Gov. Paul LePage’s relentless efforts to use the legislative process as a club to punish his enemies may have another victim: LePage himself.
Nineteen bills, including one to allow cities to keep asylum-seeking immigrants on the General Assistance rolls, have become law — not with his signature but because of his apparently deliberate inaction.
Why did he do it?
On Wednesday, the governor said the Legislature had stopped the counting of the 10 days within which bills can be vetoed when it “adjourned” on June 30, and he believes that means that he can hold the lawmakers in session for three days later this month before he has to deliver his vetoes.
It looks as if the governor and his staff are mistaken. Lawmakers say they were “at ease” or in recess and not done for the year when they left the State House last month. If this is an “adjournment” in the constitutional sense, then they “adjourn” every weekend. The governor may be right — but that would mean that everyone else has been doing it wrong for a very long time.
This appears headed to the courts and will turn on a close parsing of legal language and a specific set of facts. But before this episode boils down to learned discussions about the precise difference between “adjournment” and “adjournment sine die,” there is a larger point that we should not miss.
We don’t believe that the governor’s legal staff forgot how to count to 10. That means that they did this on purpose.
The most likely explanation for this episode is that the governor wanted to provoke a confrontation with the legislative branch so that he could assert his dominance. Considering that the same lawmakers are investigating him for abuse of power, this is outrageous conduct.
But even if he were not under scrutiny for using state funds to deny House Speaker Mark Eves a job, the governor has revealed some distorted priorities. If LePage were serious about taking General Assistance away from asylum seekers, he would have simply vetoed the bill, knowing that it didn’t have enough support in the House to be overridden. Instead, he played a game with the calendar, perhaps to make lawmakers spend three days sweating in the State House in the middle of summer, putting personal revenge ahead of political goals.
This is not a game. People’s lives are at stake. Money that would help people stay housed and fed should not be used to punish lawmakers, who, like the governor, will not have to go without enough to eat or a place to sleep, no matter who wins this fight. Using vulnerable people for leverage in this way is contemptible, regardless of where you stand on current state GA policy.
If LePage and his team are proved wrong — and we hope that they are — he will have failed to deliver on a major campaign promise because he was more interested in settling scores than in governing. Maybe the backlash from his disappointed supporters will motivate him to change, because shame doesn’t seem to work.
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