For nearly 200 years, the Maine Legislature never voted to impeach anyone. Lawmakers are now poised for a second impeachment vote in eight years.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows will join former Gov. Paul LePage on that list when legislators vote as soon as next week on a GOP impeachment resolution over the Democrat’s ruling last week that former President Donald Trump is ineligible for Maine’s Republican primary ballot.
The resolution has no chance of passing in the Democratic-led Legislature, just like the 2016 effort to get rid of LePage, a Republican. But impeachment was rarely ever discussed in state politics before that vote. The recent votes mark an era of increased polarization.
“It’s not going to have any practical impact, but it’s a chance for a political party to make a statement, I guess, more than anything else,” said former Attorney General Michael Carpenter, a Democrat from Houlton who also served as a lawmaker in stints from the 1970s to 2020.
Carpenter never remembers impeachment being discussed during his earlier years in Augusta. He co-chaired a legislative panel that examined Maine’s laws on the subject in 1986 and issued a report noting lawmakers had never impeached anyone but used a lesser-known “address” process 13 times — all before 1940 — to try to remove officeholders.
The Maine Constitution requires a majority vote in the House to impeach an official for a “misdemeanor in office,” while a two-thirds majority in the Senate is required to remove someone from office. In the address process, both chambers of the Legislature can request the governor remove an official after notifying them of claims against them and having a hearing.
Since Democrats control the Legislature, the Bellows impeachment process is likely to end with a House vote against the resolution from Rep. John Andrews, R-Paris, which asks the chamber to form a committee to investigate allegations of “misconduct” against the secretary of state. Bellows responded by calling the effort a political attack.,
Andrews focuses on Bellows’ failure to recuse herself from a hearing on Trump’s eligibility after serving as an elector for President Joe Biden in 2020. The law governing such hearings requires an official to consider recusal after a complaint of bias or conflict. Trump’s campaign asked Bellows to recuse herself two days before she issued the ruling and after the hearing.
Neither the Andrews resolution nor the 2016 one against LePage firmly outlined charges, aiming to leave that in the hands of a committee. The one from eight years ago outlined eight alleged acts of misconduct, from the former governor barring commissioners from speaking to legislative panels to LePage’s role in a school rescinding a job offer to a top lawmaker.
Leading Democratic lawmakers opposed the LePage impeachment effort, which was pushed by progressives. It was defeated in a 96-52 vote, but it still forced three hours of floor debate that was often interrupted by points of order.
“You know in your heart that what’s been going on around here is not right,” then-Rep. Charlotte Warren, D-Hallowell, a supporter of impeachment, said during the 2016 debate. “Today, follow your heart.”
“I would suggest to you that we don’t have an impeachment problem,” retorted then-House Minority Leader Ken Fredette, R-Newport, a top LePage ally who opposed impeachment. “I would suggest to you that we have a political problem.”
The LePage impeachment — along with congressional Democrats’ two impeachments of Trump — “unleashed the demon” of the process as an ongoing force in state and national politics, Carpenter said. And Fredette noted Thursday that it highlights a faction’s ability to bring issues to the forefront even if no action will be taken.
“As a state, we have generally avoided those partisan battles historically for 200 years,” Fredette said. “But it does start to reflect a growing sense of a bigger partisan divide.”
