By Michael Shepherd - May 5, 2023
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📷 Assistant Senate Minority Leader Lisa Keim, R-Dixfield, is pictured in the Senate chamber at the State House in Augusta on June 30, 2021. (BDN photo by Troy R. Bennett)

Good morning from Augusta. Legislative committees are in today for hearings on Republican gun bills and Democratic criminal justice proposals. Here's the full agenda.

What we're watching today

The politics are different for a second effort to study Maine's COVID-19 response. Two years ago, Republicans put forward a measure to assemble a legislative commission to study the state's pandemic response. They are trying again this year with a different tone hanging over what is still a charged debate.

Assistant Senate Minority Leader Lisa Keim, R-Dixfield, who championed the 2021 measure, is back with a similar proposal. It has a broad focus, directing 13 lawmakers who would be appointed to look at elements of the response including contracts, executive orders and policy outcomes from health to education. Republicans have criticized Gov. Janet Mills in those areas.

There is no exact analog for these kinds of reviews elsewhere in the country. Congress bogged down last year on an effort to put together a commission modeled on the one that investigated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. States have probed different parts of the pandemic response, including in Virginia, where lawmakers studied negative effects on K-12 education.

A public hearing on Keim's measure comes Monday on the heels of the Democratic-led Legislature rejecting several Republican bills aimed at watering down vaccine mandates, including at colleges and universities and by repealing a 2019 law that got rid of non-medical exemptions to school vaccine requirements.

"Maine people should not be forced to trust Big Pharma or the government with health care decisions," Keim said in a floor speech last week, according to Maine Public.

Keim's focus on the vaccine measure could color the work that she would want the new commission to focus on. In the 2021 debate on her similar measure, Republicans were deeply focused on Mills' use of executive orders to manage the core parts of the pandemic response, something that both parties gave her authority to do but Republicans regretted a few months in.

That bill two years ago was opposed by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which argued against studying the pandemic response when it was still a fluid situation. The Senate still passed a version of the measure unanimously before it failed by a seven-vote margin in the House.

That one was sponsored by all Republicans, while Sen. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop, is on it now. The Mills administration's stance on it will still be important, though the recent moves by the World Health Organization to downgrade the pandemic's status and the federal government to stop reporting new infections may give the effort to review the response more weight.

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News and notes

📷 The Maine State House is seen at dawn from Capitol Park on Dec. 2, 2020, in Augusta. (AP photo by Robert F. Bukaty)

🚪 A crucial legislative paid-leave push is about to begin.

◉ The liberal Maine Women's Lobby, which is part of a coalition pushing for a paid family and medical leave program, said in a Monday email to supporters that it expects the main bill on the subject to be printed this week.

◉ This bill is expected to reflect the proposal from a legislative commission that has formed a basis for discussion so far. It would put Maine among 11 states to create this new type of insurance program, which would be funded by a new tax on wages at a cost that is likely to exceed $400 million per year.

◉ The stakes are high on this issue. For one, the coalition pressing for paid leave has said it will go to the ballot in 2024 if lawmakers do not address paid leave. Key Republicans have largely opposed the push to date, while business groups and progressives expect Mills to try to negotiate a consensus deal.

◉ There isn't much time for the Legislature to deal with it. By the Maine Women's Lobby's count, only 20 percent of bills have left legislative committees ahead of the scheduld adjournment date of June 22.

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What we're reading

🔵 These Democrats aren't backing Mills' abortion bill yet.

🚨 Soaring drug violence overwhelms small Down East police forces.

✋ The state pushes back on a bipartisan effort to end a police surveillance unit.

⚡ We explain the utility takeover referendum set for the November ballot.

⛺ Bangor closed a homeless camp. It's getting more vagrancy complaints.

🚑 This hospital system nearly solved an EMT shortage. Here's your soundtrack.

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