The veto session is over and done with, and good riddance.

As expected, the Democrats’ energy bill, with its pernicious tax on Vermont Yankee, went down to defeat, as 11 Democrats voted with the Republicans to sustain Gov. Douglas’ veto.

The result is exactly what would have been obtained if a veto session had been held, as is usually the case, shortly after the regular session ended. In postponing the veto vote until July 11, Speaker Gaye Symington and Senate President Peter Shumlin obviously hoped to be able to win over those Democratic votes, and perhaps some Republicans, by hammering away in public about the virtues of their bill, leaning ever more heavily on the tenuous notion that it was a significant iniative to fight global warming.

When that didn’t work, the Democratic leadership pronounced themselves ready to negotiate a new bill, delete the Vermont Yankee tax, and postpone funding decisions until next year. That didn’t work, either. Most legislators realized that a veto session is a veto session—a simple up and down vote on whether to overturn a veto. It’s not a midsummer chance to debate and craft new legislation in a single day.

So nothing whatsoever was achieved by delaying the veto session almost two months except to provide a period of very tiresome political argument. The Democrats attacked the governor, and the governor’s people were only too happy to respond in kind. It was a disagreeable spectacle and shouldn’t have happened.

State newspapers Wednesday seemed happy to protray Gov. Douglas in a rare moment of nastiness, as he was quoted as saying the Democrats were "big losers" in the veto affair. A closer reading of the story reveals that when asked at his press conference, the governor responded with the obvious truth, that the Democrats were party which lost an important vote. He wasn’t calling them "losers" in the name-calling sense. Nevertheless, the phrase "big losers" is likely to resonate in political discussions, poisoning the atmosphere still more.

Certainly the Democratic bill had some good ideas in it, but it was nothing that can’t wait until next year for a well-considered bill without an objectionable last-minute tax source. Unfortunately the heightened partisan atmosphere that has been created in the last few weeks will make it more difficult to craft such a bill.

Everybody in Montpelier, on both sides of the aisle, and in the governor’s office, should take a deep breath, have a good summer vacation, climb some mountains, canoe some streams, see some movies, and be ready in January to ditch the rhetoric and get back to constructive work.