Self-Dealing Bill, State Anthem, and First Vax Vote of Session: Legislative Scouting Report for April 10

The Maine House and Senate will be in session on Thursday beginning at 10am. Both calendars are fairly light and most of the morning will be taken up by bill referrals and legislative sentiments. The Maine Wire will be tracking many of bills being referred to committees, but one of particular note caught our eye. A freshman legislator may have submitted a bill that would benefit themselves directly.

Representative Flavia DeBrito (D-Waterville) has sponsored a bill that is being referenced to the State and Local Government Committee tomorrow. The bill is named, “An Act to Provide Compensation to Individuals with Lived Experience Serving on Advisory Boards, Commissions, Councils and Similar Groups” and will be known as LD 1566.

LD 1566 is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bill in the sense that it proscribes special treatment for one group of people, in addition to impacting a hallmark initiative of the Mills administration. According to the bill’s summary, it “Provides an exception for boards that are not currently authorized to receive compensation or reimbursement for expenses to allow board members who have lived experience regarding the subject matter of the board to receive lived experience compensation if they are not otherwise compensated for their time serving on the board by their employer or the entity they represent.”

Then the bill text gets more specific still: “The bill allows board members to be compensated in an amount not to exceed the legislative per diem for their time and be reimbursed for expenses, including but not limited to meals and refreshments provided during the meeting of the board, childcare and travel, to the extent that the department or agency of State Government with which the board is associated has sufficient money in the budget of the department or agency to provide the compensation and reimburse the expenses.”

Rep. DeBrito was recently appointed to serve on the Advisory Council of the Office of New Americans. A new Mainer herself, by way of Cape Verde, Rep. DeBrito may benefit from the legislation that she is proposing. There is a state statute that does not allow this type of thing. It will be interesting to see if this statute is raised at the public hearing for LD 1566. It will be even more interesting to see how many legislators who serve on state advisory boards, commissions, councils and similar groups actually recuse themselves from voting for the bill on the floor of either chamber.

The House will also take up a ‘non-congruent matter’ tomorrow. That’s a fancy way of saying that the House and Senate voted on the same bill, and they disagreed. One chamber wanted to pass the bill and one chamber wanted to kill the bill. The bill in question is LD 373, “An Act to Establish ‘Welcome Home’ as the Official State Anthem”. LD 373 is actually pretty spicy so far for this special emergency session called by Governor Janet Mills. We’ve seen official status for state reptiles, state amphibians and state sled dogs getting enshrined into law. Now we have an epic battle over the state anthem that will play out tomorrow. By the end of this emergency session perhaps we will see more emergency bills to codify the official state beer or the official state fly fishing knot. At this point everything is an emergency and anything is possible this session.

On a more serious note, there are several divided reports tomorrow that will lead to floor debates. There is one bill that will most certainly stir people up on both sides of the aisle. L.D. 436 “An Act to Prohibit State Agencies from Promoting the COVID-19 Vaccination to Children” was sponsored Representative John Eder (R-Waterboro). The bill comes from the Health and Human Services Committee with an Ought Not to Pass from all of the Democrats in the majority. Minority Republicans were unanimous in their support of passing the bill.

The summary of LD 436 is short and reads, “This bill prevents any state agency, through any program including the MaineCare program, from promoting the COVID-19 vaccination to any individual who has not attained 18 years of age.”

It comes at an interesting moment. A four-hour legislative hearing on Wednesday heard debate on both sides of whether to restore religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. Also from a process standpoint, the timing is interesting because several Judiciary Democrats attempting to install a state level Chevron deference statute with LD 1484, which would force Maine courts to defer to state agencies.

Rep. Eder’s bill faces a very steep climb up Mount Everest. However, in my opinion, it was a bill worth sponsoring to push back against state agency overreach.

The Senate will be taking up all of the bills that were voted on in the House on Tuesday. It is not expected that many, if any, of them will be sent back to the House in non-congruent disagreement.

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