“Paul LePage Is Facing Impeachment”: Why The Tea Party Hero’s Luck May Have Finally Run Out
Even among the gaggle of hopping mad reactionaries swept into power by 2010’s Tea Party wave, the unbridled anger of Paul LePage, the former businessman who is currently in his second term as Maine’s governor, has always allowed him to stand out.
If the average Republican was outraged, for example, you could count on LePage to be incensed. If the average Republican was ignoring people of color, LePage was responding to their concerns with an invitation to give a specific part of his body a kiss. If the average Republican pandered to Fox News’ geriatric and terrified viewers, LePage offered them nothing less than the personification of their collective id.
All of which is to explain why it’s not a complete shock to read from the New York Times that state legislators in Maine are considering the nuclear option of impeachment. He’s a twice-elected conservative in a state that leans increasingly toward centrist Democrats, but watching his administration has often felt like getting a window into an alternative universe where Bill O’Reilly runs a state government. So now that Republicans in the Legislature have effectively abandoned him, the talk of canceling the Paul LePage Show mid-season actually makes sense.
If you’re one of those vanishingly few number of people who don’t pay close attention to Maine politics, however, you probably think this sounds excessively dramatic. You probably haven’t heard of LePage; so can he really be that bad? It’s not as if he did something truly remarkable, like destroy his state’s public unions or engineer gridlock on the world’s busiest bridge. It’s true that LePage doesn’t have many legislative accomplishments of significance. But to view him solely through the bills he signs — or, increasingly, vetoes — is to look at Maine’s historically genteel politics through the wrong lens.
Not unlike New Jersey’s Chris Christie, another Republican governor in an even bluer state, most of LePage’s troubles can be summed up in one word: temperament. Simply put, the guy is a walking firestorm of pettiness, fury and resentment. Infamously, one of the first things he did upon taking office in 2011 was order the removal of a pro-worker mural from the state’s Department of Labor. He said the painting suggested the government had an anti-business bias. The story earned LePage negative attention from the national media. The whole thing was gratuitous and stupid.
Taking down a mural is, obviously, not a big deal. I bring it up, however, because I think it’s a useful case-in-point for understanding two important elements of LePage’s personality. One, the severity of his lack of judgment; and two, how the overriding, distinctive feature of his approach is one of thoroughgoing meanness. For example, here’s how LePage tends to talk about his opponents — who are, in many cases, members of the general public: They’re idiots, liars and spoiled little brats; they’re corrupt, spineless and like the Nazis. He’s attacked Democrats in the state Senate with homophobia; and he’s joked about having his critics shot.
Maine’s comparatively sober-minded GOPers, perhaps the final representatives of a long New England tradition of Republican moderation, put up with LePage for years. As has been the case all over the country, the more confrontational and ideologically rigid elements of Maine’s GOP were better-organized than the other factions. And at least LePage cut taxes. But now that the governor has responded to his 2014 reelection by trying to ram through an elimination of the state’s income tax; and now that LePage promised to veto any bill that comes his way — be its author Republican or Democrat — until Democrats allow a referendum to that end, they’re feeling differently.
What Republicans are now realizing is that LePage’s kind of anti-government conservatism is in truth profoundly authoritarian. They probably knew this already, but new allegations that LePage had threatened to deny a charter school state funds unless it fired a political rival has made it impossible to ignore. The governor has all but declared war on the Legislature itself, and he has ground much of state government into a veto-induced halt. When combined with his machine-style tactics against the charter, these assaults on the state’s balance of power have given Republicans the cover they need to go after one of their own. Thus the talk of impeachment.
Saber-rattling is easy, though; so I wouldn’t be surprised if LePage ultimately finishes his second term. Then again, very little about the political career of Paul LePage, a man who’s earned the title of “America’s craziest governor,” has gone as one would expect. It certainly would be better for Maine — and the whole country, really — if LePage’s Fox News-style politics eventually brought him to an ignominious end, but a significant chunk of Maine voters evidently like having Bill O’Reilly as their governor. The Paul LePage show goes on.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, June 30, 2015
“Think The Midterms Don’t Matter?”: Tell That To 70,000 Poor, Uninsured People In Maine
The stakes of the 2014 midterm elections, as many have noted, seem awfully low. Yes, control of the Senate is up for grabs, but there’s only so much Republicans will be able to accomplish in the face of the veto and filibuster. As my own colleagues have pointed out, this is an overly sanguine view of the matter. But the tendency to underplay the election is especially misplaced when it comes to races for governor and state legislature. Consider Maine, where a new development in the race for governor may well have just won some 70,000 people health coverage.
Maine’s current governor is Paul LePage, a Republican elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave whose defining legacy—even more than outrageous comments such as telling the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” saying President Obama “hates white people” and comparing the IRS to the Gestapo—will be his profound antipathy to the social safety net that so many people rely on in Maine, New England’s poorest state. As the Wall Street Journal recently summarized, LePage, a former millworker who was the eldest of 18 children in an abusive home and a teenage runaway, “pushed for new laws that required drug testing for certain beneficiaries linked to drug crimes and created stricter income limits on childless workers who collected Medicaid. He also let a food-stamp waiver expire, a move that effectively terminates benefits for able-bodied childless workers after three months. His changes to food stamps, Medicaid and cash-assistance programs helped cut the beneficiary rolls from recent peaks by 11%, 12%, and 56%, respectively.”
And he has vetoed—not once, but thrice—the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which would cover nearly 70,000 people in the state—that is, more people than live in Portland, the state’s largest city. This explains Maine’s remarkable singularity on the lower of these two eye-catching maps, where it stands out as the only state in New England with large numbers of uninsured.
How did Maine, a state that went for Barack Obama by more than 15 points in 2012, elect such a person as its governor? By a fluke. LePage got only 38 percent of the vote in 2010, but that was enough to win, as Democrats split their votes between Eliot Cutler, a wealthy businessman running as an independent, and Libby Mitchell, the Democratic state Senate president.
And as cringe-inducing as LePage’s tenure has been for a state known for a more sober form of politics, it’s been looking like LePage might just pull a repeat. Cutler is running again this year alongside a different Democrat, Congressman Mike Michaud. Cutler’s drawing less support than he got in 2010, when he far surpassed Mitchell, but he’s been getting more than enough to pose a real problem for Michaud: a Portland Press-Herald poll released over the weekend found LePage getting 45 percent to Michaud’s 35 percent, with Cutler drawing 16 percent. As averse as Maine liberals are to see LePage reelected, many simply have felt more drawn to Cutler than to Michaud, himself a former millworker who is more conservative than Cutler on abortion, gun rights, and other issues. (Michaud came out as gay last year, yet even national gay rights groups have been ambivalent about backing him over Cutler.) After months of LePage’s being declared one of the most endangered governors in the country, his prospects were improbably looking up.
Until Wednesday. At a morning press conference, Cutler sent a cryptic message that, while far short of a resignation from the race, was taken by many as a hint that it was time for his supporters to put beating LePage above all else. “I truly believe in democracy and the ultimate authority of voters to vote for whomever they want for whatever reason and I don’t think any voter, whether a supporter of mine or not, now needs or ever has needed my permission or my blessing to vote for one of my opponents,” Cutler said. “Nevertheless, I want to reiterate what I said six months ago: Anyone who has supported me but who now worries that I cannot win and is thereby compelled by their fears or by their conscience to vote instead for Mr. LePage or Mr. Michaud should do so.”
If this message was a bit too ambiguous for the liking of some Michaud supporters, it was given a whole lot more clarity later in the day. Angus King, the highly popular former governor and now U.S. senator who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats in Washington, announced that he was switching his endorsement from Cutler to Michaud. “Like Eliot, I too am a realist. After many months considering the issues and getting to know the candidates, it is clear that the voters of Maine are not prepared to elect Eliot in 2014,” King said. “The good news is that we still have a chance to elect a governor who will represent the majority of Maine people: my friend and colleague, Mike Michaud. And today, I’d like to offer him my support….This was not an easy decision, but I think the circumstances require that those of us who have supported Eliot look realistically at the options before us at this critical moment in Maine history.”
This was surely not an easy concession for Cutler (and secondarily King) to make, but they deserve credit for acknowledging, if somewhat belatedly, where things were heading. Politics is about real people, and in the case of Maine, starkly so. Tens of thousands of low-income Maine residents are far more likely to get a lot more economic security as a result of what happened on this one day.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, October 29, 2014
“LePage Vetoes Medicaid Expansion For All The Wrong Reasons”: Maine’s Paul LePage Is One Uninformed And Paranoid Governor
Maine’s Democratic state House Speaker, Mark Eves, noted the circumstances this week surrounding Medicaid expansion. “We have a bipartisan plan for life-saving health care for tens of thousands of Mainers,” he said. “It creates jobs, it save lives, it saves money.”
All of this happens to be true. Every state north of Virginia has either embraced Medicaid expansion or is working towards doing so – except Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage (R) refuses to cooperate. More than 60,000 low-income Mainers would benefit from the policy, on top of the economic and fiscal benefits, but the Republican governor nevertheless vetoed Medicaid expansion yesterday.
The measure also would have established a managed care system for all 320,000 beneficiaries, an effort to control costs in the $2.5 billion program, which is Maine’s version of the Medicaid health insurance program.
Under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the federal government offered to reimburse states for 100 percent of the cost of expansion for at least three years, then gradually reduce reimbursements rates to about 90 percent.
But in his veto message to the Legislature, LePage wrote that Maine could neither afford expansion nor trust the federal government to deliver on its promises.
The rejection didn’t come as a surprise, and Democratic state lawmakers will try to override LePage’s veto. By all accounts, however, they face an uphill climb – some GOP state lawmakers are on board with the policy, but probably not enough to generate a two-thirds majority.
But what was somewhat surprising was just how awful LePage’s defense was. The governor, struggling in his re-election bid this year, had plenty of time to come up with a credible rationale for blocking Medicaid expansion, but he didn’t come up with much.
“It is shortsighted to think federal funds will always be available, especially after watching the federal deficit climb and witnessing continual delays and changes from Washington,” he said in a statement.
I realize that Paul LePage sometimes struggles with policy details, but there are some rudimentary facts he should probably understand before telling 60,000 people they can’t have health insurance.
For example, if LePage is “watching the federal deficit climb,” he’s not watching closely enough. The federal deficit isn’t climbing; it’s shrinking. In fact, in recent years, we’ve seen the fastest deficit reduction than at any point since World War II. Does LePage not know that? Maybe he should have looked it up before issuing his statement?
What’s more, LePage is convinced federal funds may not “always be available” to finance Medicaid expansion. In other words, he’ll refuse the funds now because maybe, someday, far off in the future, Washington won’t offer the funds they’re promising to provide.
Sorry, 60,000 struggling Mainers. You can’t have access to affordable medical care because your governor is paranoid about a fiscal situation that may or may not materialize at some point.
These are the best arguments the governor’s office could come up with after having months to prepare?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2014
“Just Another Vindictive GOP Governor”: Maine Governor’s Welfare Investigation Turns Up Next To Nothing
Maine governor Paul LePage (R) finally has a smoking gun in his effort to restrict welfare programs — at least according to him. According to a much-hyped study conducted by the state department of Health and Human Services, recipients of social programs like SNAP and TANF used money from these programs at places like bars, smoke shops, and strip clubs.
But according to the Bangor Daily News, during the period the study was conducted, these questionable transactions accounted for just two-tenths of one percent of the total money spent from these programs. The small amount of misuse holds steady with the national trend. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, families and single parents who receive public benefits have much smaller budgets on average and spend a larger portion of their budgets on basic necessities.
LePage, however, sees any abuse of the welfare system in Maine as evidence of the need for reform. “Any amount of abuse in the system that takes away from the truly needy needs to be dealt with,” LePage’s spokeswoman told the Bangor Daily News. “We’re not uncovering anything new. There are always going to be bad actors out there. We’re simply saying, ‘We’ve got an eye on you.’”
In fact, what came to light after the study signals a larger problem with the system than LePage expected.“This information is eye-opening and indicates a larger problem than initially thought,” LePage said in a press release. “These benefits are supposed to help families, children and our most vulnerable Mainers. Instead, we have discovered welfare benefits are paying for alcohol, cigarettes and other things that hardworking taxpayers should not be footing the bill for.”
However, it’s important to note that, according to the Daily News story, “those transactions include purchases at the checkout counter and withdrawals from on-premises ATMs. The state does not track what is purchased in EBT transactions.” So it’s highly likely that a substantial number of the hinted-at “immoral” purchases were not even made.
Similar efforts to expose fraud in social programs were attempted in Florida and Utah. Both states began drug-testing their welfare recipients to weed out drug users. There were similar results: Utah, for example, spent $25,000 to drug-test 4,730 recipients, only 12 tested positive for drugs.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, LePage is convinced there is a problem with welfare fraud in his state. The answer to this problem? Limits and restrictions to social programs like TANF and SNAP.
First, LePage would back legislation that reforms the lack of paper trail on where welfare money is spent. It’s a measure that Maine Democrats would also support, according to the Democratic House Speaker. “No one wants to see funds meant for struggling families abused,” House Speaker Mark Eves said Tuesday. “State law already forbids EBT cards from being used at liquor stores. If this list is verified, it’s time to take action. The question for the governor is, will he prosecute or politicize it? Democrats will continue to support good-faith efforts at cracking down on fraud and abuse.”
The question of whether this is a good-faith effort to stop fraud, or a political tactic to further a conservative cause, is an important one. LePage’s record on welfare reform doesn’t suggest that his intentions are sincere. In fact, LePage has been encouraging cuts to government aid throughout his term as governor. In 2012, for example, LePage said at a Republican convention: “Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: Get off the couch and get yourself a job.”
Previously, LePage instituted a five-year cap on TANF benefits, a move Democrats argue ended benefits for thousands of poor Maine residents. Just last week, Governor LePage also introduced a bill that would increase Maine’s work requirements for welfare recipients, another reform Democrats opposed.
Thus, it’s not hard to conclude that this push to investigate welfare recipients is another partisan move by a notoriously vindictive governor.
By: Ben Feuerherd, The National Memo, January 9, 2014
“Maine, The Way Life Should Not Be”: Senate Candidate Has Been “Jailed Repeatedly”
The last few election cycles have offered campaign watchers quite a motley crew of far-right Senate candidates. The cast of characters – Angle, Mourdock, Akin, Buck, O’Donnell, et al – doesn’t include any winners, but it does feature some candidates who are tough to forget.
Will the 2014 cycle offer similarly memorable conservatives? It’s too soon to say, though Erick Bennett, who’s taking on Sen. Susan Collins in a Republican primary in Maine, appears well worth watching. Amanda Marcotte explained why.
Bennett was convicted of domestic violence in 2003 after attacking his wife, who has since divorced him. While this sort of thing traditionally turns voters off, Bennett is employing an unusual strategy by wielding his conviction as evidence that you should vote for him in Maine’s Republican primary.
“The fact that I have been jailed repeatedly for not agreeing to admit to something I didn’t do should speak to the fact of how much guts and integrity I have,” he exclaimed to the press, trying to convince them that his lying ex-wife set him up for reasons unknown. “If I go to D.C., I’m going to have that same integrity in doing what I say, and saying what I do, when it comes to protecting people’s rights, as well as their pocketbooks.”
According to a report in the Bangor Daily News, Bennett also told reporters this week that his domestic-violence conviction has helped encourage him to pursue a “pro-family” agenda.
I’ve met many campaign aides over the years who’ve boasted that just about anything in a candidate’s background is survivable with the right spin. But this Republican Senate candidate appears to be testing the limits of this thesis.
When was the last time anyone saw a credible statewide candidate argue that being “jailed repeatedly” is proof of his “integrity”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 