“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
“Widening Disparities”: Maine Props Up ‘Two Americas’ With No Medicaid Expansion
The Affordable Care Act, as originally passed, holds tremendous promise to decrease health care costs and increase insurance coverage rates across rural states like Maine. But federal court opinions and repeated vetoes of Medicaid expansion are putting all that into jeopardy. Already, data is pointing to widening disparities between the states embracing health reform and those that have resisted — in the numbers of uninsured, in new health care jobs and in the finances of local hospitals.
Historically, the United States has maintained the highest health spending in the world, but it still had lower life expectancies and the highest rates of infant mortality in the developed world. Health costs have sucked up 18 percent of our gross domestic product, leaching out wage gains and damaging America’s global competitiveness.
These factors drove Congress and the president to enact health care reform. Since then, despite the fact that health care utilization typically increases as the economy recovers from recession, health care cost growth has been held in check and health economists increasingly agree that this is due to the structural reforms initiated by the ACA.
And, with federal subsidies and Medicaid expansion to help cover the working poor, the number of people who are uninsured in the country is going down. These are promising trends, but die-hard reform opponents continue to work to reverse them. Every recalcitrant governor, every contentious court decision impedes health reform from realizing its full potential, despite its proven success to date.
There are two Americas. One is prosperous, long-lived and healthy. The second comprises the working poor who are short-lived, disabled early and beset by chronic illnesses that could have been prevented — diabetes, heart failure, pulmonary disease. Those in this second America are people who have a job — maybe two — but do not earn enough to make ends meet.
We make special provisions for some of the most vulnerable in this group — children, the elderly and disabled — but millions of hard-working Americans fall through the gaps. And unfortunately, the ranks of America’s working poor are increasing, not shrinking.
An American born in one of our rural counties is likely to live a shorter life than a person in Algeria or Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Americans who live in prosperous urban regions have life expectancies that rival the healthiest places in the world. This disparity exists, and it takes money. It costs our economy, through lost worker productivity and the high price of treating people in emergency rooms when they cannot afford less expensive preventive care.
As designed, health reform aimed to erase health disparities. It pumped money into making affordable health care available to Americans in poorer, more rural states like Maine. It offered good jobs and billions in economic impact while improving the quality of care to all Americans wherever they live, whatever their income. It directed money to cost-effective primary care and dedicated scholarship funds to increase the number of doctors in rural and underserved areas, like much of Maine.
The New York Times recently reported that state-level refusal to expand Medicaid combined with the recent court ruling jeopardizing subsidies to residents of states on the federal exchange threaten to undo the national reform and create a state-by-state patchwork. This would effectively maintain the two Americas. The states that declined to expand Medicaid or design state exchanges are mostly the poorer, less healthy states. Right now, Maine is on this list.
Gov. Paul LePage has vetoed majority votes to expand Medicaid five times. If we continue in this direction, 12 percent of Mainers will continue to be uninsured while 96 percent of residents in nearby Massachusetts are insured.
Politics threaten to block health reform from fulfilling its promise: to bridge the yawning gap in health and economic potential between the two Americas. Partisan politics shouldn’t block Maine from reaping the benefits of health reform — both in better health outcomes and in expanded economic opportunity.
By: Christy Daggett, Policy Analyst, The Maine Center for Economic Policy; Published in The Bangor Daily News, August 19, 2014
“24 Health-Care Scandals”: Legislators Who Block Medicaid Expansion Are Stiffing Veterans Out Of Health Care, And Stiffing Workers Out Of Jobs
The scandal over long wait times for veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system has grabbed a lot of headlines and elicited a lot of righteous anger — as it should. America’s veterans deserve so much better.
But as Ezra Klein pointed out in a piece in Vox, there’s another health care scandal that also deserves its share of righteous anger, and it also has a big impact on veterans with health care needs: the self-destructive refusal of lawmakers in 20-plus states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs.
Klein cataloged “24 health-care scandals that critics of the VA should also be furious about” (that is, the 24 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion). Thanks to lawmakers’ knee-jerk opposition to expanding health coverage in those states, there are huge numbers of uninsured veterans who should be eligible for coverage, but aren’t: 41,200 veterans in Florida, 24,900 in Georgia, 48,900 in Texas… and the list goes on.
All in all, about 250,000 uninsured veterans are getting stiffed out of eligibility for health coverage by lawmakers who have blocked Medicaid expansion, according to Pew’s Stateline. As it turns out, those lawmakers are also stiffing their own states out of economy-boosting jobs — health care jobs that are overwhelmingly good-paying jobs. Medicaid expansion would create thousands more of these jobs.
Virginia, where Medicaid expansion still hangs in limbo, is a perfect example. According to a report from Chmura Economics & Analytics, Medicaid expansion would create an average of over 30,000 jobs annually in Virginia, including more than 15,000 jobs in the state’s health care sector. An analysis of data on projected job openings and wage levels underscores that these will be good-paying, economy-boosting jobs.
For a single adult in Virginia, less than half of all projected job openings statewide pay above a living wage ($18.59/hour, according to the 2013 Virginia Job Gap Study). However, three out of five health care job openings and close to nine out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do.
For a household with two working adults and two children, while less than two out of five projected job openings in Virginia pay median wages above a living wage ($21.99/hour per worker), half of health care job openings and more than seven out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do.
Or look at Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bipartisan Medicaid expansion plan passed by the Maine Legislature earlier this year, and too few Republican legislators were willing to break ranks with the Governor to override his veto. There, Medicaid expansion would create over 4,000 jobs by 2016, including more than 2,000 jobs in Maine’s health care sector. As with Virginia, health care jobs beat statewide wage levels in Maine by wide margins.
For a single adult, less than half of all projected job openings in Maine pay above a living wage ($15.18/hour, according to the 2013 Maine Job Gap Study). But two-thirds of health care job openings and almost nine out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do. For a household with two working adults and two children, while barely one-third of projected job openings in Maine pay above a living wage ($18.87/hour per worker), almost three-fifths of health care job openings and more than four out of five health practitioner and technical job openings do.
Health care jobs are also overwhelmingly higher-wage jobs in states like Montana and Idaho. But all these states, along with 20 others, have been missing out on these economy-boosting jobs because their legislatures or governors have rejected Medicaid expansion.
State lawmakers who continue to block Medicaid expansion do so at their own peril — both morally and electorally. Because you can only stiff your own constituents — including low-income, uninsured veterans — out of both access to health care and good-paying, economy-boosting jobs for so long before it catches up with you.
Want to really do something to help veterans get access to the health care they need and create good-paying jobs for your constituents at the same time? Two words: expand Medicaid.
By: LeeAnn Hall, Executive Director, The Alliance For A Just Society; The Huffington Post Blog, August 6, 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
“The Worst Of The Worse”: Maine’s Paul LePage Might Just Be The Worst Governor Of All
When Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released its report on “The Worst Governors in America” last summer, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was not even on the list. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did make the “cronyism, mismanagement, nepotism, self-enrichment” list, but the review of his tenure was not necessarily the most scathing in CREW’s assessment of Republicans and Democrats who had gone astray. And Ohio Governor John Kasich was ranked as nothing more than a “sideshow.”
Now Christie is busy answering questions about blocked traffic, misdirected Sandy aid and political misdeeds. Walker’s facing national and state scrutiny of secret e-mails and illegal campaign operations so intense that even Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace interrupted him to say, “But sir, you’re not answering my question.” And Kasich is scrambling to deal with a “Frackgate” controversy touched off by the exposure of a public-relations scheme—apparently developed by his administration, Halliburton and oil and gas industry lobbyists—to “proactively open state park and forest land” for fracking.
The scandals surrounding these prominent Republican governors, some of them potential presidential contenders, are serious. And they raise the question: Could there really be a governor who is more controversial? And whose actions might be even more troubling?
Meet Maine Governor Paul LePage, who ranked in the very top tier of CREW’s “worst” list with this review:
The first-term governor packed his administration with lobbyists and used his office to promote their environmental-deregulation agenda, and allegedly went so far as to fire a state employee who testified in favor of policies the administration opposed.
Gov. LePage also attempted to gut his state’s open records act, and is under investigation by the federal government for trying to bully employees of the state Department of Labor into deciding more cases in favor of business.
Now, the federal investigation has been completed, and LePage is still very much in the “worst governor” competition. A report from the US Department of Labor Office of the Solicitor General concluded that LePage and his appointees meddled with the process by which unemployment claims are reviewed—apparently with an eye toward advantaging employers and disadvantaging the jobless.
When the governor and his appointees engaged with officials who consider appeals from Mainers seeking unemployment benefits, the federal investigation concluded, they acted with “what could be perceived as a bias toward employers.” Specifically, the investigators determined, “hearing officers could have interpreted the expectations communicated by the Governor…as pressure to be more sympathetic to employers.”
The headlines from Maine newspapers Thursday were blunt:
Federal probe finds LePage pushed jobless benefits appeals officers to show ‘bias toward employers
Federal probe faults LePage administration on unemployment hearings
Federal investigation finds that LePage, Maine DOL endangered fairness of unemployment hearings
The roots of the investigation into LePage’s actions go back almost a year, as noted by Maine’s Sun Journal in a front-page story Thursday:
An April 11 Sun Journal investigation cited sources who said the governor had summoned DOL employees to a mandatory luncheon at the Blaine House on March 21 and scolded them for finding too many unemployment-benefit appeals cases in favor of workers. They were told they were doing their jobs poorly, sources said. Afterward, they told the Sun Journal they felt abused, harassed and bullied by the governor.
Emails released under a Freedom of Access Act request echoed complaints made to the Sun Journal by the hearing officers who attended the meeting.
LePage denied the charges and claimed his communications with the hearing officers were “cordial.” When the US Department of Labor investigation was launched—because hearing officers are paid with federal funds and must follow federal rules—the governor denied it was going on.
But there is no denying now that LePage has been called out for creating what reasonable people would interpret as an unfair “bias” against the jobless in a state that has a significantly higher unemployment rate than its northern New England neighbors New Hampshire and Vermont.
LePage is expected to seek re-election this year. Among the candidates he will face is Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud, a third-generation paper mill worker who says, “I understand what people are going through, the hard times that they are facing. Whether or not they have a job today or tomorrow, the uncertainty is real.”
Providing a fair process for reviewing unemployment claims helps to address that uncertainty. Infusing bias into the process is not just wrong, it’s cruel. And that cruelty—as much as any political abuse or ethical excess—provides a vital measure for assessing the worst of the worst governors.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 27, 2014
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