US Senators' jobs are to represent Vermont's interests in federal law. For most day-to-day issues affecting you, you should be worried about your local and state government.

If you like "gun culture" so much, and there are so many responsible gun owners out there, how about you start working on fixing your community and supporting policies that would keep these mass murderous assholes from having guns. Sorry, but "I like them" is not a good enough argument for something killing thousands of people every year.

The point of legalizing opiates and opioids is not to make them recreational drugs, but to make it legal to help wean addicts off them in supervised situations. Quitting addictions to narcotics cold-turkey is incredibly dangerous physically, but currently the only legal way to quit. Addiction is a disease; making the treatment legal is important.

The entire state legislature and governor are up for replacement every two years, regardless of what they do or don't do.

It's a slow process because the state gov and Amtrak don't want one there as it would potentially slow down service. If we had a dedicated light rail system, it would be less of an issue, I think. The political will is definitely there in town (though there'd certainly be the gripers you mention--there always are).

Knowing absolutely nothing about engineering this sort of thing, I also wonder if a tunnel/series of tunnels might be the better solution.

Brandon has been actively trying to get a whistle-stop train platform for a while now. There's already a viable spot for it on Union that wouldn't badly impact traffic through town. If it were realistic to hop on the train just to run errands in Rutland or Middlebury for a few hours, I think a decent number of people would do it (I would be first among them).

My definition of "sustainable" might be a little ambitious, I guess. 60K in any of those cities' cheaper areas could get you a tolerable apartment and you won't be on a starvation diet, but you're not saving up to buy a house and any serious medical issue will wipe you out.

I used to be a legislative analyst for a Texas house member who sat on the education committee and one of the big issues I handled was teacher salaries. I'm a little rusty now but I have a pretty good idea of the situation.

That's true only in cities/wealthy suburbs, where $60K is really not a sustainable single income.

Yep, my mistake. I was so proud of myself for knowing how numbers work that I forgot how numbers work.

If you care to update the speech to fit the current year, it would be "Seven score and nineteen years ago". Next year it'll just be 8 score!

EDIT: It was rightly pointed out that this is wrong! Ought to be 12 score and 6 years, per /u/the_full_effect below.

Most organized campaigns do actually keep track of who their strong supporters are.