It’s been three months since Republican leaders in the Maine Legislature wrote their Democratic counterparts, demanding a special session.
By now, you would expect them to be raring to get back to work – but you would be wrong. For the second time in three weeks, Republican lawmakers have blocked House Speaker Sara Gideon and Senate President Troy Jackson from bringing the Legislature back to complete its unfinished business.
The Republicans say they don’t want to go back unless the Democrats, who hold majorities in both houses, let them dictate the number of bills that will be taken up. The minority party wants to make sure that bills that they don’t like but lack the votes to defeat will die a procedural death.
As the parties issue competing statements about why there is no session, Mainers should not be confused: This is not legislative gridlock or inter-party squabbling. This is a move by the minority to block the will of the majority. It’s not governance, it’s preventing governance from happening – and they are doing it in the middle of a public health and economic crisis.
Republican opposition to the Legislature finishing the work that was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic cannot be attributed to fiscal concerns. Many of the bills that call for new spending are going to die in the Appropriations process since the state is not running a surplus anymore. But bills that affect veterans’ rights, child protective services, criminal justice and tribal sovereignty will also die if lawmakers stay home.
Republicans may have an unstated reason to keep the Legislature from coming back. The social media accounts for U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ re-election campaign have been counting the days since the Legislature has been in session, claiming that Gideon, the Democratic nominee, “hasn’t passed a bill or done a thing that would help Mainers during this crisis for more than four months.”
The Collins campaign fails to mention that it’s fellow Republicans who are keeping the State House dark, not Gideon.
And just because the House and Senate haven’t been in session, it doesn’t mean that legislators have not been busy. Bipartisan committees have been meeting electronically, holding public hearings, working on bills and recommending 152 of them for passage.
According to Jackson’s office, nearly half the bills received unanimous support in their committee of jurisdiction, and 74 percent had bipartisan support. What were the Republican members thinking when they voted that a bill “ought to pass” in committee? Did they know that they would soon be blocking a special session, guaranteeing that those committee votes were the last votes those bills would ever get?
The Republican leaders are misreading their role in Augusta. They have been elected to represent the interests of their constituents, not to force their views onto the majority of Mainers who see things differently. If the Democrats have the votes to pass bills that the Republicans don’t like, the Republicans have available recourse: They can take their case to the voters in November and try to win majorities in the next Legislature.
The minority party should have influence in the legislative process. The state constitution requires supermajorities to pass a budget or send bond issues to the voters so those things can’t happen without bipartisan cooperation.
But the game the Republicans are playing with a special session is neither bipartisan nor cooperation. It’s partisan obstruction, plain and simple, and it shouldn’t be seen any other way.
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