It ought to be no surprise that, right after her victory over former Gov. Paul LePage, Janet Mills’ first order of business was to spend every single dime of the projected state budget surplus and then some. Indeed, she was in such a hurry to spend the money that she wanted a vote on it the very first day the Legislature was in session, short-circuiting the usual legislative process.

It was wise of Senate Republicans to slow down Janet Mills’ latest spending spree, and it’s disappointing that more of their colleagues – in both the House and in the Democratic Party – didn’t join them. 

There were a couple of reasons to slow down passage of the so-called heating assistance bill. The first is a simple matter of principle: Every piece of legislation ought to go through the same procedures. That means it gets a hearing in front of a committee, giving members of the public and stakeholders give a chance to offer their input in the form of public testimony. When legislation doesn’t go through this normal process, it erodes faith in government, making it seem as if elected officials are manipulating the process for political reasons instead of truly representing their constituents. We’ve seen this time and time again in recent years with last-minute budget deals negotiated by leadership behind closed doors and passed in the dead of night without a chance for public comment – or even for most legislators to read the bill. 

That’s bad for democracy, and the willingness of the press and the public to go along with those backroom deals led to the debacle we just saw in Augusta. 

Another is that while the Mills administration presented the bill as an emergency, this issue could have actually been addressed last session. It has, after all, been more than nine months since Russia invaded Ukraine; the war began in February of this year, not last week. It didn’t take a crystal ball to see that this would lead to an increase in fuel oil prices the following winter, nor to see that Maine would be particularly vulnerable to such an increase. The Mills administration had plenty of time to address this issue and avert a crisis. Instead, it let it become one.  

The response to this might be to point out that we couldn’t have known exactly how bad things might be, nor could we know exactly how big our budget surplus might be in the future. That’s certainly true, but legislators and the Mills administration could have enacted a heating-aid program last session – and one that was well and truly focused on heating aid, rather than just sending out more checks to people based on income.

The administration could have established stricter criteria and crafted a fine-tuned program based on expert analysis and advice, rather than just winging it at the last possible minute. The former is reasonable, responsible governing; the latter is reckless, misguided policymaking driven by political expediency. The only reason this was an emergency at all is that the Legislature and the Mills administration failed to properly address an easily anticipated problem, not that it suddenly appeared out of nowhere.  

As for funding, there was plenty of money to do that by April of this year, when the Legislature passed a supplemental budget to spend a $1.2 billion surplus. Rather than sending out those $850 “inflation relief” checks, legislators and the governor could have used that money to establish a new heating assistance program that would have sent out aid the following winter. That would have been more fiscally responsible – but then voters wouldn’t have gotten checks before Election Day.  

To be clear, legislative Republicans haven’t been behaving fiscally responsibly, either.

During negotiations over both the stimulus checks last year and the heating assistance program this year, their top priority was making sure that the eligibility criteria for both programs were expanded to higher income brackets, making it more expensive rather than less.

In both cases, instead of questioning the wisdom of the underlying proposal, legislative Republicans were more interested in making sure even more people got the checks and that they got some credit for it. That may be good politics, but it makes it obvious that Augusta Republicans aren’t interested in fiscally responsible governing. It’s perfectly fine for them to take a moment to thoroughly question spending more than $400 million, but as they do, they ought to examine some of their own decisions – not just those of the Mills administration.

Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins. He can be contacted at:
jwfossel@gmail.com
Twitter: @jimfossel

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