This thing going on in Maine is wild, as so many things tend to be with the marvelously unhinged Republican Gov. Paul LePage.
As you may have seen earlier in the week, LePage seemed by all accounts except his own to have catastrophically botched vetoing nearly 20 bills the legislature had already passed, many or all of which he vehemently opposed.
In LePage’s telling, this was all part of his plan, not a botched veto, but a particular interpretation of the Maine constitution that should be obvious to anyone. Except it wasn’t obvious, and hasn’t been the custom or practice in the state. His interpretation smelled very much like an after-the-fact legal rationale to try escape the bind he put himself in.
But now LePage is going one step further.
Amazingly, he’s treating another 50+ bills already passed by the legislature in the exact same way: holding on to them way beyond the 10-day deadline the constitution gives him to veto them. Normally that means they automatically become law, but LePage is arguing that’s he’s got more time because the legislature “adjourned.” I won’t get into all the minutiae here. Tierney Sneed catches you up on this latest weirdness here.
Normally, you would deduce that maybe the governor did have a plan all along. No one in their right mind would jeopardize his veto power over dozens of other bills unless he was really, really sure of his plan and the legal basis for it. Right? But this is LePage. And the way he operates suggests that he’s the kind of guy who, having been caught screwing up big time, would not only deny it was a screw up at all, but continue to extend the screw up in more elaborate and dramatic ways just to prove his point that he intended this outcome all along.
If that sounds more like a teenager playing chicken than a grown man governing a state, you’re starting to get the idea of how surreal it’s been in Maine under LePage’s leadership. But this veto fiasco could be the coup de grace of LePage’s reign of increasing bizarreness. It may very well end up in court when the legislature refuses to accept his purported veto. LePage says he welcomes a court fight. If LePage loses, and some 70 bills that he planned to veto become law (that he wants to veto a whopping 70 bills is another mind-boggling aspect of his veto shenanigans), LePage will have fatally overplayed his hand. But if he somehow prevails in court, all bets are off and LePage will be unabated and able to continue to act with unchallenged impunity.
This is going to be fascinating to watch.
