By most measures, a new progressive movement in Maine ought to be taking hold.
Democrats control the Blaine House, the Senate by a robust margin and the House by a comfortable one — as they have now for three legislative terms running. The LePage years of acrimonious divided government are fading into the past.
Yet progressivism is nowhere to be seen as the Legislature hones in on adjournment a month hence.
Start with the basics. Maine has the opportunity to help adopt a fundamental voting reform: electing the president by popular vote. Yes, it can be done.
It’s called the National Popular Vote Compact (NPVC), and it’s already passed in all other states with durable Democratic “trifectas.” Imagine: Americans get to elect the president on equal terms.
No more “red states” and “blue states” on election night. No more “swing states.” No more Bush v. Gore decisions, with the Supreme Court installing a president without counting all the votes.
You’d think Maine Democrats would jump at the chance to avoid these undemocratic outcomes. Had the NPVC been in place, George H.W. Bush in 1988 would have been the last Republican to win a first term.
But you would be wrong. In 2019, the Senate passed the bill but the House rejected it. In the 2021-22 session, it never got out of committee. And this year L.D. 1578 has not even been scheduled for public hearing as of this writing.
Somehow, Maine Democrats do not favor a democratic outcome for the most important vote any of us cast.
It goes on from there. We know all about Democratic stances on abortion rights, on racial prejudice, on religious bigotry, on rights for stigmatized and historically oppressed groups, and these are honorable, highly defensible positions.
But where are the voices — and the bills — on core economic issues that have always provided the backbone for progressive movements going back to the 19th century?
The standard is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, greatly amplified by the Congressional New Dealers who pushed the agenda beyond Roosevelt’s own inclinations.
Labor, which had virtually no legal protection at state or federal levels, suddenly was free to organize and win contracts under the Wagner Act, followed by minimum wage laws incorporating time-and-a-half for overtime.
For the next quarter century, the distribution of wealth and income became dramatically more equal — progressives would say more fair — as wages rose, one job could support a family of four, and many more Americans went to college.
During World War II, to pay for the immense expenditures involved, federal income taxes became steeply progressive, with the top rate exceeding 90%. It was patriotic to pay taxes.
Then it all went into reverse. In the 1970s, Republicans began packing the judiciary, winning a majority of the Supreme Court and tilting decisions in favor of business. The “Reagan revolution” gutted the progressive income tax, and business tax preferences bloomed, especially at the state level.
We’re now faced with a situation where the working poor pay a higher proportion of their incomes than the super-rich; as Warren Buffett memorably put it, his secretary pays more than he does.
Elizabeth Warren, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders, emphasized these issues during the 2020 presidential campaign, but despite other legislative accomplishments, President Biden has so far succeeded only in installing a corporate minimum tax — though even that wasn’t easy.
As a result, we face a future in which generational wealth continues to compound, while millions of people will depend on government aid simply to eat, go the doctor, and keep a roof over their heads.
Maine lawmakers don’t have a Senate filibuster or national disinformation campaigns preventing them from acting, yet few progressive initiatives have emerged here either.
A modest bill last session to allow farm workers to organize was derided as a threat to family farms. You will hunt long and hard among the dozens of bills the Taxation Committee hears proposing yet more tax exemptions to find anything modifying the essentially flat income tax Maine now has after years of chipping away.
The national minimum wage remains $7.25, which brings in a weekly paycheck of $290 in many “red” states. Why this isn’t a scandal, or at least front-page news, is hard to understand.
Individual rights are important, but politics at its core revolves around who pays and who benefits, who holds economic power and who is denied it.
The vast distance we’ve drifted from New Deal economic principles and toward a “winner take all” world is clear enough. What’s still unclear is whether a new progressive movement can craft a meaningful response, in Maine and the nation.
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