Under questioning from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Tuesday morning, Judge Amy Coney Barrett would not say how she would rule on challenges to the Affordable Care Act, nor would she commit to recusing herself from cases related to this year's presidential election.

Leahy, participating in the second day of Barrett's confirmation hearings remotely over health concerns related to the coronavirus, spoke far more than the nominee during his 30-minute interrogation, using his first of two rounds of questions to probe Barrett's stance on issues of health care policy and potential election disputes.

Leahy's approach reflects a key strategy of Senate Democrats heading into this week's confirmation hearings: Instead of attacking the nominee's character, they hope to show how her confirmation would impact some of the most contentious societal issues — particularly as Barrett seeks to replace the far more liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

Barrett, however, has maintained a stance held by many of her predecessors — including Ginsburg — in refusing to say how she would rule in potential cases. She also largely steered clear of discussions about any precedents that she may reconsider. 

“It would be wrong of me to do that as a sitting judge,” she said Tuesday morning. “Whether I say I love it or I hate it, it signals to litigants that I might tilt one way or another in a pending case." 

Burlington's City Hall Park will reopen this week after more than a year of renovations.

The downtown green space will host a two-day reopening ceremony on Friday and Saturday with live music, tours, film screenings and more. The showcase event celebrates the end of a park planning process that began back in 2011.

"It's been a remarkable city project from the beginning," said Cindi Wight, the city's Parks, Recreation & Waterfront director. "The park looks fantastic."

The city started construction in July 2019 when it gated off the park and cut down a number of trees — a move that angered a group of project opponents known as Keep the Park Green, which had tried and failed to get a court order to stop the tree removal. Many of the trees have been replaced with younger, hardier ones, according to Wight.

The new park also features wider pathways, a water fountain with customizable colored lights — think: orange for Halloween, red, white and blue for July 4th — and a new public bathroom. The standalone unit, called a Portland Loo, will be open every day the temperature stays above -20 degrees, meeting a longtime demand for accessible bathrooms downtown.

In his opening remarks Monday morning at Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) painted the U.S. Supreme Court nominee as an existential threat to the Affordable Care Act and criticized his Republican colleagues for rushing her confirmation amid a pandemic and a presidential election.

Leahy, echoing a description he used two years ago when the Senate Judiciary Committee was embroiled in the vetting process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said the GOP-led effort to replace the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been "nothing but a sham."

"It's the responsibility of this committee to consider her replacement on the Supreme Court, but this isn't the way we should do it," Leahy said, noting that he has witnessed 20 other Supreme Court nominations during his 46 years on the Judiciary Committee.

"Justice Ginsburg, I am certain, would have dissented," he later said. "And I will, too, on behalf of Vermonters, on behalf of the integrity of the Senate, and on behalf of the majority of Americans who oppose this process."

Democratic lieutenant gubernatorial nominee Molly Gray received a boost on Wednesday when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) endorsed her campaign, calling her a bold leader who “understands the challenges facing working families” who would “put people and justice before politics.”

The illustrious endorsement quickly made the rounds on social media and seemed to be yet another signifier of Gray's strong support among prominent Democrats, whose backing has helped cement her as a formidable statewide candidate despite running in her first-ever political campaign.

But the high was somewhat tempered Friday when one of the nation’s other leading progressive politicians, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sent out an email recapping some of his own home state endorsements. The list named three dozen people, from legislative candidates to every single Democratic or Progressive statewide office seeker — that is, except Gray.

“These races are incredibly important — that's why we've put together a list of progressive, Bernie-endorsed candidates in your area,” read the email Sanders' campaign sent out on Friday morning. “If you can, we hope you'll cast your ballot for them when you vote in Vermont."

To be sure, Gray, who is running against Republican businessman Scott Milne, does not have the same ties to Sanders as she does Vermont's two other federal leaders.

She interned for Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) while she was a University of Vermont student and went on to work for Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), first on his 2006 campaign and later in Washington, D.C. Both men have endorsed her campaign.

She also has not tried to portray herself as a Sanders surrogate in the same way some other Vermont candidates have. Though her platform calls for investments in childcare, higher education, broadband expansion and paid family leave, she falls short of some of Sanders' most progressive policies, striking a more moderate tone at times. She even touts support from some former Republican officials, including former U.S. representative Peter Smith, who lost his seat to Sanders in 1990.

And Sanders has lent limited support to Gray's campaign, appearing on a soon-to-be distributed Vermont Democratic Party mailer alongside Leahy that asks voters to support all statewide Democratic candidates — including Gray.

Still, his continued silence on Gray's candidacy, in light of Warren's endorsement, would appear to be a clear snub of a rising Democratic star in his home state. Sanders' press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Regardless of his reasoning, Sanders' decision to leave Gray off his endorsement list has given her political rival ammunition heading into the final weeks of the campaign. Almost immediately after Sanders' email was sent out, Milne campaign manager state Sen. Corey Parent (R-Franklin) forwarded it in an email and asked "Where is Molly?"

“Another prominent Vermont Dem/Prog not endorsing Molly Gray," Parent wrote.
The Milne campaign took the same tack earlier this week when Gray announced that she had been endorsed by 16 Democratic and Progressive state senators.

Some of those senators — including Democratic Majority Leader Becca Balint (D-Windham) — gathered on the Statehouse lawn Monday morning to heap praise onto the nominee. But while Gray's campaign tried to use the event as a show of strength heading into the final weeks of the race, Milne's camp held up a different lens.

“It is revealing that, with less than a month before Election Day and with votes already being cast, Molly Gray still has not consolidated the support of leaders within her own party," Milne's press secretary, Mike Donohue, wrote in a press release on Monday, referring to how the 16 endorsements only represent two-thirds of the non-Republican Senate caucus.

Gray's campaign, meantime, has repeatedly tried to contrast her fundraising tactics with Milne's to show that she maintains broader grassroots support. In a press release last week, Gray's campaign noted that she has received contributions from more than 1,600 people since declaring her candidacy back in January compared to the less than 500 people who have financially supported Milne's campaign.

"I'm so proud to have earned support from every corner of this state and across party lines," Gray said in a statement to Seven Days in response to questions about not securing Sanders' endorsement. "My commitment as we move forward is to continue to work every day to earn the support of my fellow Vermonters."

Correction, October 9, 2020: An earlier version of this story misstated when Molly Gray interned for Sen. Leahy.

This story was updated October 10, 2020.

Molly Gray and Scott Milne continue to squabble over two super PACs supporting their campaigns for lieutenant governor, criticizing one another this week for benefitting from "dark money" outside influence peddlers.

While Gray and Milne have sparred over the topic for several weeks, the latest exchange began on Wednesday when a super PAC supporting Gray filed a mass media report showing it had sunk $30,000 into television advertisements mentioning only Milne.

The expenditure came about two weeks after the same super PAC — the Alliance for a Better Vermont Action Fund — leveled an attack against Milne's voting record that turned out to be partially false.

"I have just been notified that an outside group associated with Molly Gray’s campaign is preparing to run negative ads against me — the first attack ads in this race," Milne wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday afternoon. "Too bad this is where the Gray people had to take it, especially after all her dishonest posturing about how she is committed to a positive campaign and falsely attacking me for being a negative campaigner when all I have run are positive ads."

Milne's comments were rich, because while it may be technically true that he has not run any negative television ads, his campaign has seemed quite at home in the trenches ever since the primary ended.
It has repeatedly attacked Gray over her lackluster voting record and has posted a handful of videos on its YouTube page with titles such as "Molly Gray Won't Tell Us How She'll Pay" and "Molly Gray Repeatedly Evades Reporter's Question About Campaigning On The Taxpayers' Dime." (Gray actually told the reporter — who asked her on Monday about tweets sent during what would typically be working hours for the assistant attorney general — that her campaign staff has access to her Twitter account.)

Still, the more substantive part of Milne's tweet — an allegation that Gray was somehow affiliated with the PAC — was notable, since it is against the law for political candidates to coordinate with such groups.

Gray has dismissed this claim, saying that she doesn't know anything about the PAC. And the fund's director, Ashley Moore, recently tweeted that she had never even met the candidate.

Yet the Milne campaign doubled down on the comments Thursday, noting in a press release that several people associated with the super PAC have either donated to Gray’s campaign, endorsed her or, as with Burlington attorney Jacob Perkinson, given her legal advice.

Perkinson, the former chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, authored a legal opinion that Gray's campaign has given to media outlets to answer questions about whether her 15 months living in Switzerland in 2017 and 2018 disqualified her from holding the office of lieutenant governor.

Perkinson filed paperwork to incorporate the Alliance for a Better Vermont 501c4 in 2018 but told Seven Days on Friday that he informed the organization shortly afterward that it would need to find other legal counsel and that he does not "have anything to do with them at this point."

He said he made that decision because he wanted to have the flexibility to work directly with campaigns and avoid the types of accusations now coming from the Milne campaign.

“Any allegation that I participated in any coordination between the Alliance for a Better Vermont super PAC and the Molly Gray campaign is unequivocally and absolutely false, and any suggestion to the contrary is reckless,” Perkinson said.

It is common for donors or supporters of a candidate to run super PACs benefiting that candidate's campaign. But Milne again pressed the issue when the two debated Thursday on NBC5, asking Gray whether she would request that the super PAC reveal where its money is coming from.

That has turned out to be a difficult question to answer. Though the super PAC filed campaign finance disclosure forms with the Secretary of State’s Office on October 1, it only listed two donors: a separate Democratic super PAC and the 501c4 nonprofit Alliance for a Better Vermont. When asked by Seven Days whose money was being funneled through the nonprofit to help make the advertisements possible, Moore would not say.
Gray responded to Milne's request by saying that not only can she not control what outside organizations do, but that she did not even know which PAC he was talking about.

When Gray wasn't on the defensive, she was attacking Milne for his own super PAC support, noting that the Republican State Leadership Committee recently dumped more than $200,000 into television advertisements supporting his campaign.

Gray has criticized Milne for welcoming the “special interest, dark money,” though only half of that is true. Unlike the super PAC supporting her, the RSLC makes its donors public. They include cigarette giant Altria Group, Koch Industries and the Judicial Crisis Network, which is currently spending millions to convince Republican lawmakers to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The same supporters that support Donald Trump are moving money into the state right now to defeat me, a 36-year-old Vermonter,” Gray said.

Milne said at a previous debate that he is happy to have the RSLC's support since its backers "only do this for people that they think are going to win." He appeared equally unbothered by Gray's line of attack on Thursday, pointing out that the PAC is only running positive ads supporting his own campaign. (The RSLC hasn't always stayed above the fray; two years ago, it spent $186,000 on ads attacking left-leaning Vermont candidates).

Gray sought to end the back-and-forth by asking Milne to pledge with her then and there to cease all negative attacks for the final three weeks of the campaign. "No more nasty tweets. No more nasty press releases. No more nasty emails,” she said as the broadcast cut to a split-screen shot of the two candidates. “Nothing but the issues for Vermonters facing our state. Join me?"

Milne declined the olive branch. "A convenient request since you've got your friends launching a negative attack through a super PAC that you claim not to control — even though you have people on the board of the PAC doing endorsements for you on your website,” Milne shot back.

“I'm looking forward to a robust dialogue about facts,” he said, adding, “you know, sometimes the truth hurts.”

The volleys continued after the debate as the two campaigns sent out dueling press statements.

“In their final debate, Milne avoided answering basic policy questions on issues of police reform, systemic racism, and climate action, instead, echoing partisan charges against his opponent or deferring to his campaign website,” Gray’s campaign wrote. It then attributed a quote to Gray that said her opponent and the GOP “clearly have not learned that blank checks and tired, old partisan attacks are not the way to earn the support of Vermonters.”

Milne’s camp had a different takeaway. In a two-paragraph statement, campaign manager Sen. Corey Parent (R-Franklin) wrote that Milne won the debate because he continues to offer “real, affordable and achievable solutions, and honest answers, not bumper sticker sloganeering and political-speak."

"Tonight, Molly Gray refused to call for the disclosure of donors to the Super PAC run by her friends,” Parent wrote. “Her dodgy response and thin excuses ring hollow. There is nothing stopping her from calling for full disclosure except an unwillingness to be honest and transparent with Vermonters, which has become the hallmark of her candidacy.”