With S.5 vote and FTX-Balint coverage, they get it right
By Guy Page
At the risk of losing some Republican friends and knowing I will make no new Democrat friends, I publicly applaud Democrats in the Vermont Legislature and the Vermont mainstream media.
Yes, really. Because they deserve it.
Today, anyway.
Some of them, anyway.
The Democrat-controlled Vermont Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday could have told the world, “we’re the supermajority and you aren’t,” and approved the clearly Unaffordable Heating Act.
Our senators were being pressed hard by renewable power industries. Already enriched by crony laws created by their lobbyists and legislative pals, these companies wanted more. Well, it worked once……
But not this time. This time, Vermonters spoke up. And despite the desperate distortions Big Renewable mouthpieces got some senators to repeat, the Vermonters who made the difference were not the fuel dealers. They were the hundreds of poor, rural fuel users who begged them to oppose S5. Because it would hurt them.
And enough senators listened. By a 4-3 vote, they politely rebuffed Big Renewable and its ‘public interest’ lobbyists and changed the bill to require a two-year study and then an affirmative vote by the Legislature to proceed.
On the Senate floor last year, Sen. Jane Kitchel (D-Caledonia) expressed the same concerns about hurting the poor – and then voted for the Clean Heat Standard, last year’s version of this year’s AHA. But this year – more informed, more influenced by real constituents, and as chair of Appropriations more in a position to act – she heeded those concerns.
S.5 will likely pass. The checkback could be removed by the House and then killed in conference committee in exchange for 30 pieces of Big Renewable silver obtained through rate increases their pals mandated more than a decade ago.
But for now – good job, Democrats! And now, a word of praise for our friends in the liberal media….
In their March 1 story on Becca Balint, the LGBTQ electoral lobby, and FTX (“Court Filing Reveals How Crypto Moguls Tarnished a Historic Vermont Election”), Seven Days reporters Derek Brouwer and Sasha Goldstein just kill it. They describe in detail how LGBTQ Victory Fund leaders took shady $$ from FTX and gave it to Balint – after Lt. Gov. Molly Gray had rebuffed them. After Balint promised to not court super PAC money.
In the end, Balint got $1 million in two-minute warning Super PAC money and used it to defeat Gray.
Would Gray have won had she violated the campaign agreement and taken the $1 million ahead of Balint?
We’ll never know. What we do know is that the feds are all over FTX. A series of indictments show a cozy relationship of mutual interest between the Balint campaign and FTX.
And we know it because Seven Days put investigative, appropriately adversarial journalism before interest group pandering. 👏