Mills, State House Dems Poised to Approve $120 Million Spending Bill Using “Extraordinary Occasion” Maneuver

Maine Gov. Janet Mills and her Democratic allies in the Legislature were poised Monday afternoon to once again invoke an extraordinary parliamentary maneuver to pass a major spending package without Republican votes.

By the end of the business day, the Democrat-controlled House and Senate had failed to adopt the same version of the spending measure, and the already unpopular measure lost so much momentum that the leadership retreated from an attempt to push through the spending bill on a majority basis.

The drama began Tuesday morning when Maine House Majority Democrats moved forward with a bill with a hefty title and an even heftier price tag: LD 209, “An Act to Make Supplemental Appropriations and Allocations from the General Fund and Other Funds for the Expenditures of State Government and to Change Certain Provisions of the Law Necessary to the Proper Operations of State Government for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 2025.”

The bill calls for $120 million in additional spending, the vast majority of which would go toward the underfunded medical welfare program.

The initial vote on the committee report fell along party lines with 74 Democrats and left leaning Independents voting ‘Yes’ and 71 Republicans voting ‘No’. That narrow win sent the Supplemental Budget to the Senate for Concurrence.

Concurrence is the legislative term for agreement between the House and Senate on bill that has the same exact wording and expenditures in both Chambers. It is an essential step for a bill to advance to the governor’s desk and be signed into law. A bill left in non-Concurrence dies between the chambers if they can’t agree on its final form.

LD 209 made it onto the House Consent Calendar after receiving a unanimous vote from members present at the late-night Appropriations Committee vote on February 5th. Under new Joint Rules recently adopted, absent members were not allowed to offer a new report of Ought Not to Pass, which would have created a Divided Report and removed the bill from the unanimous Consent Calendar.

Rep. Ken Fredette (R-Newport) was absent from the late night committee session, but had wanted to vote No on the bill. The new rules prevented that. The Democrat-controlled Appropriations Committee denied a request to reconsider the vote to allow Fredette to log his No vote.

Earlier on Tuesday, House members voted unanimously 138-0 to fix that rule change and allow absent members to vote Ought Not to Pass in Committee, but the Fredette ‘No’ vote was not allowed to be counted due the existing rules having been in place on the night of February 5th.

In subsequent statements, the Mills Administration nonetheless insisted on calling support for the committee’s report unanimous despite Fredette’s clear opposition.

Appropriations House Chair Drew Gattine (D-Westbrook), Rep. Michelle Meyer (D-Eliot), and Rep. Jim Dill (D-Old Town) all spoke in favor of the bill, citing fiscal emergencies and a potential Spruce Budworm outbreak as reasons why the bill needed to pass without delay.

[RELATED: Expensive HIV Treatments Add Pressure to Maine’s Healthcare Budget Amid $118 Million Funding Gap…]

Republican Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winter Harbor), Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) and Rep. Gary Drinkwater (R-Milford) and others argued for a more collegial approach and for the bill to go back to the Appropriations Committee to be re-worked for bipartisan agreement.

Rep. Libby pointed out the donkey in the room when she said: “Maine people don’t want us to bail you (Democrats) out.” She was referring to the fact that the Democrats have held control of the Governor’s Office, the House and the Senate for the last six years. In recent years, they’ve passed majority budgets to avoid having to reach a 2/3rds majority vote that would required support from both parties.

Here’s where the State House drama gets further into the weeds of arcane parliamentary procedures, quirks of Maine’s State Constitution, and a tactic the Mills Administration has increasingly come to rely upon to advance all major spending bills without Republican support.

In the last budget cycle, because Democrats could not achieve a 2/3rds majority, their leadership decided to adjourn the legislature prematurely through a procedure know as sine die. Adjourning in that manner meant that legislation passed to that point would take effect after 90 days. In the case of the last two-year budget, that meant the new spending package would be in place before the end of the state’s fiscal year. Thus, there would be no lapse in state funding and no “government shutdown.”

Gov. Mills then re-convened the legislature in a special session, invoking the “extraordinary occasion” provision of Maine’s constitution, so that it could finish their legislative work. This move was made so that Democrats would not have to include Republicans in any budgetary decisions, and that decision was subsequently litigated in court.

Although Mills has previously used the sine die adjournment trick to pass two-year partisan budgets, the tactic has never been used to pass supplemental spending bills. But Tuesday afternoon, multiple State House sources confirmed to the Maine Wire that the Mills Administration had threatened to use the maneuver to secure passage of the $120 million package.

[RELATED: Mills Irks GOP in Meandering, Hyperpartisan “State of the Budget” Speech…]

The initial vote on the Supplemental Budget was taken at 12:23 pm. Shortly after the Senate approved the same measure 20-14.

After the bill’s initial passage Tuesday afternoon, Republicans offered several amendments. All were killed by Rep. Drew Gattine (D-Westbrook) through Indefinite Postponement. Indefinite Postponement is a parliamentary procedure that puts the amendment into an indefinite suspension that requires a majority vote to recall it, effectively killing it for the rest of the legislative session.

Some of the notable amendments centered on the controversial new Paid Family Medical Leave (PFML) tax.

[RELATED: Maine’s Private Sector Workers Are Paying the New 1% Paycheck Tax. They’re Also Paying the Tax for State Employees…]

Rep. David Boyer (R-Poland) offered Amendment D, which would have required state employees, including legislators, to pay their share of the PFML. Currently, state employees are covered by the state, i.e. the taxpayers — unlike private sector workers, which is to say everyone else. That motion died 74-71

Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) proposed Amendment G, which would have made the new Paid Family Medical Leave program optional instead of mandatory. That motion died 73-71.

Late Monday afternoon, lawmakers in the House and Senate were still wrangling over a version of LD 209 that could be passed in concurrence between the House and Senate and, ultimately, put on the governor’s desk for approval.

At the core of the supplemental budget bill debate are some minor welfare cuts originally proposed by Mills and later backed by Republicans.

Under “Part S” of the governor’s originally proposed supplement spending bill, the state would place new limits on emergency rental assistance, including the taxpayer-funded shelter program used to house migrants during and after the Covid-19 scare.

Although Republicans supported this part of the governor’s proposal, Democratic lawmakers removed it from the version approved in the House Monday morning, causing GOP lawmakers to take a unanimous stand against the spending bill.

This is a developing story and will be updated.