“We the People.”
Those are not just the first three words of the United States Constitution. They are the foundation of the American experiment. They are a declaration that power in this country does not flow from a king, a ruling class, a bureaucracy, or a political machine.
It flows from us.
That is the point Maine people need to remember right now, because no one is coming to save us.
Vice President JD Vance came to Maine on Thursday and did what too many state leaders, local officials, and legacy media outlets have refused to do: he validated the fraud crisis in this state. He called it out. He blasted the Mills administration for failing to work with the Trump administration to confront it. And he made clear that the people of Maine have a role to play.
Vance told this reporter that it is up to us to hold our local and state officials accountable. When that happens, he said, the thieves will be prosecuted.
That is the message Maine needed to hear.
Because the truth is simple: when a state representative, city councilor, selectman, state senator, or even the governor knows that zombie health care offices exist in their city, town, or district, and they stay silent,they have failed the people they were elected to serve.
When public money is being drained, when vulnerable Mainers are being used as billing codes, when fraud is hiding in plain sight, silence is not neutrality. Silence is complicity.
Speak up and lead, or get out of the way.
Maine has two choices.
We can allow the madness to continue. We can watch the same political class offer excuses, form committees, issue vague statements, and hope the public moves on. We can keep pretending this is just a paperwork problem or an isolated scandal.
Or we can hold them accountable.
We can demand answers. We can demand investigations. We can demand prosecutions where the evidence supports them. And we can vote out every elected official who looked the other way while fraud festered in their own backyard.
The current leadership in Augusta has had every opportunity to confront this crisis. Instead, the fraud has grown. The excuses have grown. The silence has grown.
At some point, Maine people are allowed to ask the obvious question: was this allowed to happen because it served a political purpose? Was this tolerated because the system benefited the people in power?
In a sane state, the names at the center of these failures would not be shielded by political convenience. They would be facing real scrutiny. Deqa Dhalac, Yusuf Yusuf, and Gov. Janet Mills should all be answering hard questions about what they knew, when they knew it, and why this crisis was allowed to continue.
But they are not under serious pressure because We the People have not demanded it loudly enough.
That must end now.
It is time to speak up. It is time to shake the status quo. It is time for new leadership in Augusta, in city halls, in town offices, and across every level of government where officials have forgotten who they work for.
They work for us.
They spend our money.
They answer to us.
We the People decide…not them. That is not a slogan. That is the entire point of this country.
Maine does not belong to the political class. It does not belong to bureaucrats, insiders, consultants, or taxpayer-funded nonprofits that believe public money is theirs to control.
It belongs to the people who pay the bills, raise the families, build the communities, and expect their government to protect the vulnerable rather than enable the predators.
Now is the time.
No more silence. No more excuses. No more looking the other way.
We the People still hold the power.
Now let’s go take it back.
