Last week, as the Legislature lurched toward adjournment of its bill-packed session, a moment of extraordinary clarity occurred: Republicans, in a major surprise, announced a solution to the longstanding problem of an underfunded highway budget.

As anyone who follows the state budget knows, Maine Department of Transportation funding has been a basket case ever since former Gov. Paul LePage in his first budget zeroed out indexing the gasoline tax to inflation and insisted he’d never allow another penny to be raised.

Instead, LePage promoted borrowing $100 million a year, year after year, while blocking bond issues for any other purpose. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t responsible governing.

The hole in the budget, and the potholes in the roads, grew deeper and deeper until the pandemic arrived. Then, emergency relief and President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill brought hundreds of millions in short-term federal funding.

Clearly, it wouldn’t last, and the “current services” budget Democrats passed in March didn’t include the Highway Fund, with services lapsing unless lawmakers acted before July 1.

So there were Republican leaders, Democratic chairs of the Appropriations and Transportation committees, and Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, celebrating a new budget, with a brand-new financing mechanism. Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Aroostook, and House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, were conspicuously absent.

Republicans couldn’t believe their luck.

Without controlling the House, Senate or the governorship, they nonetheless managed to take over tax policy.

Their solution was to scrap the traditional means of funding transportation — fuel taxes and motor vehicle registrations and licenses — and garnish a major share of sales taxes on vehicles and auto parts, some 40%. That amounts to $100 million a year, not coincidentally what LePage kept borrowing from the future to pay current expenses.

Those sales tax revenues will depart the General Fund. The raid is the first successful attempt to divert money from countless programs now funded that way — including health care, education and environmental protection.

Not that many haven’t tried. Bills to divert sales taxes to outdoor recreation, land acquisition and the Inland Fisheries & Wildlife budget were particularly popular, but there were many more.

Yet those were small compared to this heist. Take your favorite program for school nutrition, wellness checks, PFAS water tests, then ask: Would you rather pave a road instead? That’s the choice the governor and Legislature made for us.

How did they do it, almost in the dead of night? Because, like Sherlock Holmes’ “dog in the nighttime,” Democratic legislative leaders didn’t bark; they did nothing.

This pattern goes back a long way, to the original Ronald Reagan tax cuts, when stunned Democrats yielded to mammoth income tax cuts, disproportionately benefiting the rich. It turned out Reagan’s attempted cuts to Social Security and other popular programs weren’t acceptable, so we got permanent peacetime budget deficits as one result.

This doesn’t work at the state level, with balanced budgets constitutionally required, yet Maine Democrats are no more inclined to support anything that could be described as a tax increase — even if it isn’t.

LePage’s decision to end fuel tax indexing was senseless. The sales and income taxes automatically adjust with the economy’s growth; the flat gasoline tax doesn’t. It’s been 30 cents since 2009, and its value continues to plummet. The last governor to take this seriously was Angus King, who sought a 5-cent increase but got 2 cents, plus the inflation adjustment.

This worked well enough through the Baldacci administration until LePage sabotaged it. The peak for highway fund revenue was actually fiscal 2006. Adjusted for inflation, it’s now 45% lower.

There’s an additional problem: Electric vehicles, heavily promoted by Mills and Democrats, don’t pay fuel taxes, and represent a small but growing proportion of vehicles.

A political party dedicated to fiscal responsibility would have proposed restoring indexing, explaining why it isn’t a “tax increase,” while adding a fee to EV registrations representing their share for maintaining roads.

Instead, Democrats did nothing, silently and unanimously allowing Mills to make common cause with Republicans.

As politics, it’s dubious. As policy, it’s worse. Adding insult to injury, lawmakers even added a constitutional amendment, L.D. 713, to make it inviolable – so far sweeping through both chambers without a recorded vote.

With the climate emergency growing ever more ominous, we ought to be taxing fossil fuels more heavily, not phasing out the tax. In coming years, sales taxes going to the Highway Fund will grow, while the proportion coming from fuel consumption will shrink, the opposite of what’s needed.

Democratic leaders have set a new low for tax policy. They’ve left a huge opening for candidates from the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren school when election time comes round.

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