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Nearly five years ago, Janet Mills looked directly into the camera and reassured Mainers everywhere that she was a truth teller, who wouldn’t lie to us or go back on her word. “I’m always going to be straight with you,” she declared, “and that’s the kind of governor I’ll be.”
As her first four years drew to a close and she began campaigning for reelection, the supposedly straight-talking Mills told Mainers that bipartisanship had been a centerpiece of her governorship. In her first debate with Paul LePage last fall, she congratulated herself on working “in partnership with Republicans, Democrats and independents in the Legislature,” and she would do it more if reelected.
That wasn’t what had really happened, though, with Mills governing for a year and a half without much involvement from either political party, and then promptly burned the Republicans by forcing through a partisan budget without any meaningful collaboration with them. We could be forgiven, then, for being a bit skeptical that she would be any different in her second term. And of course, she hasn’t been.
Right out of the gate, she pulled the exact same partisan stunt and steamrolled minority Republicans, leaving them out of not only the budget, but nearly all important legislation.
Yet being disingenuous about bipartisanship is hardly the worst of her political sins.
On the issue of abortion, Mills has similarly lied to our faces. Asked in the first debate of 2022 about her plans if reelected, Mills said unequivocally, “I support the current Maine law. It reflects Roe v. Wade, which tragically the U.S. Supreme Court has chosen to overturn.”
She continued, saying, “I have no plans to change the current law.”
This was an important position, because even though Maine is a decidedly pro-choice state, abortion is a famously nuanced issue. Most pro-choice people do not believe in universal access under any circumstance at any time, and support restrictions. In general, people grow decidedly more negative to the “freedom to choose” the later in a pregnancy it gets. Many polls even show a majority of Americans believing that abortion should be illegal in the second and third trimesters.
Put another way, it is very likely that the operative majority in Maine wants abortion to be legal, but reasonably restricted in the later terms. By saying that she supported Maine law as it was, and explaining that she had no plans to change it, she was casting herself as the defender of the status quo. It was LePage, she argued, who was the radical. She was no radical, but instead a white knight there to protect the law as it stood.
That’s what made her proposal to expand abortion so jarring. Not only did she break her directly stated position, but she did so in a direction that is not broadly supported in America, polls show. When you violate a promise, it is usually a bad idea to do so by standing on the other side of majorities. Doing so makes a large-scale counterreaction inevitable.
But perhaps most damning of all the broken pledges is the most recent one. Last week, Mills gave her public support to a proposal that would increase taxes on Maine workers, and Maine businesses to pay for a paid leave law. Mills promised, in both of her campaigns for governor, that she would oppose any tax hikes or new taxes on Mainers.
Explaining herself, and acknowledging her pledge in a Portland Press Herald column announcing her decision, Mills said that she was going back on her promise because, in her words, “I live in the real world.”
As opposed to the world she inhabited when she was asking for us to vote for her?
Mills’ argument claimed that the legislation wasn’t perfect, but that it was better than a proposed referendum that might pass if she didn’t support this bill. So, because she lives in the real world, she had no choice but to support this.
Absent from her argument is the fact that New Hampshire instituted a paid leave law that did not require new taxes, and could have provided a framework for a Maine law that didn’t break her promise. Absent also was the thought, apparently, that she could have publicly and forcefully campaigned against that referendum, if it came up, and that the power of her position could have made the difference to a deciding public.
Alas, in the “real world” none of those possibilities matter. All that matters is what Mills said she would do, and what she actually does. And in that, the broken promises are piling up.
