A wide range of bills are currently being considered by the Maine Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs committee concerning Maine’s constitutionally-defined process of direct democracy — everything from legislation aimed at preventing lawmakers from tampering with laws decided by voters at the ballot to a measure to thwart “mob rule” by barring voters from directly influencing tax policy.
In recent years, Maine voters have used the citizen-initiated referendum process to implement Medicaid expansion, twice pass ranked-choice voting, raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by next year, and enact a 3-percent surcharge on income over $200,000 to fund public schools.
[blockquote author=”Sen. Justin Chenette”]”These referendums are helping Maine people, helping Maine’s economy, helping our families and our small businesses.”[/blockquote]
State Sen. Justin Chenette (D-Saco) is sponsoring legislation to advance a constitutional amendment that would require that voter-approved referendums go into full effect for at minimum a year before the legislature could change the law.
“I would hope elected officials would want to respect the will of the voters without being mandated to do so, but it has become abundantly clear that we can’t trust elected officials to do that,” Chenette explained, referencing the repeals of voter-mandated ranked-choice voting and the 3-percent surcharge on the wealthy in previous legislative sessions.
“These referendums are helping Maine people, helping Maine’s economy, helping our families and our small businesses,” he said.
Timberlake bill would bar citizen initiatives from changing tax rates
Another bill, sponsored by Assistant Senate Minority Leader Jeff Timberlake (R-Turner), would take the state in a different direction. He has proposed an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting new taxes or fees from being decided by ballot initiative.
“Tax policy is complex and difficult to understand and it certainly can’t be boiled down to a one-sentence ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question on a ballot,” Timberlake said in a public hearing before the legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, which first heard public testimony on his bill Wednesday. “Beyond that, it’s a dangerous thing for the many to have the power to tax a few.”
Two years ago, Timberlake sponsored similar, unsuccessful legislation to restrict ballot referendums.
“People have said that Augusta is dysfunctional,” said Timberlake. “One of the reasons is that we have spend most of our time working on citizen initiatives. We got a republic, we was elected to represent the people in our district, and we wasn’t elected so it’s a mob rule.”
Committee member state Rep. John Andrews (R-Paris) echoed Timberlake’s fears about voters weighing in directly on tax policy. “This would shift us back to a representative republic. The purpose of that is to protect us from the tyranny of the majority, which is the 51 dictating to the 49,” he said.
Committee members Reps. Kent Ackley (I-Monmouth) and Craig Hickman (D-Winthrop) took issue with Timberlake’s characterization on the state’s citizen initiative process as “mob rule.”
“I look at this being a check and balance on the tyranny of inaction when the legislature does not act,” said Ackley, explaining that most recent successful citizens’ initiatives resulted after similar legislation failed to pass in the legislature. Regarding Medicaid expansion, he said, “the only way to get it done, after the legislature sat on its hands for about six years, was to do it through citizen initiative.”
This Maine Heritage Policy Center supports Timberlake’s proposal, but a decade ago, that group and leaders in the Republican party held a very different position. They opposed restrictions on direct democracy and launched multiple referendum drives to pass a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) which would have required all tax increases to be passed by referendum.
Now, however, Timberlake claims, Maine’s ballot referendums have been taken over by out-of-state interests.
“We are such a cheap date in the state of Maine, that people are coming here and trying their policies out on Maine first to go across the rest of the country,” he claimed.
Ackley asked Timberlake, “How much outside money and undue influence is actually spent here in Augusta on lobbyists who are so-called representing the citizens of Maine?”
“It’s a huge number and we’re not going to stop that,” Timberlake responded.
Voters and advocates testifying against Timberlake’s measure significantly outnumbered those in support.
Maine Equal Justice policy analyst Katherine Kilrain del Rio said the proposal’s parameters against new taxes and fees are overly broad and could preclude any voter-initiated legislation which has a fiscal impact on the state budget. Under Timberland’s restrictions, Medicaid expansion, which won with 59-percent voter approval in 2016, could have been prevented, she suggested, as it included no tax measure, yet was a directive to the legislature to appropriate the funds to begin accessing federal money.
Other advocates and voters echoed Ackley’s sentiment that the state’s citizen initiative process is a tool against government inaction, allowing voters to advance policy ideas that their elected officials were unable or unwilling to address.
Adam Goode, political director of the Maine AFL-CIO, testified, “If we are in a moment when there’s this major fear that voters are going to raise taxes on themselves, then that probably says something about the state of revenue and public service in this state, more than anything else.”
Sarah Austin, a policy analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy, said Maine’s ballot process allows for a level of direct democracy not found in some states. “Maine’s protected system of direct initiative is one of the most powerful tools of democracy available to any citizen in the United States,” she said.
Paris, Maine resident Liesha Petrovich said that getting involved in past voter initiatives gave her a voice where she felt she had none.
“I asked my local representative last year about implementing Medicaid expansion. His response was to ask what kind of people this would help,” she said, referring to former state Rep. Lloyd Herrick. “He wasn’t concerned about the financial cost, he was concerned it would help the wrong kind of people, people like me and my family. To him, we’re not the right kind of people, and neither are a vast majority on my neighbors.”
Lawmakers consider pay-per-signature ban
The Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee also heard public testimony Wednesday on a bill sponsored by state Sen. Stacey Guerin (R-Penobscot) would prevent petition collectors for ballot initiatives from being paid for each signature they collect.
The bill comes as a response to ballot campaigns, including a 2017 initiative to allow a casino to be built in York County, which paid petition circulators for each signature they collected. The casino initiative, in a final push to get enough signatures, reportedly paid petition circulators up to $10 per signature.
Maine used to have a law banning payments per signature, but it was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
(Photo: Mainer voters sign petitions for the 2017 citizens’ initiative to implement Medicaid expansion.| Beacon staff)
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