Call'm Crazy...

America's Craziest Governor Goes Off the Rails

Is Paul LePage overplaying his hand or no longer playing with a full deck?

By COLIN WOODARD

The strangest month in memory at Maine’s State House started with Gov. Paul LePage stepping out of his office to squeeze a squeaking rubber pig toy for the assembled press and call their attention to a tabletop Christmas tree decorated with ornaments bearing portraits of several of his erstwhile Republican legislative allies, including the president of the state senate.

State lawmakers of both parties, he explained in the unusual June 17 appearance, had rejected his budget in favor a compromise package he alleged was filled with pork. In response, he announced he had just issued some 200 line-item vetoes just to give lawmakers more work to do before the session could adjourn for Maine’s cherished, all-too-short summer. “For five months they wasted our time,” LePage explained. “This time I am going to waste a little bit of their time.”

“We need Mainers to understand our government is corrupt,” the chief executive of that government continued. “The Maine people have to demand better from our elected officials.”

One month later LePage—a pugnacious, hot-headed, sometimes vulgar Tea Party-style conservative—is facing a bipartisan investigation into potential abuse of power, a nascent impeachment effort by opponents in the lower State House chamber, and a federal lawsuit by the outgoing Democratic House speaker, who has accused the governor of blackmailing a non-profit school into revoking their job offer to him. Meanwhile, leaders of the Republican-controlled state Senate and many Republicans in the House have turned on the governor, helping overturn hundreds of his vetoes and line-item vetoes in lightning-paced voting sessions, sometimes at a rate of one every 25 seconds. His veto of the bipartisan budget was overturned, narrowly avoiding a state government shutdown. An aggressive attempt to appropriate wider veto authority for his office has been rebuffed by lawmakers and legal experts, but still threatens to plunge the state into a constitutional crisis.

“For whatever reason the governor has chosen to demonize the entire legislature and people in both parties who don’t always agree with him on everything,” says Sen. Roger Katz, a moderate Republican whose face adorned one of the ornaments on LePage’s Christmas tree. “There is so much he could get done if he chose to work with the legislature instead of against it.”

Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine, puts it this way: “This is no longer a partisan battle or one primarily over policy. He’s turned it into an institutional fight, a knock-down, drag-out fight between executive and legislative prerogative.”

LePage won reelection in November by a five-point margin in a three-way race, surprising many outside the state who knew him as the guy who told the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” chastised a state senator for wanting to “give it to the people without Vaseline” and turned an obscure mural depicting U.S. labor history into a national cause célèbre by removing it from the state labor department because an anonymous constituent likened it to North Korean brainwashing. He’s perhaps the only governor in the country who could rib New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for being “a little bit shy” and only be half kidding.

Since his January re-inauguration, however, he’s brandished his slender electoral mandate as a club, verbally battering anyone who stands in the way of the will of the Maine people, now said to be synonymous with his own. He spent much of a volatile, hour-long May 29 press conference lambasting Democratic legislative leaders as “repugnant,” “disgraceful” and child-like before pledging to veto every bill with a Democratic sponsor regardless of merit until they agreed to back one of his top priorities, a constitutional referendum to eliminate the state’s income tax. Days later he turned on two longtime allies—Senate President Mike Thibodeau and Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason—for engaging in budget talks with Democrats; his daughter, who heads his political organization Maine People Before Politics, recorded robocalls deployed in both the stalwart conservatives’ districts, erroneously accusing them of funding “welfare for illegal aliens.” Instead of falling into line, the lawmakers have steeled their resolve.

“I think he wants some primary challenges against Republicans in 2016 so he will have a more conservative legislature to work with,” says political scientist Jim Melcher of the University of Maine at Farmington. “But that’s hard to pull off and I think he’s overplayed his hand.”

LePage’s isolation increased substantially earlier this month after a bizarre episode in which he failed to veto 19 bills he opposed—including a hotly-contested measure to prevent 1,000 legal asylum seekers from having their welfare benefits cut off—and thus allowed the bills to become law. The blunder was based on a novel interpretation of the state constitution that conflated the legislature having gone into recess for a few days with having adjourned for the session, which would have allowed the governor more time to veto the bills. Despite his take being soundly rejected the state’s attorney general, the non-partisan staff of the legislature and Republican leaders in the senate, LePage defiantly doubled-down on it, refusing to veto another 51 bills, which also became law early this week and will remain so unless the courts intervene.

As Democrats celebrated this act of unintentional compromise, some prominent conservatives expressed concern. “The administration has absolutely no ground to stand on here,” fumed Republican operative Lance Dutson, former head of the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center, who this week launched a political organization for Republicans fed up with LePage. “All it has is rhetoric and intimidation, which unfortunately has been the story way too many times recently.” Mike Cianchette, the governor’s attorney until he was deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy Reserves in 2013, told the Bangor Daily News LePage had taken “a very aggressive legal position” on the latest vetoes that “may be a bridge too far for the courts.”

The courts may soon be considering charges against LePage himself over the strong-arm tactics he used to force Good Will-Hinckley—a school for troubled teens—to recently abandon the hiring of House Speaker Mark Eves as their new director. Eves, a family therapist by training, said the governor threatened to pull $530,000 in state funding, an accusation LePage has not denied. Eves says he is planning to file a federal civil rights lawsuit, even as the legislature’s bipartisan watchdog committee unanimously voted to investigate. LePage, unbowed, has claimed his actions are somehow protected by the First Amendment and that the legislature’s investigative agency—which has subpoena power—lacks the authority to scrutinize his actions. As for the 70 new laws LePage meant to veto, the governor has said he won’t enforce them unless compelled to by Maine’s highest court, a threat that if carried out would throw state government into disarray.

Democrats are predictably apoplectic, with state party Chair Phil Bartlett pronouncing LePage “unfit to govern.” State Rep. Pinny Beebe-Center, one of six lawmakers trying to start impeachment proceedings, called the governor’s actions “lower than low.” “We’re the laughingstock of the country,” she says. “He has made a mockery of Maine for too long,” House Majority Leader Jeff McCabe said last week. “As lawmakers, we must put an end to this outrageousness.”

Progressive political activist Ben Chin has worried aloud that the state no longer had a functional executive: “If there was to be a natural disaster or something like that, it’s impossible for me to imagine our governor in the current state that he’s in, for whatever reason, actually being able to effectively manage that.”

What will happen next is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to conclude that at a minimum the governor has squandered the political capital he came away with in November’s election. “I really think he’s missed a real opportunity to get things done in a cooperative way,” says Katz, the moderate Republican state senator. “I worry the well is so poisoned that it’s gong to be difficult to get back to cooperation even if he chooses to do so.”