For U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vermont,“every day we’re fighting the fight,” she told The Commons last week. “Everything is about abuse of power.”
Balint, 58, who used “scrappy little dyke” as the catchphrase that launched her into the House of Representatives in 2024, recently announced that she will be running for a third term in the upcoming elections.
In Congress, Balint sits on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Budget Committee. In Judiciary, Balint serves on the Constitution and Limited Government subcommittee as well as the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust subcommittee.
These past two Congresses have been remarkable for the lack of work done, the bad blood between the two parties, and the depth of the aversion between the Democrats and President Donald J. Trump. So why would Balint run again? Why not take a long hot shower, wash off the bad blood of D.C., and come home to enjoy Vermont?
“I can tell you, having been now in the minority for four years, I am ready to get some real work done,” Balint said. “We are going to flip the House, and I’m going to finally make the impact that I want to have in housing, in lowering costs, and really getting working people back at the center of the work that we’re supposed to be doing here.”
She also is excited about the implications of serving on the Judiciary Committee with her party in power.
“I feel like there’s going to be a bunch of work that happens around intellectual property, around AI, and holding big tech accountable,” she said. “I’m also hoping to move up the ranks in the subcommittee on Antitrust and continue to go after some of these monopolies that we know are driving up costs for people.”
Then she added, “And in terms of taking a shower and washing the grime off? I do that on the regular here.”
FEMA money comes home
Balint has had some significant success during her time in Washington. Her voice is being heard. Her heated February exchange with now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi went viral.
And while Trump has routinely tried to punish states that did not vote for him by withholding already appropriated federal money, the Vermont delegation — Balint and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch — recently announced that the state will get $20.83 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money to help pay for recovery from the 2023 floods that devastated communities in northern and central Vermont, including Montpelier’s “hard-hit municipal buildings and state rail and trail infrastructure,” they said in the announcement.
“Much of this funding was delayed by FEMA for years — it never should have taken so long to get to Montpelier, and is a glaring example of how this agency needs reform,” the announcement continued. “We will continue to fight for the FEMA funding our state needs and will work with new leadership at the agency to deliver the assistance Vermonters need to fully rebuild and recover.”
Balint said the administration is definitely withholding FEMA money to punish “blue” states.
“We’re never going to stop shaking this administration to make good on these grants,” she said. “And a lot of times, we have to take them to court.”
With some success, individual Democratic legislators or the Democratic Party caucus as a whole have signed on to amicus (“friend-of-the-court”) briefs “to force the issue in court,” Balint said. “But it shouldn’t take us taking the administration to court to get the money released. I don’t have any easy answers, but we’re certainly very focused on this.”
A lot more money is due to Vermont, Balint said.
“My office works on these issues,” she said. “Week after week, we receive information from organizations or from educational institutions or businesses that are waiting on grants or loans.
“We do what we can with the information that we are given to try to get answers for folks from this administration. But as I’ve said before, this administration is completely and totally a black box.”
A black box is defined as a system, object, or process where inputs and outputs are known, but the inner workings are hidden.
Other money
Recently, the nonprofit investigative political website NOTUS reported that Balint’s net worth was upward of $1.6 million, according to her 2024 financial report. This was a startling figure for someone who was a school teacher, then a Vermont senator and then a congresswoman with a yearly standard base salary of $174,000.
The story, shared by VTDigger, emphasized that Balint does not own any stocks and does not in any way take advantage of insider trading. Her money is in shared accounts with her wife, attorney and opera singer Elizabeth Wohl, as well in college saving accounts for her two children.
“I absolutely married up,” Balint said. “But I’m surprised to hear that report. I don’t own individual stocks. All the money that we have is in mutual funds and indexed investments. There’s money I have been able to save to guarantee that both my teenagers can go to college. The investments that I’ve made over the course of the last 30 years have put me in a safe, secure place financially, and it’s really important to me that other people have the same opportunities to have that kind of security.”
But NOTUS’s bottom-line estimate of $1.6 million “has not been confirmed or verified by us in any way,” Balint’s spokeswoman, Catherine White said.
In the article, the publication said it “analyzed the assets and liabilities listed on lawmakers’ annual financial disclosures and calculated the median of their minimum net worth — minimum total assets minus maximum liabilities — and maximum net worth — maximum total assets minus minimum liabilities.”
The upcoming election
The upcoming elections will be vital in returning values of democracy to the country, Balint said. And her optimism about “flipping the House” is palpable, despite the current Republican attempts to gerrymander electoral district boundaries to its advantage in light of recent court rulings.
On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that “eliminated the law’s protections against lawmakers drawing maps that dilute the political power of minority voters,”according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
And, days after a special election in Virginia approved the redrawing of the state’s congressional district map to favor Democrats, the state’s Supreme Court overturned the change on procedural grounds.
Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana are already redrawing district lines to eliminate districts that might have a propensity to vote for Democrats, including some that are predominantly African-American.
“We’re absolutely concerned about all of this redistricting that is going to take place because of the Supreme Court — in what I see is as a disastrous decision around gutting the Voting Rights Act — and then about the Supreme Court in Virginia overturning their maps,” Balint said.
But she cited a “huge margin” — between 10% and 15% — that national polls are showing for a generic ballot, which measures party preference and not individual candidates or races.
Balint said she believes that Trump’s support is falling apart.
“Whether it is among Latino voters or whether it is among working-class voters who feel betrayed that he is not bringing down costs, his support is down,” Balint said. “We see a lot of younger voters moving away from him because of this illegal war in Iran.”
And even on issues that previously favored Republicans, “their support has bottomed out, whether it’s on immigration, on the economy, or on the war,” she said.
Everywhere Balint goes, she said, voters ask one question: Will this be a free and fair election?
The Democratic caucus has also been working with outside groups focused on election security, as well as law firms specifically focused on access to the ballot and election security.
“We’re working with attorneys general across the country,” Balint said.
“I want Vermonters to know I just came from a long meeting in the Democratic caucus in which we are focused very much on what can we put in place to ensure that we have a safe and secure election,” she said. “The task force within the House on the Democratic side has been working on that.”
She said the group has looked at more than 160 scenarios about how the administration of Trump, who was impeached for his role in overturning the results of the 2020 contest, “may try to interfere with the election.”
“We’re not taking anything for granted,” she said. “It’s still going to be absolutely the fight of our lives, because there’s deep concern that if the House Republicans retain control, there will be no check on this presidency.”
There is a list of things Vermonters can do to help secure a fair election, Balint said. Soon the Democrats will be issuing an election toolkit, but in the meantime, Balint’s office provided a guide. [See sidebar.]
Balint said the Republicans might very well gerrymander themselves out of office.
“The Republicans have created districts that are much more competitive in trying to shave off parts of Democratic districts so they can create more Republican districts,” Balint said. “They now have put many of their seats in play that wouldn’t have been in play before.”
She pointed to Florida.
“Many of my Florida colleagues are calling it a ‘dummymander,’ because districts that were very safe for Republicans before are now much more in play,” Balint said.
To create those new Republican districts, they had to move reliable voters from districts where Trump won by seven points or more (a “Trump-plus-seven” district) and move them into a new district that is “just a Trump-plus-two or a Trump-plus-three district, which, in this climate, is very gettable.”
It might also be difficult for Republicans to win another election with gas prices climbing so fast, Balint pointed out.
“And obviously, it’s not just gas prices,” Balint said. “Whenever you have an increase in fuel, that absolutely drives up the cost of everything. It’s driving up the cost of groceries, because you need to transport all of those goods, whatever those goods are, including agricultural products. It’s making housing much more expensive because of the inputs that you need to build homes.”
As a result, she said it will be “critically important” for Democrats to focus on “the price gouging that is clearly going on among the some of the major players within the petroleum industry.”
Trump is floating the idea of a gas tax holiday to give Americans some relief at the pumps. Balint believes his proposal is misguided because “essentially he’ll be raiding the trust fund we have to give states money to be able to build bridges and do road repairs,” she said.
“What we should be doing is taking away all the subsidies that these gas and oil companies are getting right now from the federal government, which would more than cover the cost of reducing the federal gas tax for people at the pump,” Balint said. “The priorities are all in the wrong place.”
More and more, ordinary Americans believe that Republicans are not working to help them, Balint said.
“We know that Americans do not believe that this president or this Republican majority in the House or in the Senate are working to lower prices, and that is the most important issue for Americans right now,” she said. “The cost that they’re paying at the pump. The cost of health insurance.”
She claimed that Americans “do not believe that Republicans will give them any relief, especially as more of the cuts that came from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, like the cuts to Medicaid, are going to have more of an impact on Vermonters.”
“More Vermonters will lose their healthcare because of those cuts, and also because of cuts in the Affordable Care Act,” Balint said. “But it’s not just particular to Vermont. That’s true across the country, and people are mad about it, and rightly so.”
She also pointed out the consequences of Trump’s military action in Iran — “absolutely a war of choice that didn’t need to happen” — including the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the rising price of oil.
Those results have raised fears of possible future scarcity, such as the country saw in 1979, which was triggered by the Iranian Revolution, but Balint does not see that happening.
“We still have resources in the National Petroleum Reserve that can be released in emergencies,” Balint said. “So certainly, I hope that doesn’t come to pass. But we’re in a bind right now because of what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz.”
‘It’s absolutely necessary’
Democrats are fired up, Balint said. Independents are angry. And that anger is showing at the polls.
“When you look at all of the special elections that have happened across the country in the last year and a half, Democrats have won every single one,” Balint said. “So we’re talking about money, but also about volunteers to knock on doors. We’re talking about old-fashioned retail politics, making sure people can get to the polls.”
So the questions become: “How do we get folks in Vermont who want to help make phone calls into these out-of-state districts? How do we make it easy for them to sit at their homes in Vermont?” she said.
Since Vermont, as a rule, does not unseat its incumbents, Balint envisions spending some of her campaign time assisting in other races around the country.
“That is my hope, absolutely,” she said. “I was actually just having a conversation with a couple other members on the floor yesterday about how we can pool our resources to make sure that we’re all doing our part with this.”
It can’t just fall to the people in those much more competitive districts, Balint said.
“We all have to be talking to members who certainly are in the fight of [...] their political lives, right now in the Deep South,” she said, noting that Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell “has really been engaged with us about how we harness the power of people across the country in districts that are less competitive, so that we can do our part to flip the House.
“It’s absolutely necessary,” Balint said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.