Rep. Anne Donahue
Legislative Update
February 17, 2008
Two major veto bills from last year came to the House floor last week, with the same divergence of non-partisanship and partisanship that marked each last year.
The energy/greenhouse gas bill passed with even stronger consensus support, and now is in the House Ways and Means (raising the money) Committee. The bill broke down last year over radical changes the Senate made, not the House.
The campaign finance reform bill is not on as happy a track.
In 1997, the legislature passed a bill with sharp restraints on campaign donations and fund raising. It was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court by groups that asserted they were having their free speech rights curtailed: an alliance of the Vermont chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Right to Life Committee.
The Supreme Court chastised Vermont for exceptionally low limits that, among other things, were not based on any demonstrated need. The court said that to justify limits, there had to be at the very least a showing of an appearance of corruption that was being addressed.
The effort cost Vermont not only its own legal fees, but $1.2 million in reimbursements to the appealing parties, which is a requirement under First Amendment claims.
Limits on fund raising hurt challengers, who are held to the same caps despite the uphill battle of gaining the name-recognition that incumbents have. It also protects wealthy, self-funded candidates.
The real key to protecting against special interest groups controlling votes would be to have open records on candidate funding.
Vermont ranked “F” in a recent state-by-state profile on fund raising transparency. In most states, a quick trip to the internet gives access to all the contribution data. You’ll be hard-pressed to access any of that here.
So Republicans offered an alternative bill: stop just studying how to create open campaign records. Do it.
The amendment failed, and the new limits passed on party line votes, 44-95 and 89-41 respectively.
Rep. Tom Koch of Barre Town gave the best summary of what was wrong with the bill when he said, “I believe it is ethically wrong for me to sit here in Montpelier and decide how much someone who wants me out of office can raise, and therefore spend, on that effort.”
“All that is needed is full disclosure. Then the voters can decide whether they approve of what a candidate is doing.”
We had a second day of debate focused on the finding in the bill that it is needed because, “(2) Some candidates and elected officials, particularly when time is limited, respond and give access to contributors who make large contributions in preference to those who make small or no contributions.”
The strongest evidence the committee reported to justify this finding was the testimony of one representative who said he once caught himself answering an email out of the order in which it arrived because he recognized the name as a contributor.
Throughout the debate, committee members presenting the bill said the finding was essential for meeting the Supreme Court standard that a bill restricting contribution limits should be based on a need to combat real or perceived corruption.
We needed, as one member said, to be sure to “put together a record that will stand up” to a court challenge.
House Democrats voted to soften the assertion with “may,” but refused to eliminate the finding on an 87-44 vote.
I explained my “no” vote on the floor:
“My understanding is that findings in a bill are supposed to reflect the testimony and evidence heard by a committee. Instead, we hear that this finding is intended to satisfy the United States’ Supreme Court’s ruling that this law should be based on responding to at least an appearance of corruption. Where was the evidence heard in committee to justify it?”
In a similar effort to push court challenges, we recently passed revisions to try to survive the current court challenge of last year’s law to regulate companies that buy prescription information to target new drugs to doctors. Similar bills in New Hampshire and Maine have already resulted in early court findings that they violate constitutional commercial free speech rights.
I support the concept behind the bill — these practices help drive up health costs by giving one-sided information to doctors too busy to do independent research — but not at the cost of a court battle that we know in advance we are likely to lose. Attorney General Bill Sorrell’s testimony to the Health Care Committee was that the lawsuit would be “an uphill battle,” but an attempt to block the bill failed, 43 to 86.
Finally, an updates on education funding reform: Don’t expect headway from this legislature and administration.
Efforts to correct the worst of the potential consequences of last year’s Act 82 (such as the hopeless inequity to towns with tuition students, as the Roxbury School Board so eloquently wrote to the House and Senate Education Committees) seem to be gaining no traction.
I have joined in co-sponsoring a “throw it all out and take a new look” bill that suggests full state funding of special education and other mandated costs, and full state support of an average per pupil cost, with an alternative to the property tax. Only local supplemental costs would go on a local property tax.
We need to eliminate the impossible goal of the “common level of appraisal,” and as predicted, the goose that laid the golden eggs to create unsustainable increases — the housing market inflaqtion — is flattening out and will create even greater budget tension.
The greatest loss of this session is the failure of legislative leadership to come through with its opening commitment: identify what we expect from our schools, find out what it costs, then figure out how to fund it.
However once again, we skipped the first two steps, therefore tripping on the third.
Meanwhile, in health care, a new report shows that Vermont has moved in the past 12 years from spending 12 percent below the national average in health care, to115% percent of the average, topping all states during the past five years recorded, with its average annual growth of 9.4 percent. This is a crisis of unsustainable spending increases, not a crisis of health coverage.
I’ll address more on health care issues, including why cutting funding of our share of Medicaid is one of the biggest cost drivers in health insurance costs of all, in a later update on this year’s health care initiatives. Our third ongoing economic crisis, housing, also is overdue for a full discussion.
Your thoughts and concerns are of great importance to me — please stay in touch. You can reach me anytime, or ask to be added to the email list to receive direct updates, by message at counterp@tds.net; 485-6431 or 828-2228.