didn’t go into specifics, but in recent weeks Smith, Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, and other leading Democrats have talked about bringing the budget into balance by using all four mechanisms available – cutting some programs, borrowing some money, dipping into the Rainy Day Fund, and what they usually call “revenue,” though occasionally refer to by its real name: taxes.

Politicians do not like to raise taxes, or even to mention the possibility. So when they go on radio programs or sit for newspaper interviews and mention the possibility, they must (a)  be serious about the possibility; and (b) be sending the idea into the political atmosphere to see how much   anger it arouses.

So far, it doesn’t seem to have aroused much. A few letters to the editor, but no apparent outpouring of fury from anywhere. Outwardly, in fact, there seem to have been at least as many Vermonters saying they’d be willing to pay a little more to maintain social programs at current levels as saying higher taxes would drive them out of the state.

The outward appearance, though, might not reflect the deeper reality. That demonstration under the Golden Dome yesterday illustrated something about the asymmetry of Vermont politics. As former State Rep. Barbara Postman, one of the organizers of the “One Vermont” rally, candidly acknowledged, the turnout was disappointing. Worse, there was some confusion about the starting time, so the TV news cameras had left before some of the most compelling speakers came to the microphone.

Still, they were there, right out in the open. Advocates of services for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the homeless, the mentally ill. They were there and they were energetic and attentive, especially to the two young autistic men, one of whom, Tracy Thresher, who apparently can not speak in public, addressed the crowd via a facilitated communication device.

The other side of this debate – the side that agrees with Douglas – does not hold rallies at the Statehouse. It couldn’t if it wanted to, but it doesn’t want to and doesn’t have to. This does not mean that it less powerful, only that its power expresses itself differently.

This faction is led by the governor, and includes such business groups as the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Northern Vermont (Douglas is scheduled to speak at its annual dinner next Tuesday), the editorial page of the Burlington Free Press. Only the last of those regularly speaks in public.

But all of it together has clout, and could steel the governor to veto a budget passed by the Legislature. Nothing is going to happen for a few weeks. To begin with, until Congress comes up with its final bill, lawmakers won’t know how much extra money Vermont will get. And this year, both houses are taking a two-week break in early March for Town Meeting instead of the traditional one-week recess.

So the showdown is likely to come in April. What looms then is an interesting game of chicken. In most of the Douglas years, it has been the Democrats in the legislature who gave way first. This time the Democrats are strutting in a more roosterly manner. And as that Human Services Committee vote indicated, they may have convinced a few Republicans to walk their way.

Tags: Floyd Nease, Jim Douglas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Politics & Elections, Taxes, The Legislature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.