 Anyway, I won't need it for the introduction. I'm delighted to see you all here. I'm Edie Miller, I'm part of the OLLI program committee. And by the way, we would love to have additional support for OLLI if there are any of you who would like to volunteer to do various things that make the presentations like today happen. So let me know, or anybody at the table, Michelle and Bob. And I bring you greetings from Sarah, the executive director of the Montpelier Senior Activity Center. She had hoped to welcome you herself, but she's at a meeting. So this is our first, the kickoff to our first full term since March 2020. So it feels very special. And though we certainly haven't seen the last of COVID, it feels good to be together again. And to add to the feeling of kind of normalcy, we're delighted that after the presentation, I wanna invite you to enjoy Cider and the Wonderful Goodies baked by Amalia DiStefano. We haven't been able to have refreshments before this, but we can now. So stay afterwards, talk about what you've heard, just socialize, get to know each other. Anyway, we have a terrific opening today. I don't think we could be talking about anything that's more current or more relevant than what today's speaker is gonna bring to us. Diane Derby is a familiar name and face when she takes off her mask. Too many in this area. She was a long time journalist with the free press and with the Vermont Press Bureau here in Montpelier and she covered where she covered the legislature and the administration of Governor Dean. She was asked to join the DC staff of Senator Jim Jeffords in 2001 and she remained with him and his staff until his retirement. Shortly thereafter, she served, I think, was at 10 years as a field representative and outreach worker here in Vermont for Senator Leahy and she left that job just about a year ago. Now she has recently returned to her journalistic roots joining Vermont Digger as a senior editor as of last March. Diane will share with us the insights she gained from working as an insider in the national political arena. She'll discuss with us the challenges we face and try to elicit ideas for dealing with these difficult areas. Diane. Thank you. It's so nice to see familiar faces. I always had the reason why I've not been a politician in my life is, A, I hate raising money and B, I get nervous about public speaking which was a tough thing for me as a spokesperson for U.S. Senator. So I've made some notes, so I'm not gonna read from any script but I just wanna remind myself of where I'm trying to go with all of this. So thank you all. Thank you, Evie, for the invitation. Great to have this speaker series back after a long hiatus due to COVID and great to see all of you here. Thank you so much for coming out. Evie gave you a brief wrap up of my bio sketch. I joined Senator Jefford's staff. I was a long time journalist, as you mentioned, at the Crespiro which was the State House Bureau for the Rutland Herald and the Tange Argus. I came to Vermont in the late 80s to work at the Free Press and then moved over to the Crespiro and spent a decade covering state politics and policy and politics and so far as I covered the campaigns, congressional and state campaigns and I covered everything that went under and religious, well not everything but the legislative sessions for almost 10 years. And as such, I became very familiar with our congressional delegation. And it was one of the things that really kept me in Vermont for a long time. When I moved to Vermont, I thought I'd only be here as kind of a hiatus from big city papers and then I'd go running back to the Boston Glovers in place where I interned and when I got here, I realized all of the politicians in Vermont were so incredibly accessible. I didn't have to speak to layers and layers of spokespeople coming from a spokesperson but I think that's really what kept me here for so long. Both as a journalist and then after that as a Senate staffer, I just really appreciated in Vermont how we could really talk. I'm sure many of you have met, you know, one of our congressional delegation, delegate members in person, you know? I mean, I think we all have an experience of being at an event and reaching out and somehow having connections which I think is really unique in Vermont and I for one really appreciate that. So yeah, so that's that. So my bio, when Senator Jeffords left the Republican Party and became an independent in 2001, his chief of staff had reached out to me. You might remember, I was working for the Department of Education at the time when Dave Walk was commissioner and I think he and I both felt that we might have not been the best fit for those positions and he went to Casselton and I went to DC to work for Jim Jeffords. And you know, the, yeah, the ask came out of the blue. I really didn't aspire to go to DC and become a Senate staffer. I just was on good terms with Senator Jeffords, chief of staff, a woman named Susan Boardman Russ. She's one of the Burlington Boardmen since she was Senator Jeffords' longtime chief of staff and I got to know her when I went to DC to cover the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1998. We all probably remember those days. Back when impeachments, well, I won't go there. But I covered that and Senator Jeffords had a big role in that. Some might remember in that he was the first Republican. He was still a Republican there to declare that he would not vote to support the impeachment. He would not find Clinton guilty and then a few Republicans fell in luck stat and suddenly the impeachment was over and you know, the House had brought the articles of impeachment but the Senate did not find him guilty in large part because of a few moderate Republicans at the time that voted against impeachment. And so that was kind of my first taste for the Senate in DC and the political scene down there and it was really quite interesting to me but I really didn't give deep thought about it until Susan called me and offered me the job. After Senator Jeffords left the Republican party, he took on, he became part of the, he didn't, he caucused with the Democrats but he wasn't formally a Democrat but for all intents and purposes. He took on new staff, he took on a chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee and he needed more staff. And so they brought me down as press secretary and I took a little time off during the summer before getting down there and lo and behold, 9-11 was my first day on the job on Capitol Hill. And yeah, I come down on Monday, unpack things, started report to work and we all know what happened. And so with that, it was really saddened to me to remember those, you remember the Sharpshooter's and you remember the chaos and the Capitol police yelling at you to run for your life. And there were just so many unknowns at the time and stuck it out and then not even a month later or just roughly a month later, we had the anthrax and our office was a floor below Senator Daschle and he got the envelope opened in his office and we all had our televisions on having no idea about this anthrax letter, a floor above us and all of a sudden we had, you know, people in Tyvek suits coming into our office and evacuating us and so we were then out of our office for three months because of anthrax. So needless to say, I was second guessing my decision to move to DC for a while and I don't say that lightly. I seriously was considering coming back and glad that I didn't but it was, you know, it was a pretty amazing journey when I got there. So now I'll tell you a little bit about what it's like to work in the Senate office and I wanna offer a few caveats here. I'm not a Senate historian. I'm not in the weeds on all of the long history. So I don't wanna come off sounding like I'm an expert on the Senate. I, the span of my time there was from 2001 then a few years off after Senator Jeffords retired and I went back here to the Senate with Senator Leahy in 2011 and technically retired, didn't really retire, but left his office just as Edie said about a year ago. So what I wanted to do today is just cover the span from like 2001 to 2021, a 20 year span. Noting that I took a few years off in the middle to do other things and came back to it because I was really excited by what happened, you know, the daily grind, if you will, of the Senate. It really, it was a lot like journalism. Journalism, you never knew what you were gonna be covering that day and in the Senate, it was kind of the same thing. Nothing was predictable. And I don't have any tell-all stories. I'm trying to offer insights, but I wanna also stay non-judgmental and as best as I can, I'm partisan about it. I'm sure everybody has different thoughts on this. And, you know, so everything I say is just based on my observations and political experience. And because I do work for a news organization now, as Edie said, I'm a senior editor, D.T. Digger, and I've come full circle back to journalism. So I also just wanna keep my opinions somewhat to myself for those reasons. But, and I'll open this up to Q and A. I don't plan on talking a real long time because I know that gets boring. So I'll gladly take questions after I talk a little bit. But, you know, I was asked to talk about, you know, from the insider's perspective and I think the best way, I think the question I wanna kind of arrive at here is how do we get where we are, right? We all know that there's total gridlock. Things aren't getting done in the best interests of our country and our people sometimes. And, you know, just say I thought it was bad when they left the Senate, when Jeffords retired in 2007 and I came back to Vermont and I thought maybe I'll go back to D.C. when it's a little less partisan. And obviously it's just gotten really more partisan since then. And I think we saw the accumulation of all of the things that have transpired in 20 years with what happened in January 6th, that's in my estimation. So I wanna get for a minute to, again, that 20-year span and what I think has led to some of this partisanship, not only partisanship, because I think the partisanship is also a reflection of where we are as a country. It's not just the Senate and the House members. You know, people are electing their representatives and we're a country that's torn apart. And I think it's representative in the Senate and House, but I think it's a much bigger issue. And I think there are two things that play here. And, you know, one, I'm sorry, I'm not a power-quant person, but this is a good map. You can see the red states versus the blue states. And I think, you know. Can I move the mic closer? Oh, sure. I can't hear you. Sorry. Okay, I'll try to be closer to the mic. But, you know, all you have to do is look at that map and see that there's a whole swath of red states and there are blue states and it's a country-divided rate. And then, of course, every year at the midterms or the four-year election cycle, we have this wild flip between Democrats and Republicans, which is going on in foreign eight-year increments. So I only offer that by way of saying, I think what we see in Washington is a reflection of, you know, the country as a whole. And I think I'm gonna trace some of this back in my experiences, again, from the inside of you to 9-11 and what happened in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, because I think it's really important to view it somewhat, it's not entirely the reason, but three big things happened immediately in the aftermath of 9-11 when we saw the passage of the USA Patriot Act. And some might remember that was signed into law, if you think about this, just over a month after the 9-11 attack. It was October 26th in 2001. And Congress passed this very sweeping surveillance bill that allowed the government to top phones and hold people in indefinite detention, rather, excuse me. Even librarians found themselves being subject to inquiries about what books were being read. I mean, I think we all remember that that was just kind of a tough time. So that's the first big piece of post 9-11. Then we saw the Iraq War resolution passed in Congress, the vote passed in Congress in October 2002, authorizing military force, and there were 23 senators who voted against that, and our two senators, Jeffords and Leahy, both opposed that largely on the belief it was based on false information, which we only later proved that it was. And then the third thing that I think has led to where we are, I mean, there are many things that have led, but these are the three things related to 9-11. We saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. And that was in November of 2002, and that had the effect of combining 21 departments that already existed between justice and treasury and various other places within the government, and it created the third biggest cabinet office in our government after DOD, Department of Defense, and Veterans Affairs. And that just expanded the purview of the immigration police, you know, the ICE immigration policing. It expanded the purview of TSA and airports. It, you know, it was just so sweeping, and it even brought FEMA into its control, which traditionally had been an organization called Natural Disaster Relief. And so we saw three years later what happened when FEMA was called out in Hurricane Katrina, and they were just not prepared because, you know, their mission had changed so much under the DHS approach. And during that time, we also started seeing, particularly the Republican Party in the Senate line-up lockstep. When I came to D.C., Senator Jeffords, he had since left the Republican Party, but he was long known in kind of joking terms as a rhino, a Republican in name only. And he proudly wore this rhino tie. And he was very proud of being an independent, even while he was a Republican. And I won't, you know, rehash all the details of why he left the Republican Party, but it was largely over his differences with President Bush, early in Bush's first term. This is Bush two, George Bush, George W. Bush. Over special education funding, he was upset that the president had not come through on a pledge, and he also opposed the president's tax packages. So my point, tax break packages. So my point being that Senator Jeffords was one of about seven or eight Republicans at around the year 2000, who you never knew where their vote was gonna take them. They were all independent rhinos, Republican in name only. And that was something that was a given for much of Senator Jeffords' career in D.C. People never knew really how he'd come down and the next vote. He was never a lockstep, as there were Arlen Specter, who later became a Democrat, who, you know, Olympia Snow and Maine, there were a number of them who caucused together as rhinos. And that was okay until it wasn't. And there came a time after 9-11 and the Bush administration, and maybe it had something to do with Jim Jeffords' defection, but, you know, suddenly there were no rhinos left in the room and it was a bad word and you could not be an independent Republican. And Democrats tried to follow suit, but I think as we've seen with the Senator Manchin issue, I don't think the Democrats have been, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, they just have not been as effective as the Republicans in lining up their caucus, lining up their members in lockstep for the votes. So, you know, I think the loss of moderation and the loss of independent, you know, the ability of senators to think and act independently on both sides of the aisle has been a big loss for the country in terms of how the representation, I'd say both on the House and Senate side. I'm only speaking to the Senate side because the House side, you know, I just, I wasn't there on a daily basis and I really am not familiar as much with the operations, 435 members and that it's unwieldy. So these are my observations just working in the Senate. And so, you know, this all played out in the 2000 to 2006 area. And then I left DC in 2007 after Henry Tired. And then we saw, you know, as I said, I left thinking it would come down and I might come back. And then we saw the rise of the Tea Party and again, I think these are all these pressures that have been building over the years. It's easy to think like a lot of the partisanship and the patriot, you know, kind of patriotism that you hear about with the patriots who stormed the Capitol. It's easy to think about that in terms of the, you know, in terms of the, you know, in terms of the Trump administration and what's led to that. But I think what I'm trying to show here is that, you know, it's, I don't think it's coincidental that was called the USA Patriot Act and that these are the patriots who are now storming our Capitol. I think, you know, and also something, this is not my observation, but a lot of young men particularly came of age after 9-11 and joined the military. And what you saw in a lot of the arrests that were made at the Capitol after January 6th were men of a certain age, a lot of them who had military backgrounds and who referred to themselves in some form as patriots and, you know, truly were going on the notion that they were holding, you know, what they saw as a false election. I won't go there, but I think we all, we all are aware of how that played out. I mean, so during my years with Senator Leahy here in Vermont, it was nice to have a little space between what happened in D.C. and what happened on the ground in Vermont. And I think, you know, in Vermont, I'll just say that I don't know, can I just see a show of hands? How many of you have ever reached out to your congressional offices for help? Okay, yeah, didn't that, that's great. I think what people don't often recognize about these offices, the Senate and House offices, the delegation is we do a lot of constituent service work on the ground in Vermont and you don't get that as much in D.C. In D.C. you get a lot of requests for tour guides and things like that from Vermonters who are coming to visit but the real one-on-one work with your constituents, I would argue, is on the ground in the home state. And that really, I just felt so much closer to the work that I felt was important in Vermont on the ground working for Senator Leahy with the work in D.C. I was Senator Jeffords spokesperson and it was a lot of press releases. It was a lot of committee work. It's all very important work but after 20 years looking back, I think the most effective and most important work is the constituent work that they do on the ground and these offices in Vermont I think are just really good. All three offices, you know, Welch Sanders and Leahy and Jeffords before that. And you know, the casework that goes on, getting people the right fittings for winter tires for wheelchairs. I mean, it goes, you know, it just, there's so much casework and Medicare issues and cutting through the red tape of government. That's not the work I did. I was not a caseworker. I was a field representative, which means that given that Senator Leahy was chair of appropriations or at least vice chair when I was with him for much of the time and before that he was chair of judiciary and vice chair of judiciary committee. So a lot of my work was related to his work in the committee, so which translated in Vermont to me being able to work with organizations that needed funding, needed federal funding and going out and assessing what they did and what they needed and trying to match the federal funding that the senator could pull into the state with the needs that were out there. This is outside the realm. You might have heard of earmarks in a bad way but I will maintain that earmarks have been used inappropriately around the country but I think we do a pretty effective job in Vermont of trying to target earmark money. Not all the time, sometimes it's all out there in terms of what gets funded with federal funds but for the most part as a staffer, my job and other staffer's jobs were to try to align the needs of Vermonters and organizations with some of that federal money. And so for the last 10 years that's largely what I did but I also was Senator Leahy's point person with law enforcement agencies around the state and Senator Leahy as you might know is a former state's attorney. He's also a strong civil rights advocate so sometimes those two things were a little bit at odds with all that we've seen with law enforcement issues slightly but I worked on department justice funding to the state of Vermont and again I think that that's a largely overseen aspect of what a Senate office does. So a Senate office has a personal staff in state so you have a staff in Burlington for Senator Leahy with about 12 people. We have a small office in Montpelier that's another two or three people. I'm gonna say we did, I'm out of it now but I still say we. So he has basically 15 people on the ground in Vermont which is not a huge staff given that your state want. You get all around the state. But I absolutely loved going around the state and just trying to target what the needs were with what the funding possibilities were. And all of that is to say that I think I'm afraid the politics and the division and all of the bad taste that people have about politics can sometimes overshadow the good work that's sometimes done in Senate offices and what can be possible. And I think in Vermont we still have a mission to do what's really needed and to try to target that. And as for the future looking forward, there is no magic bullet. And when I left the Senate last year, I was just worn out. I couldn't listen to the news anymore. It was just too depressing. And I really felt it alone. And then I switched over and found my roots again in journalism. And I just feel that I almost feel that we can be as effective in journalism as we can be in political work in trying to change systems, trying to find inequities, trying to really show where needs are and where systems fail. And I think certainly I don't wanna inject opinions, but I think our federal government is just going through time where it's not meeting the needs of a lot of ordinary people. I think the Affordable Care Act is the last thing that we, well, there's been all of the ARPA money, all of the response to the COVID pandemic was really critical. And I can tell you I did a lot of work with arts organizations and performance venues and businesses that were very close to just going under during the pandemic. And I think that's one example where the government really did come through on a lot of funding and managed. I mean, now we're seeing the results with inflation, but without that kind of aid package, there were three major aid packages in response to COVID from the federal government. And without that, I think we would have seen a country in a lot worse shape right now. So I think in those instances, I think the Affordable Care Act, as I said, which had became the lightning rod of political division that has helped so many millions of people to keep health care. And I think to keep our eye on what it is that we need to do at the federal level is so important. So with that, I think I'd love to just have more of an interactive discussion here and take questions. But I also just want to close on saying a couple of quick, if no one has read, if anyone in the room has not read that Sunday New York Times Magazine piece that recently it was in August 25th Sunday magazine of the New York Times on Jones Day, which was a big law firm in DC. And the effect that this law firm had on the selection of judges going back 20 years. And having gotten into talking about judge judicial nominations, that was a big part of Senator Leahy's career as head of judiciary and then ranking member of the minority member lead. The Senate has largely gotten to a place where, and I think it's changed a bit with Biden and the Democrat control, but for years, for many years, we did not see any legislation going through the Senate. There was very little true legislating and it was so focused on making judicial appointments. That was much of the work. In 2013, we passed a comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee. And I could almost say, I'm sure there are exceptions, but that was the one major piece of legislation, the last major piece of comprehensive legislation that was passed and never made it to the Senate floor for a vote. But that was the kind of thing we could do in the Senate to really change and make policy. And that just doesn't happen anymore. We're just not making policy and the big thrust for eight years was to nominate judges to the bench who would support a certain view. And the Republicans were very successful in doing that. And as a result, we're seeing at the Supreme Court level, we're seeing it at many levels and I think that is gonna be the long lasting effect, if you will, on somewhat of a paralyzed Senate. And that, well, we were kind of focused on some other big shiny object. If you read the story in the New York Times magazine about Jones Day, and I'll gladly share the link if you'd like, but if you just Google New York Times, Jones Day, Jones Day is a major big law firm. And this story was stunning in that this law firm, working with Mitch McConnell and some very far right groups were making all the decisions on who to nominate as judges and would take those lists to the White House. And it was all very much out of the public eye. And in my mind, this was probably the most significant change in how things were done in Washington in my 20 years there to imagine that these meetings were going on with a lot of private interests represented. And I wouldn't even start talking campaign finance issues, but this one story to me shone a light on what's really wrong and why the system isn't working in the best interests. So I'll just leave you with the thought to go back and have a read of that article. And I'm happy, I don't know what your interest, I don't wanna, if you have questions about how Senate offices operate, I'm happy to answer those. I just, I don't wanna prescribe the field of what I'm covering here. As I said, I don't have any great insights as a longtime Senate staffer other than really sharing the feeling that a lot of Americans have that something needs to change. And I wish I could say what that change is. And I think it comes with the next generation. And I think I wish I had a magic ball so I could get crystal ball rather so I could like see what happens 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. Because it really is certainly uncertain times. And I think money is obviously the big issue that we all recognize. And I don't see anything changing in the courts largely because of that judicial system that we've now got in place. So I wish I had better news. But I think it's so important for the public to feel that they have a say. And I think we live in this microcosm of Vermont where we feel we're represented. I remember being once interviewed by C-SPAN about an upcoming race back when I was at the state house and the interviewer said, what if you got in the water in Vermont? You've got Bernie Sanders. You've got Jim Jeffords, the Republican Bernie and Patrick Leahy. And at the time, I think we had the Republican government. No, it was during Dean. He said, you're just all over the map politically. And I said, yeah, good observation. I think we are, but it seems to work for Vermont. You know, and that's where we're at. So I just would love to take questions because I'm not good at standing up and talking about myself. Yeah. I'm interested in how does the speaker or how does the majority leader rise up? Like how did it happen that it's Mitch McConnell and Schumer? What do they have to do to be in those positions of leadership which just seems so crucial? And again, we don't have any say. Right. It's largely the caucus that decides that. And it used to kind of be more based on seniority, but now it's just, you know, if it were seniority, we'd have Patrick Leahy as the majority leader right now, right? But it's largely based on the caucus and who, I mean, Schumer is an ambitious man, you know, and he definitely wanted to be the cent majority leader. And, you know, they don't want to fill out the bad stuff in public. So a lot of it's just done privately in their own caucus to decide who rises up. And so I'd say, like I said, it used to be more based on seniority and now it's just based on the vote of the caucus and, you know, Schumer worked hard to become cent majority leader. So it's not, you know, it's largely, well, there's a majority like Mitch McConnell was the Senate leader, the Senate majority leader. He made all the decisions of what came to the floor for a vote and what didn't. And I'd say back when I started in the Senate, there was a lot more committee work being done. So Bill would start in committee, the committee chair would decide, usually in consult with the ranking, the ranking is the minority leader on the committee. So there are 16 standing committees and I would argue that we used to do so much more work in the committee to get a bill passed. I think of Jim Jeffords pushing in 2001 or two when he was first chairman to get a card and reduction bill passed in the Senate. And he worked so hard on that and it just, he was a chairman at the time and he couldn't get Democrats to all line up on that. And so you get a lot of work done at the committee level and then the bill passes the committee hopefully and we'll go to the Senate and traditionally you just, once the committee chair got the bill out it would go and the same majority leader would take it up on the floor. And oftentimes it was a bipartisan agreement what we would take up. It wouldn't always be just like that the majority wanted but that has just changed over the years. So the majority leader holds a tremendous amount of sway. When Chuck Schumer took over in January as majority leader, sorry, 2021, he made a grand pronouncement that the Senate will legislate. And that, you hear him say that and you think, she, why would he even have to say that? Why is that even a point? Of course the Senate's gonna legislate but if you look at the history of what happened in the eight years prior, there was very little actual work. I mean, the most basic obvious point is passing the 13 appropriations bills that we have to pass to keep government running. And how many times have we heard of government shutdowns and we're coming up now to the end of September and that's the end of the fiscal year and I think I lived through three or four government shutdowns when we had to just quit working and close up shop and go home and wait for it to be over. So the basic elements of what gets done or what doesn't get done are largely guided by who the majority leader is, hopefully in consult with the minority later but certainly not always. So it is, you're absolutely right. It is a very important function. It's a very important role. McConnell and Schumer both have a pretty tight lock on that leadership right now and I mean, as does Pelosi in the house. You know, and unless I think you really mess up somehow in that, you stay leader for as long as you want to be a leader unless there's some dramatic revolt within your caucus and they vote you out. It doesn't happen that often. I am. Yes. I'm curious, for the last several years I've brought to myself and I'm sure many here have thought. There's a Liz Cheney, there's an Adam Kinzinger, there has to be more than two in the two chambers. Yeah. Are there, I mean, what do you hear and the scenes are there people who just won't speak up? What do we have? Some moral course still left? Or have they ended all just? You're putting me on the spot here, Edie. You know, I think with those two names you just mentioned, Cheney lost her primary, right? And so she paid the price and the other gentleman is retiring, so if you're retiring you have more of a basis to stand on that. But, you know, I think that's the boldness that we need are people like those two to stand up to their own party. I think there are others that vote in the chambers. Again, I can't speak as much to the House side, on the Senate side that's where I was speaking to the Rhino issue, you know? So you've got, I think there were seven Republicans who voted for impeachment the last time after the January 6th event, so the vote was like 57 to 43. And all of those Republicans who voted for the impeachment were singled out. And one guy running in Missouri, who used to be the governor, ran this campaign ad with guys with weapons and flag jackets and said, we're going rhino hunting. And it was like so scary. If you watched the video, it was like, how could this be that he's running for the US Senate and he thinks this is okay? I never followed up to see if he won this primary, maybe it hasn't happened yet. But, and he's the former governor of Missouri. And the ad was super scary and they took it right down on Facebook. I haven't even talked about social media and the effect of social media, but I think we all know how it filters in. It's just, it's really a poison. Yes? Do you see this as the end of democracy and the use of big money corporations and perhaps just what capitalism has done to our democracy? You know, I think we came dangerously close on January 6th. I don't think there's any denying. And I think, again, I'm trying not to be partisan here, but I think there's a real danger ahead if certain falsehoods still maintain this energy that we had a false election. And that, again, is fueled by a lot of social media. I do think a large number of people were brainwashed into really believing all of that to be true. And I think it's proven time and time again, it wasn't true. And some of these people realized that after they got hauled into court and, you know, talked at length. I don't know. You know, I read a lot of the stories of people who were convicted in connection with that. And some of them were just very upfront and talked very specifically about and saw the ways after they were convicted and serving jail time of how they were manipulated. I think a lot of the answer lies in what our response is and what happens in the next four years and how successful our country is in overcoming. I mean, history just, we've seen it all through history, right? And it's just always been a little farther just to see it in our own country. It's just very different. As for the money, I don't know how you get rid of money unless you overturn citizens of the United. I mean, I don't see that happening with the current state of Supreme Court. I've been reading that there's been a lot of misuse of COVID money being discovered. How do you think that played out in Vermont? Do you feel that in Vermont, we handled it fairly? So that's a good question. So I have to say, I think it was overwhelming how fast money was coming into the state. And for good reason, like we needed that money. A lot of the COVID business, like the PPP loans that you hear about, the payroll protection loans, that all went channeled through the SBA Small Business Administration Office. And I can tell you that I worked next door to that office and there were an office of about four or five people on any given day. And they had an enormous workload to, because you couldn't wait six months, these people needed those loans. I think what you're going to see, I think in Vermont generally, that's a small, Vermont's like a big city, right? 640,000, 50,000 people, it's not a big, so you know, it's hard to stand out as a true fraud in fraudulent operation in Vermont, because it doesn't take a lot, but you know, you see some of the stuff that happened in Rhode Island with the COVID money to like absolutely fraudulent farms that got millions of dollars. And I think eventually the federal government will claw back a lot of that, but in many cases, obviously the money's gone and they'll never see the money again. I think in the big balance of things in Vermont, I think that money was well spent. I'm sure there are cases where there was some fraudulent activity or money wasn't really needed, but never got returned. It was used, I think, in a lot of cases as a safety net for companies that didn't know if they could hold onto employees, so they got the payroll protections, just one of many pieces of that pot, but that was the big one to keep businesses afloat. No doubt there's some fraud when you put out billions of dollars in a small amount of time, but to the defense of some of the federal agencies that had to administer that money, it's not like they saw a huge increase in their staffing levels. So I think generally it was very, it was money very well spent. A lot of it went back to communities. You know, Montpellier, Selfie, Million, every community saw a little piece of it, and then you had the big infrastructure spending bill, which I think will see play out over the next few years. That's a very large investment in communities. But I like to think that in Vermont, we didn't see a lot of fraud on a national level, we sure did. Yes? Do you think there's any hope that the uprising of women in response to Roe v. Wade's political opposition might cause some changes towards democracy? You know, I think there's no doubt that, again, I'll have to, through a political view, I think Democrats are seeing that as something that will weigh in their favor in November at the midterm elections, and it will also bring out more female candidates. You know, I think, sorry for the men in the room, I'll just say it, we need more women representing our country. I mean, we're just, you know, and I think we'll see a lot more activity. One thing that's happened in Vermont is the growth of Emerge Vermont, which tends to be a Democratic-leaning training for women who want to go into politics, and it started with Madeleine Cunin probably about 10 years ago, and the number of women who were successful in primary races who have come through Emerge just in this last cycle, it's really shown that you need training. You can't just step in the realm of politics and not understand that you need to raise money, you need to have lists, you know, lists of donors, you need to, there's a lot that goes into even a small campaign, even for state reps at the state house. There's a lot of training, there's a lot of background that you need to know to be successful unless you run unopposed. So, you know, back to the rogue question, I think the Democrats are seeing that as something that will prove in their favor. I think, as we saw with the Kansas vote, I don't know if you followed the Kansas vote, that was not framed in a question of are you in support or against abortion rights. It was framed in terms of personal privacy rights, and that was how the Kansas voters saw that question because that's how it was framed. And I think if you watch TV in Vermont, you're seeing a lot of Maggie Hassan ads for the U.S. Senate and her opponent in a very Republican state is against abortion and the ads that are being run in support of Hassan talk about how her opponent wants to, you know, limit your individual freedoms. And in New Hampshire, that's something that rings loud. So it's not about abortion per se, it's about individual freedoms and privacy. So I think in different states, it's gonna be cast differently. But I think that Democrats are seeing that as a plus and I think Republicans, I mean, just you can read the newspapers and see that that's of concern that they're, you know, they're running against them about it. Yes. So you always hear about lobbyists sending money, sending money to influence votes. How effective are constituents when they're asked to either write to your congressional person, contact your congressional person, all your congressional person, and also not necessarily yours, but maybe from another, to another state is not your representative. And how, how does that drive you on pregnancy? No, it doesn't drive us, I mean, I was on the receiving end of many calls. I was a sole person, sometimes working in Montpelier and people would look up Leahy's number and find the Montpelier number and call. And so I often spoke to people and we had a system in Senator Leahy's office and it was all very much data-driven. And we had a program that we opened for every constituent caller. Now, I'll be honest with you, we didn't log calls for out-of-staters because you just, A, don't have the bandwidth and B, you're representing constituents if you're not representing people in West Virginia. So I'll just be blunt and say it really doesn't work well to call someone in another state. I think that it is effective to call to your congressional office because we not only log every call, we'll ask for your identification and that's important to us. I understand people with privacy concerns but it's important to be willing to identify yourself if you call because we need that to know your Vermonter. But we log every call, we write notes on every message, we put it under a category. So for the Supreme Court nominations, our phones would light up and we would log every day how many calls came in pro or con Kavanaugh. And those reports get generated and sent down to D.C. from Vermont. It's funny when you talk about some of the odd moments. Whenever Fox News comes on and says something against your senator, our switchboard lights up. Like, it lights up from across the country often with really foul stuff. Like if they don't like, I bring this up because in the Kavanaugh hearing when Patrick Leahy was going against Brett Kavanaugh and questioning some of his past statements, the phones, sometimes you just have to take the phone off the hook and they're all out of state calls. And they can get really nasty but I have to tell us one story. This is unrelated to that. But to finish that thought, it is very important but it's important to call your delegation. I don't think it has much effect to call outside of your delegation. But those votes are all recorded and all tallied and it definitely gets noticed. When I worked for Senator Jeffords, I was only, I was pretty new to the office and it was in September of 2001 and we were still getting hate mail. We're getting some love mail but a lot of hate mail after his switch, people who were really, really angry. And we sorted it off, I didn't do this. We hired Sister Elizabeth Kenden. I don't know if any of you remember Sister Elizabeth. So Sister Elizabeth was always a good friend of the office along with Sister Janice Ryan and Sister Elizabeth at one time, for those of you who don't know her, she was the agency of human services secretary under Governor Snelling for years. And she's just a very sprightly, funny woman. She's now passed, but she was the person we put in charge of sorting through all of these letters. And she worked in an office, it was just above me in Senator Jeffords office, above the spiral staircase. And she would come down with a little glint in her eye and a smirk on her face and she'd say, read this one. And they got so, they were so nasty. I wouldn't even repeat some of them. But the nastier they got, the more Sister Elizabeth just got worked up about these crazy responses that, I could only think, like if only that letter writer knew that a Roman Catholic nun was reading your response. I'm sure many of them considered themselves good Christians who wrote, who didn't like Senator Jeffords decision, but I still think of Sister Elizabeth in that capacity. That's a little bit of a detour after your question, sorry, but it's, yes. Do you think this post-cog writing campaign which is targeting voters in general, I don't think a specific party will be effective in helping to get the vote out? Do you mean in Vermont or? In general. Generally, well, I think for those of us in Vermont, many of you, I don't know, at least my experience, I live in Montpelier. I got so tired of seeing the postcards for Becca Ballant and with all due respect, they were a third party generated postcard and sometimes I'd get three in one day and maybe that's the post office, I don't know. But I think there's a saturation point with postcard. You mean the ones you get or the ones you send? I'm sending. I'm sending, I'm sorry. I thought you meant in general. But handwritten is different. Handwritten, again, it depends where you're sending it to. Are you sending it to your delegation or are you sending it to the president? Or are you sending it to the Georgia voters? Yeah, to the states. I'm sorry, there are a lot of different postcard efforts out there. You know, I think, I used to go doorknocking a little, I hated campaigns and occasionally I'd take part in them and oftentimes we'd get together as a group from Senator Leahy's office and go over to New Hampshire to try to help a candidate in New Hampshire. And the people of New Hampshire were so tired of being told how to vote. But as the season ended, you know, we got doors slammed in our faces. They just didn't want to hear from people. I think for these key states, like in Georgia, I think it's gonna be largely on the campaigns. I'm not sure that handwritten notes from another state to, do you mean to certain voters in the state of Georgia or to? No, please do not name who to vote for a party. It nearly, they nearly say, please get out and vote. Our democracy depends on how we participate. Yeah, I gotcha. Sorry, I, there's a lot of different postcard efforts. I guess I wouldn't have any more insight than anyone else on that front. I think everybody responds differently to being told to vote. I think, you know, I think the Secretary of State's office or where a lot of that lies. I mean, Vermont, we are now seeing this big push in Vermont to get out to vote. And there's some Secretary of State's office that wanna cross the vote, right? And they've made it hard for people to vote and vote a registration. You gotta show your ID. And they've found various ways to make it difficult. Georgia's gonna be fascinating. And I think it's just gonna be largely based on how much of the voting public comes out. Yeah, yeah. How often do you receive, do I receive form letters from the office? When I've asked a specific question and I get a form letter, it has nothing to do with what I asked or what I've said. And it's supposed to be an answer from the Senate. And that drives me crazy. I can tell you. So those are often sent out. And I'll be the first to say, I don't think the offices always do a very good job of responding directly, which is why I would suggest you call and talk to a real person live. If you have a... Well, at least it gets recorded as what your opinion is. If you get, did you get a form letter in response to an inquiry made online? I'm a Medicare advocate and I'm always trying to say that. You're Mary Alice Gispy, right? Yeah. Yeah, I know your name. Now I'm stuck. We appreciate it. I mean, we've gotta get rid of privatizing Medicare. Nobody's gonna have healthcare anymore. It's all gonna be owned by all the big corporations and Wall Street investors. Yeah, and I appreciate what you're saying about the responses. I have a real issue with those generated responses that get sent out from the office that are very generic and don't really address the immediate concern. We do get an enormous amount of inquiries, so. But again, I think your best bet I'm wanting to be heard is to call the office and talk with someone. And that way, your name and what you're saying will get registered. I found that. Yeah, I wouldn't count. I'll be honest with you. The reality is there's no way the U.S. Senator, even in a small state, can answer every inquiry from a constituent. It's just, you know, you can't personally sit down. Unless I have dollars in my pocket to give. Well, you know, I bet there is. I think if you're a huge corporation with certain members, that's true. But I think, again, I think our delegation's pretty responsive. I'm gonna push back a little bit on that to say. It's just that it would be impossible to really get a personalized note each time to each constituent concern. There's just not capacity to do that. So oftentimes you're hearing from our legislative correspondents who write letters in response and the senator will review the letters. But it's just not as effective going through that, you know, web form as it is to call the office in Vermont. I would call to one of the Vermont offices. And I think that's true for the whole delegation and taking liberties here. But I think for Senator Sanders and Congressman Melch as well. Yeah. Considering the nation as a whole, what do you think the odds are of being successful in reversing some of the restrictions of voting that are being imposed by a minority majority? Yeah. It seems to me it's a slippery slope. It is that reduced control of the ability to one vote count. We're in trouble. And that all goes back to the loss of democracy, right? Yeah. I mean, it's scary what's happening in a lot of states and how difficult they're making it on people to just to vote. Can you reverse? You know, again, I think it's largely, I mean, you think about it. You know, so much power is in the Secretary of State's office and all the gerrymandering that we've seen going on it on the state by state level. If it's going to be reversed, it's going to be at the state level. I don't think it's going to be happening. I don't know how we approach it. And maybe others smarter than I am have a much better view of how do you approach it from a national level to assure that one vote is one vote. But we haven't been able to get a good handle on that in some states, as you see in Georgia and elsewhere. You know, just going to make it very difficult, particularly for, you know, regions of persons of color and whatnot. It'll just be made harder. What do you see is the future of the Gillibust rule, especially if the Republicans take that decision? You know, I've never wanted to project what might happen because I don't think this will happen. The Senate sort of reflected why they thought they should keep it a while they thought they should. We have it everywhere. Yeah, I think my mic went out, so I'll just speak loud, I think. Just tell me if you can't hear me, I'm pretty good at projecting. You know, when I was in Senator Leahy's office, we were getting a lot of heat because he would not just flat out say he's not in support of abolishing the filibuster. And I think that's in large part, I'm reading between the lines here. He's a true believer in the protocols and the traditions of the Senate. And he still wants to hold on to believing that the traditions can, you know, where we started losing ground on the filibuster wasn't the Republicans, it was Harry Reid voting to allow, you know, to do away with the filibuster for judicial votes when we were in the majority, when Democrats were in the majority. And that was a slippery slope. At least, again, I'm not a Senate historian, but, you know, it was like, okay, we'll do it just in this case. And then when the Republicans came to power, they seized on that and, you know, used filibuster to the best of their doing. I don't know what happens with the filibuster. I really don't, but I think it's just because, I mean, it's part of the reason why we're not legislating, you know, to get to the 60-vote threshold to bring up a bill when you've got a 50-50 split. It's impossible. And even for things, you know, like the impeachment vote, 5743, you know, things that make a lot of sense to be a simple majority, you know, it's just, it's made that much more difficult with the 60. So it's definitely a major problem for why the government doesn't seem to be functioning well, but I have no idea where that goes politically. Yeah, I think anyone who projects they know is making it all up. Diane, are you okay if we take one or two questions to share already and then we'll perhaps formally end and then can you stay around for a little bit? Absolutely. So are there one or two questions we'll end with? Yes. Do we have, do you think we'll let us see the end to the Electoral College? Oh, that's a tough one. Again, I hate to project what I think. You know, when you look at how skewed the popular vote is versus the electoral vote, it's just kind of crazy in recent history. What's happening there? But I'm gonna leave that to the historians to decipher because I'm really, I don't feel adequately prepared to even guess how that plays out. Here's a softball question for you. What's your favorite restaurant in D.C.? Very funny that you should ask that. I used to live right on Capitol Hill. So I frequented, there was a whole row on 8th Street in your Eastern Market, if any of you know Capitol Hill at all. And there was a particular restaurant there, which I've forgotten and it's been a while since I lived in D.C., but it was right on 8th Street and I don't even know if it's still there. There's so many restaurants in D.C. And if you want Ethiopian food, you have your choice of 15 different Ethiopian foods in Georgetown. If you want, you know, so I think it's a hard one to say, you've got the steak places, you know, there's so much to choose from, but I do miss a lot of the options that were available in D.C., not that Montpelier doesn't try, but yeah, thanks. I want to thank you very much, Diane. Thank you all for coming out. So please stay around, socialize, have some cider and cookies. Again, thanks to Amalia DiStefano. And I'll remind you next week, we're going to hear from Maudeen Neal talking about the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont in the 20s. And it's an interesting story. She's written a book about it. She saw a picture, my understanding is she saw a picture in some family album of a white-suited person and then as her started researching this. So come next week and thank you for coming today.