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What we're reading
â Democrats' spending bill is expected to keep 14,000 Mainers on Affordable Care Act marketplace plans insured.
â In Maine's wild housing story of the week, a couple in the coastal village of Bayside cited threats of bodily harm as a reason for dropping their plan to build a store and three apartments.
â Equipment rolled onto Sears Island on Tuesday for a state survey on its suitability for an offshore wind hub, rankling environmental groups that want the island to stay undeveloped.
â Maine's small size could bode well for the recent trend of retail unionization efforts, one expert said.
â The Army Corps of Engineers has set aside $4.7 million to dredge the Union River in Ellsworth. The harbor has been the subject of recent city improvements but has only 1 foot of clearance in some places at low tide.
â Calls are increasing at Maine's domestic violence resource centers, but the volunteers who take them are dwindling, Maine Public reports. |
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| đ·Â House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, is pictured in the House chamber at the State House in Augusta on June 30, 2021. (BDN photo by Troy R. Bennett) |
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Legislative Democrats wrote a letter to Maine's congressional delegation backing the party's spending bill.
â The Friday letter, led by Senate President Troy Jackson of Allagash, and House Speaker Ryan Fecteau of Biddeford, singles out the expanded marketplace subsidies and changes that will allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs and capping out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 annually.
â Prescription drugs have been a major legislative cause for Jackson and one that has put him on collision courses with Gov. Janet Mills. While she was attorney general in 2017, she lobbied lawmakers to stifle a generic-drug bill from Jackson that her office deemed preempted by federal law.
â But Mills signed a package of prescription drug bills championed by Jackson after Democrats took full control of Augusta in the 2018 election, including a drug importation program that is still awaiting federal approval.
As Trump mulled schemes to keep the presidency after the 2020 election, a Maine senator was a conduit to the top military official.
â After the election, Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, talked often with Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an excerpt of a book on the Trump presidency by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser published by the New Yorker.
â Milley was assuring King that the military would play no role in Trump's efforts to keep the presidency at that time, with the senator saying their conversations were about "the danger of some attempt to use the military to declare martial law." King, in turn, assured fellow senators that the military would "do the right thing."
â During Biden's transition, King was reportedly considered for the top intelligence post in a sign of his Democratic national security cache that nevertheless seemed to be only a fleeting possibility. |
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