The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on the other branches,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer warned last year.Many Supreme Court observers, and even its own dissenting justices, are wondering if what Breyer forewarned has now come to pass. The court has just issued a series of blockbuster decisions that mark it as the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. In the past month, the court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, weakened the government’s ability to address climate change, undermined gun regulations and enabled public funding of religious schools in a case that will have a direct impact on Vermont. These decisions advance longtime goals of Republicans, who appointed six of the court’s nine justices.Rodney Smolla has been analyzing and arguing before the Supreme Court for decades. On July 1, Smolla became the inaugural president of Vermont Law and Graduate School, formerly Vermont Law School. A longtime constitutional law professor and civil liberties litigator, Smolla has participated in a number of famous first amendment cases, including Hustler vs. Falwell, which was the subject of the 1996 movie, “The People Versus Larry Flynt.” He is the author of a textbook on defamation, numerous books and more than 100 articles. Prior to coming to Vermont, Smolla was dean and professor of law at Widener University Delaware Law School. He previously served as president of Furman University and was dean of the law schools at Washington and Lee University and at the University of Richmond.“I honestly never thought I would see (overturning Roe) happen in my lifetime.” Smolla said. The decision will be “enormously disruptive to women across the nation that are now going to be severely hampered in those states that have immediately banned abortion.”Smolla is concerned with “the willingness to overturn such a settled clinical precedent and to do it so quickly once there was a solid five justice conservative majority, to do it in the face of all of these various statements that some of the more recent appointees made that seemed to signal that they had respect for settled precedent.”Have the justices become politicians in robes? Smolla replied, “We’re perilously close to that.”

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, half of women in the U.S. live in states where they are at imminent risk of losing abortion access.Against this backdrop, Vermont is moving to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In November, Vermonters will vote on Proposal 5, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which states in part that “an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed.” California voters are also considering a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights this year.How will overturning Roe v. Wade change the landscape of abortion rights in Vermont and New England?For answers, we turned to two people who are on the front lines of the reproductive rights movement locally and nationally: Lucy Leriche, vice president of public policy for Vermont at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and James Duff Lyall, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“It's pretty devastating to go to bed feeling like a person and wake up the next day and all of a sudden discover that your country does not consider you a person anymore,” Leriche said. “That you are a vessel. That your function is kind of analogous to livestock in terms of the kinds of rights that you have over your own body. It's very personal. It's devastating, and it's infuriating.”“We can't normalize any of this," Lyall said. Fighting for reproductive rights is "going to take voting. It's going to take organizing. It's going to take local, state and federal activism and engagement, and sustained political engagement. "That's what the right has done for a very long time and very successfully. … That's the only way forward.”Disclosure: David Goodman is a board member of the ACLU of Vermont.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham. After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.” The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.“I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.” When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.“I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade. “I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.

Bill McKibben thought he knew where he came from. He grew up in the tidy, affluent and predominantly white suburban community of Lexington, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he gave tours on the Lexington Battle Green, regaling visitors with tales about the opening shots of the American Revolution. He thought the United States was the greatest force for good in the world.Fifty years later, McKibben, now 61, has a very different perspective. He sees a world riven by racial and economic inequality. He has dedicated his life to stopping the climate crisis, a human-caused disaster that his generation has done much to create. The big question on McKibben’s mind today is this: What the hell happened?Bill McKibben tackles this question in his new book, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben lives in Ripton, Vermont, and is the author of more than a dozen other books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, writes a blog about the climate crisis called The Crucial Years and founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org. He was the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people over 60 for progressive change.

When Erica Heilman heard about the death by suicide of 17-year-old Finn Rooney, she initially recoiled from telling the story. It was too raw. But Heilman, an independent podcaster and the creator of Rumble Strip, lives by the credo, “good conversation takes its time.” So she patiently waited and continued talking with Rooney’s mother. The story that evolved was not about suicide. It was about how the family and the Hardwick community grieved and healed together. The podcast that she crafted is called “Finn and the Bell.” It is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of love and loss.Last week, Heilman won a Peabody Award for the podcast, the highest award in broadcast journalism. “A Peabody is like an Oscar wrapped in an Emmy inside a Pulitzer,” said Stephen Colbert, a multiple Peabody Award winner.Heilman’s award is notable because she is an independent producer who, as she likes to say, makes podcasts in her closet. Rumble Strip, which she founded in 2013, is a one-woman operation. That’s not the typical profile of her fellow Peabody winners this year, who include longtime host of NPR’s Fresh Air Terry Gross, former CBS anchor Dan Rather, and other well-known media figures and institutions.Heilman has a history of punching above her weight. Rumble Strip was named the No. 1 podcast of 2020 by The Atlantic, ahead of podcasts produced by the Washington Post and the New Yorker, to name a few.Heilman is a self-taught podcaster. She was born in Vermont but left to study musical theater at the University of Michigan. She then landed an entry-level job at PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and continued to work as a freelance television producer around New York. That wasn’t paying the bills, so she moved back to Vermont and took a job as a private investigator. She began producing her distinctive Rumble Strip podcasts on the side, relying on listener donations to support it. Rumble Strip podcasts now air on Vermont Public Radio and at rumblestripvermont.com.The Peabody Awards praised Heilman’s work on "Finn and the Bell" as “subtle, thoughtful, and gorgeous.” “Heilman’s important work serves as a reminder of what we stand to lose with the ongoing crisis in local news,” the Peabody Award announcement stated. “Local media institutions aren’t just responsible for holding the powerful accountable and shedding light on injustice; they’re also there to simply document life around them, to act as the institutional memory for the people they serve. They reflect communities back to themselves, forging the shared bond felt with each other through joys as much as tragedies.”Heilman continually looks for ways to build community. Alongside her podcasting, her newest project is to help create a “mobile cultural center” in Hardwick called The Civic Standard.Heilman wants her work to dignify the lives of ordinary people. “My hope is that … people I've talked to have felt seen,” she said.“It makes me very happy to introduce Vermonters to each other who might never meet, where you can see yourself in that person,” Heilman said on The Vermont Conversation. “If I achieve that, I feel I've done something perhaps useful.”

The students graduating from Vermont’s high schools this year are extraordinary in many ways. For most of high school, they have been on the frontlines of a global pandemic. They attended school from their bedrooms. They had to find the strength to forge connection and community while enduring personal isolation. They returned to school wearing masks to keep each other and their families safe as the pandemic raged around them. Now, like young people everywhere, they dream of a brighter future — and are actively building it. They are the ones we have been waiting for.On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with five remarkable members of the class of 2022. Ava Thurston from Harwood Union High School has been Vermont state champion in both cross-country skiing and running in all four years of high school, won the U18 national championships in cross-country skiing this year, and aspires to ski in the Olympics. Yahir Ramirez from Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans is the son of Mexican farmworkers in Vermont who volunteers with Migrant Justice, and he soon will attend Harvard. Addie Lentzner from Arlington Memorial High School helped prod Gov. Phil Scott to extend emergency housing for people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. Kiara Mack of Winooski High School is an all-star soccer player and team captain who confronted racism directed at student-athletes. Sawyer Totten is a transgender student and LGBTQ+ leader who inspired peers from around the state to walk out and speak out to protest the national wave of anti-trans legislation.These students have made a lasting mark on their communities. Now, they are heading out to change the world.For Ramirez, who will be a first-generation college student when he attends Harvard, graduating Bellows Free Academy “really means a lot to the family because it really just shows that we're able to do it. … My background or my color, it doesn't limit me.”Kiara Mack says that she struggled to get through high school until she finally felt she was being heard. Then she emerged as a student leader against racism. “I'm proud of the impact I have on people. I have a lot of younger students who I try to steer more in the right path because I feel that I can connect with them on a different level,” she said. “I'm really happy with the imprint I've left on my school and who I am being seen as I am graduating.”

How did abortion rights become a battlefront in the culture wars?Felicia Kornbluh has been a participant observer in the fight for reproductive justice. Kornbluh is a professor of history and of gender, sexuality and women's studies at The University of Vermont. She is also chair of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund. Kornbluh’s work to advance reproductive justice carries on the tradition of her mother, an attorney and who was a key player legalizing abortion in New York in 1970. Kornbluh chronicles her mother’s activism journey in a forthcoming book, “A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice in New York and the Nation.”The day after Politico leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion with the bombshell news that Roe v. Wade would likely be overturned, Kornbluh wrote an article for the American Prospect titled “Advice to Progressive Menfolk.” Kornbluh began her piece with the admonition, “Don’t you dare be surprised.”Speaking of the forces that have aligned to make abortion illegal, Kornbluh told the Vermont Conversation, “This is a crowd of people who really just aren't that happy with the 20th century. … They want to incapacitate the federal government. They don't want to engage in federal taxation that takes money away from some people and gives it to other people. Those were 19th century legal ideas. I think that's very, very dangerous.”As abortion rights hang precariously in the balance, Kornbluh sees an opportunity. “I don't want to sugarcoat the situation that we're in right now, but I'm optimistic in two ways,” she said. “One is that in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not easy to win abortion rights or other reproductive rights. It was a very hard fight, but it was an effective fight. And I think every time we look at a really ambitious social movement in American history, we see that the organizing really works. When people come together from diverse backgrounds, and they give it everything they got, they win.”

Has rural America turned a permanent shade of red? Or have Democrats abandoned rural voters, competing only in cities?Chloe Maxmin has been pioneering a new style of progressive politics in conservative, rural Maine — and winning, earning her national attention. Maxmin is a climate activist who graduated from Harvard in 2015, where she and classmate Canyon Woodward co-founded Divest Harvard, a climate action group. In 2018, Maxmin returned to her rural Maine county and twice flipped a Republican seat — first for state representative and then defeating the highest-ranking Republican in Maine. She was the youngest female state senator in Maine’s history. Woodward was the campaign manager for Maxmin’s successful 2018 and 2020 campaigns.Maxmin and Woodward have teamed up to share their story and give some tough-love advice to Democrats about why they’ve lost rural voters and how they can win them back. Their new book is “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It.”“We need a Democratic Party that can inspire and support such campaigns in which political power is rooted in community, based in relationships, and built to last,” Maxmin and Woodward wrote. “There is power in the untold stories of rural people, in their frustration and search for a better life, in the wisdom that dwells at the crossroads of independence and interdependence."

A tsunami of censorship is sweeping across America. In 2021, there were attempts to remove nearly 1,600 books from libraries, schools and universities — a four-fold increase over 2019, according to the American Library Association. Censorship typically focuses on books that cover LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism.But is censorship sometimes necessary? The alleged gunman who killed 10 people in Buffalo used social media to livestream his attack and to post his racist rants. How should social media companies control misinformation and hate speech? Should former President Donald Trump be allowed to use Twitter and other social media platforms even though he has used the medium to spread election lies and stoke violence?Christopher Finan has been grappling with these issues for 35 years. He is executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and former president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Struggles over free speech date back to the founding of the country, he said, and he chronicles the changing nature of censorship in his new book, “How Free Speech Saved Democracy: The Untold History of How the First Amendment Became an Essential Tool for Securing Liberty and Social Justice.”Freedom of speech is an essential part of democracy, according to Finan. "We will have free speech as long as we're willing to fight for it," he said, "and this is a time to fight."

Abortion may soon be outlawed in much of the United States.If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, 28 states are poised to ban or further limit abortion access. This would end nearly a half century during which reproductive rights were constitutionally protected.Melinda Moulton vividly remembers the days before abortion was legal. She was 12 years old when her mother died after a botched hysterectomy, a result not having access to safe abortion care.Before abortion was legal, people with unwanted pregnancies like her mother “were shamed. They lived in fear. Imagine how that traumatized a woman at a young age. A lot of women died and took their own lives by self-induced abortions or back alley abortions,” she said.The threat that abortion may once again be illegal in many part of the country “is a blatant attack on the health and safety and welfare and lives of many, many women,” Moulton said. “If a woman becomes pregnant, and she does not or is not able to carry that child for whatever reason, then she's going to probably try to find a way to end the pregnancy. And it's going to be really horrific for women in this country.”Moulton, now 72, has been a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. Moulton has served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, been a member of the Vermont Commission on Women, helped lead the 2017 Vermont Women’s March and is currently vice president of the board of the ACLU of Vermont. She recently retired as CEO of Main Street Landing, a developer of the Burlington waterfront.“Women deserve to have the right to determine what happens to their bodies. And what's happening in this country is that we have a political party that is basically saying that as long as it's in your body, we control you,” Moulton said.“This is not about the unborn. This is about control over women. It just reminds me a little bit of the Taliban,” she said.Moulton is now working to help pass Proposal 5, which will enshrine reproductive rights in the Vermont constitution.Moulton said that Prop 5 will send a message to women around the country. “Know that Vermont is here and we will provide you with safe, affordable … reproductive health care,” she said.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election. But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later — and just a day after burying his son — Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”

Could feeling bad be essential to feeling good?That’s the contention of clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. She is a professor of psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She is the author of a new book, "Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad)."Anxiety and depression are the focus of intense interest as the country grapples with the mental health fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. The Surgeon General has warned that young people are facing a devastating mental health crisis.Dennis-Tiwary argues that the anxiety-as-disease story is false. She says that anxiety is not the problem — it’s how we cope with it. She encourages people to embrace “a new mindset about anxiety — a fresh set of beliefs, insights and expectations that allows you to explore anxiety, learn from it and leverage it to your advantage.” She discusses anxiety and how to use it as a tool.

In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.Today, The Emancipator rises again. This modern version is a multimedia collaboration with The Boston Globe’s Opinion team and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.“Just as abolitionist publications in the 19th century called for the end of the enslavement of Black people, The Emancipator will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society,” Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, co-editors-in-chief of The Emancipator, wrote in their introductory essay.Payne tells The Vermont Conversation that there is a difference between reporting about race and journalism that is intentionally anti-racist.“I think about reporting on racism and race (is) reporting the facts, getting the story down," Payne said. By contrast, "Anti-racist journalism (is) centering the right voices in a story, centering those that are most impacted and empowering them to tell their story.”“I don't know that we're trying to change people's minds,” Douglas said. “What we're trying to do is have a dialogue to give people the context to think about how they're implicated in the American project. So we can offer information that partially validates some of what they think but offers better information. Or we can just blow them out of the water with straight facts about how it’s different, or we can offer our own personal stories or allow our contributors to offer their personal stories and their own lived experience and just really flood the public conversation with a whole new set of narratives that previously there hadn't been much room made for. By taking up space, and giving people the opportunity to at least hear a different story or a different side of the story, then possibly we can embark upon this narrative change that we hope to effect.”“We're in this shared mission drawing from that abolitionist spirit of this multiracial and diverse movement where there's shared equity around one focus," Payne said.She hopes readers of this modern abolitionist newspaper “feel equipped to maybe have that conversation with their neighbor or their father or anybody (who) they felt a bit uncomfortable about and uninformed about when it comes to racial and social justice and equity, but they feel like they can have that conversation and have a better understanding.”

When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world.Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Robert Mahoney of “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.” Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed ‘censorship through noise,’” Simon and Mahoney argued. “Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortion, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth.”

Lois Gibbs knew something was not right when her 5-year-old son began having seizures. She soon discovered the local school and playground in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump known as Love Canal. It was 1977. Gibbs soon transformed from a suburban housewife into a crusading activist who changed the face of the national environmental movement and whose work led to the creation of the federal superfund program. Love Canal has become synonymous with corporate greed and toxic pollution. Hooker Chemical, the largest employer in Niagara Falls, had been dumping highly toxic waste in the working-class community since the 1940s. The company covered the polluted landfill with dirt and sold it to the city’s board of education for $1, and a school was soon built on the site. Hundreds of community members and schoolchildren were poisoned, and some died. Echoes of the Love Canal saga can be felt today in communities including Bennington, where local residents just reached a $34 million settlement with Saint-Gobain, a multinational plastics company which, along with previous owner ChemFab, operated a plant that was responsible for contaminating the soil and water. On April 21, Gov. Phil Scott signed a law giving people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals the right to sue responsible companies for the cost of monitoring their health. The Love Canal story is told in a new book, “Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe,” by New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien, a former reporter for the Boston Globe.

Jane Mayer has earned a reputation as one of the country’s top investigative reporters. As chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Mayer has been relentless in exposing the hidden forces shaping American politics. Her bestselling book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” documents the vast influence of the Koch brothers and was named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the New York Times. In the past year, Mayer has exposed the right-wing funders behind former President Donald Trump’s big lie of a stolen election. She reported how Ginni Thomas secretly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, considered cases that involved her. And this month she exposed the shadowy conservative organization that smeared Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in a failed attempt to derail her Supreme Court confirmation. Mayer often provokes the ire of those she exposes. The Koch Brothers hired investigators to smear her, and the subject of her most recent exposé tweeted her personal contact information in an attempt to intimidate her. Mayer worked at the Wall Street Journal before joining the New Yorker in 1995. She has won numerous awards for her reporting. Esquire called Mayer “quite simply one of the very few, utterly invaluable journalists this country has.” Disclosure: Jane Mayer serves on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.

From Brattleboro to Newport and beyond, a crisis is brewing in the Green Mountains. Housing, especially affordable housing, is desperately hard to find.“The state would have to build a minimum of 5,800 homes and apartments by 2025, and more than triple that to address the broader affordability crisis,” Seven Days reported, noting that the growth of Vermont’s housing stock has fallen to one third its 1980s levels. Solving the housing crisis is “going to take both public investment to bring the price down and it's also going to take less barriers in terms of our land use policies to get housing built,” said Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.An unspoken driver of the affordable housing shortage, Seelig said, “has been the growth of income inequality as a key factor in leaving folks behind. … It doesn't take a lot of people coming to Vermont with a ton of money to have a big impact on the housing crisis.”We discussed the housing crisis and efforts to address it with Seelig and Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Brattleboro.