AUGUSTA, Maine — Democrats on the Maine Legislature’s budget committee began muscling past Republicans on Saturday, kicking off party-line votes on a new spending plan.
It seems to be a new standard under five years of Democratic control of state government. The Legislature passed a two-year spending plan by a simple majority in 2021 for the first time since 2006, then set aside the usual consensus process again in March to ink a $9.9 billion budget while saying Republican tax-cut demands could be considered later this spring.
They have not been so far in talks about a budget addition after Gov. Janet Mills unveiled an additional $900 million spending proposal in May. During marathon sessions on the chamber floors over the last month, the budget panel canceled many public sessions, only holding scant bipartisan votes on non-controversial parts of the Democratic governor’s proposal.
Appropriators held late-night meetings on Friday to finalize next steps. The committee came out around noon on Saturday to take a series of mostly party-line votes on government positions, though a few Republicans crossed over to support some of them. Democrats kicked off votes by saying talks on more contentious items would continue Saturday.
Rep. Melanie Sachs, D-Freeport, the panel’s co-chair, said her party was trying to “get this process forward” by taking the votes. Rep. Sawin Millett, R-Waterford, a veteran appropriator, called the maneuver “a pathway” to a potential majority-only budget and urged Democrats to engage his party on major spending items.
“I am long past the point of feeling that it’s low-hanging-fruit time or weed time,” he said. “We need to get into the harvesting of bigger crops.”
A majority budget would further erode the relationship between the parties. House Democrats needed hours to wrangle votes from their own members to pass a high-priority abortion-rights measure, angering Republican opponents. House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, is going to need some of them to override a likely veto from Mills on a signature tribal-rights bill.
There are other side effects for Democrats. Budgets that win two-thirds approval in both chambers can take effect immediately. Those passed by simple majorities take three months to pass into law, meaning this money will only be available near September’s end.
The majority party looked willing to take these risks as they ran the clock out on the budget process. Lawmakers could finish their business for the year sometime next week. Last week, Sen. Rick Bennett, R-Oxford, a budget panel member, said there were many “unresolved issues,” and lawmakers were running out of time to solve them.
Major pieces of a potential Democratic-only budget were still unclear on Saturday. Mills’ proposal included major items mostly swept out of the last spending plan, including $80 million for housing initiatives, $31 million grants for emergency medical services and start-up funding for souped-up business tax breaks.
It set aside Republicans’ top demand for $200 million in income tax cuts, something that has been centered on lowering rates for the bottom bracket. Democrats have been likely to resist that, with the liberal Maine Center for Economic Policy finding the biggest benefits of one version of the Republican plan would go to those making more than $150,000 per year.
