For the second time in two years, Governor LePage last Friday vetoed bipartisan legislation aimed at finally implementing a recreational marijuana policy passed by Maine voters by ballot initiative in 2016.
The newest version of the bill scaled back some provisions of the law passed by voters, including reducing the number of personal plants an individual could legally keep from 6 to 3 and eliminating “social clubs” from the commercial licensing scheme, but the compromise bill came out of the bipartisan committee responsible for creating it with a 16-1 margin of support and sailed through both chambers of the Legislature with supermajorities. Despite the wide bipartisan support and a lingering popular mandate, the LePage administration has not budged in its opposition to the policy.
While the governor argued in his veto message that “joint efforts” between his office and the Legislature were required to craft effective policy in this area, his office’s stonewalling on the issue reflects an unbroken pattern of obstruction since the 2016 election. That election saw a Republican wave that nevertheless included huge victories for progressive and small-d democratic issues on the ballot in Maine such as increasing the minimum wage, funding public schools by taxing the rich, ranked choice voting, and marijuana legalization.
Notwithstanding LePage’s rhetoric in his veto message, the governor has made clear through his actions that he has little interest in honoring the expressed will of Maine voters and has either stood ready with his veto pen or stood behind House Republicans in blocking implementation of these citizen-made laws.
One has to look no further than the ongoing battle to force the LePage administration to follow the law passed by voters last fall expanding Medicaid to observe the full extent of the governor’s complete unwillingness to implement the laws created by the people who put him into office and the apparent disdain our he has for Maine’s century-old direct democratic process.
Medicaid expansion was a policy that LePage had vetoed five times before its passage on the ballot, and LePage has essentially been pretending that the law doesn’t exist. The administration has failed to even attempt to take the preliminary steps necessary for complying with the law, despite having sufficient funding to begin the implementation process. As it stands, members of the Legislature may have to initiate legal action to compel the executive branch to comply with the law.
Whether it’s marijuana or Medicaid, allowing the governor to flout the state’s democratic process will only work to disenchant voters and wreak additional damage to our collective faith in our political institutions to be responsive to our needs and desires. That faith is essential to the health of a civil society, and a representative democracy is bound to wither without it.
Those kinds of long term consequences should give the Legislature pause as they consider whether to let the governor once again get away with undermining the people’s laws.
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