In their latest campaign finance filing the Maine Association of Realtors reports giving the maximum individual donation of $425 each to 16 state lawmakers seeking re-election. All are Republicans and all 16 have been endorsed by the Christian Civic League of Maine, the state’s leading opponent of abortion rights which recently celebrated the overturning of…
Over the objections of Republicans, the Maine Legislature Labor and Housing Committee on Friday heard a presentation on the racist origins of the exclusion of certain workers from New Deal legislation. Committee chair Sen. Craig Hickman (D-Kennebec) said comments during the April 7 public hearing on bills to expand protections under labor laws to farmworkers…
State Sen. Stacey Guerin, a Republican member of the legislature’s Labor and Housing Committee, said Wednesday that the Mills administration should consider cancelling a cost-of-living increase to Maine’s minimum wage, scheduled for the beginning of next year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of a more than four-hour long video briefing with the…
Lawmakers and advocates who have been trying to help out-of-work Mainers access unemployment insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic say that the added strain on the state’s benefit system has exposed systemic neglect and dysfunction years in the making. On Wednesday, lawmakers on the state legislature’s Labor and Housing Committee were briefed by Department of Labor…
With the Maine Senate poised to vote on a statewide earned paid sick days law, Republicans are scrambling to put forth an alternative that one analysis says would reduce potential benefits for more than one third of Maine’s private sector workforce. Last week, every Democrat on the legislature’s Labor and Housing Committee voted to move…
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…