BRATTLEBORO-As Congress devolves in front of our eyes and the federal government appears to be rapidly abandoning working Americans, Windham County's own U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D–Vermont, is fighting the good fight in Washington, D.C.
She recently became the chair of a Progressive Caucus Ending Corporate Greed Task Force, and she has worked out her own estimate of the cost to Americans in general and to Vermonters specifically of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, recently passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4. She voted against the bill.
"How're you holding up?" could be the most important question Balint gets asked these days.
"All things considered, I'm doing all right," Balint told The Commons this past week. "So many aspects of it are disturbing and surreal, and it's hard sometimes to feel like, 'How are we going to get out of this when we can't even agree on basic facts or basic values?'"
That said, Balint feels Vermonters have her back.
"Everywhere I go, people thank me for doing the job," she said. "Of course, they say, 'I don't want that job. I don't know how you do it.' But for whatever reason, I do feel it's where I'm supposed to be right now. And that means a lot to me. When people reflect back to me just how unsavory it is, I'm like, 'Yeah, it is ghastly, but I'm not losing my hope.'"
Balint, 57, works at maintaining her personal health.
"I have figured out that now, right in my middle age, if I don't take care of myself, I can't do the work," Balint said. "So I am pretty vigilant about getting enough sleep and getting enough exercise. I don't eat junk because it wears me down. I don't drink a lot because it wears me down.
"I also have little hacks that I do when I'm in D.C.," she said. "If I feel my anxiety level rising - and [if] I could feel it in my body or my head could feel clouded - I tell my team I'm going out. And I sit in the park behind our building for a few minutes, or I take a walk around the block."
Shame takes a holiday
It is exhausting to deal with people who seem to have no moral compass, Balint said, referring to the Republicans who voted for the funding bill.
"People say, 'Can't you shame them into doing the right thing?'" Balint said. "And you think to yourself, 'I sit in committee with these folks. They seem to have no shame.' You've got to find a way to not see the whole world through that lens, or else it would be just very, very dark."
So, Balint said, she has her moments when she feels overwhelmed, "and then I try to do one of the things that I know will help me to feel better."
In an interview with MSNBC's Way Too Early on July 17, Balint said that when discussing sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein's case, her Republican colleagues can't even look her in the eye.
"You're talking about the sexual molestation of minors, and it's really, really unsavory," Balint told The Commons.
Her Republican colleagues, she said, tell her they have no choice but to fall in line behind President Donald Trump and give him what he wants.
"Republicans say to us, 'If we don't stick with Trump, then we'll be voted out of office.' Or, 'If we don't stick with Trump, then you're going to get somebody worse,'" Balint said.
"And I say, 'Well, if you're not being brave and voting against him, then what's worse, right? You're already voting with him all the time.'"
Balint said that she has worked with Republican colleagues who came to Congress to do good work.
"I'm on a bunch of bipartisan caucuses, one being the Rural Health Care Caucus," Balint said. "You get to know people through the bipartisan work, and they'll tell you, 'I ran because I have a terrible opioid epidemic in my district,' or 'I ran because the grinding rural poverty in my district is really destroying families.' And so you get to know them and why they ran. They want to be able to do good work, and they don't see a way to do that if they don't fall in line."
A large percentage of her colleagues in government, Balint said, just want power for power's sake.
"They will say anything and do anything in order to keep that power," Balint said, pointing to her example of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former senator who "has done a complete 180 on everything that he said he stood for."
A 'private army' in the shadows
In the most disturbing cases, Balint said, some of her Republican colleagues are afraid for their safety and the safety of their families if they don't fall in line behind Trump.
She suspects they are scared because she believes that Trump is building a private army.
Balint, who has had family who suffered during the Holocaust, calls it "the Brown Shirt Army" after a Nazi paramilitary army, also called Stormtroopers, who created an atmosphere of terror in Germany that helped Hitler seize power.
"You have people who are afraid of essentially what I call The Brown Shirt Army that Trump has created through the Proud Boys and other paramilitary white supremacist organizations," Balint said. "When he pardoned the people who were the violent insurrectionists from Jan. 6, he was sending a signal to the entire Republican conference in the House: 'These are my people, and I can fix them on you.'
"And he certainly does that on his social media. He has no qualms about calling out people directly, posting their addresses," she continued.
"So there is a fear for their family," Balint said. "We've heard through some of our colleagues that their spouses have told them, 'Please don't stick your neck out. I don't want these people showing up at my door.'"
The fact that men working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wear masks to cover their faces seems to be part of this effort.
"It is part of a network that Trump is using to instill incredible fear in the American electorate," Balint said. "It absolutely feels like he is building a private army. And one of the aspects of this horrible budget bill that passed was super-sizing the budget of ICE. They gave $150 billion to ICE in order to carry out a mass deportation."
Trump ran on a platform of ridding the United States of criminals from other countries who are operating here.
"The problem that he's having with implementing his mass deportation is - Oh! Shocking! - there aren't actually millions of undocumented criminals in this country," Balint said. "There are people who are milking our cows and picking our strawberries and working in hotels.
"So they have had to abandon the idea of going after those who are criminals, and just go after people who are showing up at the Home Depot to buy supplies so they can go back to gardening. They have to go after people who are just here for financial reasons and are essentially the backbone of our workforce."
These workers pay into the Social Security system, but they are prevented from ever getting benefits back.
"So it's all a shell game," Balint said. "It's not based in reality. And when I talk to folks in the construction industry, or when I talk to folks in the agricultural industry, they all say the same thing: What this administration is doing is not just cruel and craven, it's stupid. It's absolutely stupid, and we are shooting ourselves in the foot."
Finding common ground
Balint said these days she focuses on the few people who are sticking to their values, like Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, for inspiration.
"He is somebody that I disagree with on a lot of things, but I have gotten to know him," Balint said. "I watch him. Thomas Massie actually does have values, and he does stick to them. He doesn't fold. So he was one of the Republicans who did not vote for that disastrous budget bill a few weeks ago. He said, 'This is a disaster. You are lying to the American people.'
"He said to his colleagues, 'You are increasing the deficit. You are doing all the things that you said you weren't going to do.' And not only did he not vote for it, he took to the floor of the House, and argued with them about it. He really shows what could happen if more people stayed in line with their values.
"He's also the one right now who is not letting the Republicans try to sweep the Jeffrey Epstein scandal under the rug," Balint said. "He's not letting it go."
It helps to be around people like Massie, she said.
"Massie is somebody who, on some of my hardest days, if I look and see what he is doing, I think, 'OK, here is somebody who is helping us to cleave wider this crack in the MAGA base,'" Balint said.
"And that's good, if this is the issue that finally gets people to understand that this man, meaning Trump, does not actually care about you. He does not care about pedophiles. He's a sexual abuser himself. If this helps us to do that, then that's a step closer to try to heal this country."
The 'Big Bad Bill'
Among other things, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts $900 billion from Medicaid, threatening the closure of many rural hospitals, and it is projected to cut food assistance for nearly 40 million Americans.
Balint's office issued a newsletter update enumerating more than three dozen broad categories of consequences of the new budget reconciliation bill. The Commons has traced the origin of these numbers to multiple credible public documents and sources, including the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation).
Because of the Medicare cuts, 17 million Americans are at risk of losing their health insurance, including 45,000 Vermonters.
Vermont receives $1.3 billion dollars in federal Medicaid funding. And 168,000 Vermonters - 26% of the state's population - get their health insurance through Green Mountain Care, the Vermont Medicaid program.
This money covers, for example, 37% of all births, 41% of all children, 21% of adults ages 19-64, 53% of working-age adults with disabilities, and 62% of nursing home residents.
The bill also attempts to defund Planned Parenthood.
"Vermont hospitals could lose up to $80 million a year in reimbursements for health care services," Balint said. "Vermonters and Americans will feel the impacts in higher premiums, reduced coverage, and reduced access to hospitals and providers."
In addition, "Many refugees, people who have been granted asylum, victims of human trafficking, and some people who hold special visas or protected immigration status will no longer be eligible to receive Medicaid," she said.
Also, because of the bill, $4 trillion will be added to the national debt, including $700 billion in interest.
And 14,000 Vermonters are now at risk of losing food assistance.
The bill also allows for tax breaks for people making over $500,000, eases access to dangerous weapons, makes higher education more expensive and less accessible, rolls back clean energy tax credits for wind and solar, and spends more than $150 billion for the "cruel immigration enforcement agenda."
"We will continue to fight this cruel bill and will be in touch with updates as they become available," Balint wrote at the end of the list. "Don't lose heart."
The good work
Balint concentrates her efforts on working with people who are still focused on doing Congress's job.
The new Progressive task force is one of five designated "to advance a slate of policy proposals to set a vision for the Democratic agenda that puts the needs of working people first," Balint said in a July 16 press release.
The other four task forces are Promoting Peace and Security, Fighting Corruption, Lowering Costs, and Better Pay and Benefits.
"I jumped at the chance to lead this caucus, because I'm already someone who sits on the the Monopoly Busters Caucus that I founded with Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington state, and I am on the Congressional Antitrust Caucus," Balint said. "For people who don't know what antitrust is, essentially you're fighting monopolies. This is a subcommittee I hope to eventually lead, because it is work that I feel very fired up [about]."
Some Republicans still care deeply about the small businesses in their district, Balint said. Some still care deeply about the fact that multinational and mega-corporations come into their districts and "put the little guys under."
Such representatives "could potentially be partners with us on some of this work," Balint said. "We're not going to give up trying to find partners on the other side. And it goes back to what I was saying about Tom Massie. There are a handful of people on the Judiciary Committee with him who want to go after corporate greed because they see how it's affecting their own constituents."
Trying to end corporate greed seems like work for Sisyphus, the mythological figure who was condemned to continually push a heavy boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down each time he reached the top.
"I love that there's some eye rolling going on over there," Balint said. "Look, one of the things that we know is that the electorate believes that elected officials start from a baseline of corruption. And there really is no different assessment when it comes to what people feel about Democrats or Republicans when it comes to corruption and fighting corporate greed. They think that if you are in Congress, you must be a multi-millionaire yourself and [that] you must not care about making the extremely wealthy pay their fair share."
Looking back to the last election, she thinks people believe Democrats have moved away from helping working people.
"We've continued to work on things like paid family leave and raising the minimum wage and things like that," Balint said. "But in terms of what people see us doing to fight corruption and corporate greed, they don't necessarily associate Democrats with doing that work. And so we have to not just do the work, but we have to talk about the work that we're doing. We need to move the Democratic caucus into a stance that this is central to the work we're doing."
Finding a way forward
Because Balint sits on the House Judiciary Committee, she has the power to push these initiatives forward and find bipartisan partners.
"Some of this stuff is really popular, like going after price gouging and going after credit card interest rate caps," she said. "These are bills that have interest from people who are on the Republican side, but are much more populist in their thrust."
Trump is not a real populist, Balint observed.
"He acts like a populist in the way that he shows in interviews and on the stage, but when it comes to delivering, he's not a populist," she said. "He doesn't want to go after capping interest rates. He doesn't want to go after CEO pay. And we do think there's an opportunity there, especially when we are in the majority again, to pull some of these people over."
Enforcing the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act is another example of the work Balint wants to do. The act prevents price discrimination that can harm competition, especially for small businesses.
"You've got a lot of small retail grocers in rural areas," Balint explained. "You've got those places across rural America. They're not just in Vermont, but in some of those deeply red districts. These are retailers that are not affiliated with the big chains, and they often are paying their suppliers a disproportionate amount of money for their goods and their groceries, compared to something like a Walmart or [a] Target that also sells groceries."
Noting that "distributors are supposed to be giving even the small retailers the same prices," Balint looked to the origins of the Robinson-Patman Act.
"This was a very important case that worked its way through Congress in an earlier push for antitrust legislation, and we can make sure that finally, that act is going to be enforced," she said.
Balint's task force can also pressure the administration to enforce the law.
"But we need to make the case to Republicans that this is good for them and their constituents and their businesses, and it's good for them electorally," Balint said. "People will see in their districts that [lawmakers are] actually showing up for that little grocery store in a rural town."
Balint's highest goal and deepest wish right now is to flip Congress in the midterm elections.
"What Trump calls his 'Big Beautiful Bill' was a deep betrayal of many of his own voters in rural areas," Balint said.
"Those Medicaid cuts are not just going to impact individuals and families," she said. "They're going to absolutely impact hospitals and health care clinics in rural areas, because the margin that keeps those doors open on those facilities is Medicaid.
"You can't suck that much money, hundreds of billions of dollars, out of the health care system and not force some of those hospitals to close," Balint continued. "It is also going to increase premiums for all of us."
And in Vermont, and other states that cannot fill a sudden gap of Medicaid dollars, "it is going to cause price increases in the services that we get at hospitals and health clinics," she said.
"The Republicans know it's wrong, and they were too cowardly to vote 'no' on a bill that they knew was going to hurt their own people," Balint added. "So I do think there's an opportunity for us as members of Congress - and specifically, of course, I'm looking at Democrats."
Her party needs to reclaim the House, Balint said.
"We have to win back the house in order to stop this bleeding," she said. "Right now, Republicans control all the power in the House and the Senate and the White House and, arguably, the judiciary. And so our best shot is flipping the House."
Balint said that Democrats will "continue to hammer on the ways in which Republicans have abandoned rural America in the bill they just passed, and I'm speaking from a Windham County perspective as well as a Vermont perspective."
"I would be a fool not to be worried about all of our hospitals in Vermont that serve rural areas," she said. "It is going to be difficult for them to make it work, but I know there's a deep commitment to keeping them open, whether it's Grace Cottage or Brattleboro Memorial or the Brattleboro Retreat."
Republicans have been very good at demonizing particular groups of people, she said - including those on Medicaid: "They say that they're not worthy."
"So they're going to find out a way to - and I'm being sarcastic here - 'fight waste, fraud and abuse' on the backs of people who qualify for Medicaid, while then delivering a massive tax break to the very wealthy," Balint said.
She observed that some of her Republican colleagues, and "certainly" the president, "believe that their constituents are stupid and they're not going to figure this stuff out."
"I feel like it really has moved into contempt at this point," Balint said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.