Vermont

Bolstered bloc of Vermont Republicans see bills repealed this year as a win – VTDigger

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July 5, 2026

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Bolstered bloc of Vermont Republicans see bills repealed this year as a win – VTDigger

Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, listens to discussion on the floor of the Senate on the opening day of the legislature at the Statehouse in Montpelier on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Political parties are quick to declare victory when the bills they support make it into law. But for Vermont’s Republican minority in the Legislature, it was the laws they succeeded in rolling back this year that seem to have the party celebrating just as much.

In a newsletter to supporters last month, Paul Dame, chair of the Vermont Republican Party, adopted a sweeping tone as he reflected on the 2026 legislative session that had ended just days before.

“If Vermont’s Republicans are not the most effective minority in any legislature in the country, then I’d like to hear who is,” Dame wrote in the email. The GOP accomplished its goals, he went on, “in ways that seemed impossible just two years ago.”

Two years ago, Vermont’s 2023-24 legislative biennium ended with Democrats enacting six bills into law that Republican Gov. Phil Scott had vetoed and that Scott’s GOP allies in the House and Senate broadly opposed. Democrats were able to do so because they had a supermajority of seats in both chambers.

But then, voters elected a wave of additional Republicans to the House and Senate that November — many if not all of them maligning some of those new laws on the campaign trail — and the political dynamic in the Statehouse changed.

In the two years since, Republicans enjoyed more committee leadership roles, which dictate which bills get airtime, and found an easier path to get some of their party’s priorities into law. Dame pointed, for example, to a 2025 law expanding state tax breaks for military retirees, something Scott had backed for years with no success.

Democrats still held a majority of seats in both chambers and so could set the agenda as they liked. They had their own priorities that they pursued, at times over many Republicans’ opposition, such as a new legal avenue for Vermonters to sue federal agents whom they allege have violated their constitutional rights.

But Republican leaders said that one of, if not their biggest, win of the 2025-26 biennium, which started last January and ended this May, was slowing or reversing some of the policies passed in the prior two-year period.

“Most of what Republicans did was apply the brakes,” Dame wrote in another newsletter last month. Even if the party succeeded in some ways, though, “there is still work to do in order to turn the car around and start moving toward prosperity instead of away from it,” he added.

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said the results of the 2024 election made it clear to him that his GOP colleagues would try to change some of what his caucus passed before.

“And that’s part of the democratic process,” he said in an interview. “The voters are the ones who decide. And so, given the change in the chamber, I think they accomplished some of their goals.”

Baruth agreed Republicans had a stronger voice in the Statehouse the past two years, but said he didn’t think that meant the legislative process was more confrontational.

“By and large it was not, every day, a struggle with an emboldened minority,” he said. “We worked very smoothly together — on what amounted to the Democrats’ agenda.”

The policies Republicans repealed was a focus for Gov. Scott at a press conference the week after the Legislature adjourned.

“We’ve now spent an entire session undoing harmful policies passed by the previous supermajority rather than making meaningful progress,” he said in early June.

‘The highlights of the session’

The most significant reversal Republicans say they won this year was to a slate of conservation measures included in a 2024 land use law, Act 181. That was one of the laws Democrats passed over Scott’s veto and opposition from the GOP.

Parts of the law aimed to loosen state reviews for new housing in already-developed areas. But at the same time — in response to climate change and habitat loss — the law added environmental protections for building projects in sensitive areas.

As state officials rolled out draft maps of these areas, ire from rural landowners, local officials and housing proponents bubbled up. Their opposition, which was echoed by Republican Lt. Gov. John Rodgers and GOP members of the House and Senate, also drew a large protest on the Statehouse steps in March.

After the Senate passed a bill delaying the implementation of some of those provisions, Democratic House leadership went a step further, and in an unexpected about-face approved a rollback of those measures entirely. That’s what lawmakers ultimately passed in May and Scott then signed into law.

Dame also pointed, in an interview, to how the 2025-26 biennium marked the end for the Clean Heat Standard, a 2023 law that Democrats also enacted over Scott’s red pen aimed at reducing the carbon emissions that come from heating and cooling buildings.