December 27, 2025
John Andrews is the Political Editor for the Maine Wire. He brings six year’s experience as a former state representative to the Maine Wire’s political coverage. He can be reached at [email protected]
Interview with Jerry Leeman: Today we bring you a story about a handful of fishermen rallying against a billion-dollar green industrial project, shady foreign corporations, and our own federal and state government. All are conspiring to generate a cash cow for…
On June 20th, 2019, Governor Janet Mills (D) signed LD 534, a bill to make ballot initiative questions easier to understand, into law with an emergency preamble — meaning it went straight into effect. It was my first and only bill of any consequence signed into…
The Maine legislature will meet Thursday for the third session day in a row. Thursday’s calendar is light in both chambers; however, on the agenda there are several noteworthy bills to keep an eye on as well as a resolution showing how bans on militia training and wea…
The Montreal Canadiens are in a playoff series and Wednesday is Franco-American Day in the legislature. It’s a good week to have French-Canadian roots. On the regular House Calendar on April 23 are the final votes on the perceived gender, race, identity Equal Rights A…
It’s Easter weekend, but the only Easter egg to be found under the dome in Augusta is just another goose egg on the scoreboard for anything even close to resembling an emergency to justify this current emergency session. The House and Senate will meet tomorrow at 10am…
It’s Tax Day. Taxation is theft. With that grim reminder out of the way, let’s get down to the scouting report for the April 15 session for the Maine House and Senate. Both chambers will gavel in tomorrow at 10 a.m. for a session with light calendars. There are a fe…
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…
The Maine House and Senate will both have session days on Tuesday with a full dance card of debates and divided reports. The chambers will take up a repeal of the ban on plastic bags, as well as the ban on paramilitary training, and the perennial vote on a state-level E…
The Maine Legislature’s Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing on a bill Monday intended to codify into law the principle that power essentially belongs to state agencies and not the people. If enacted, LD 1408 would mandate that state bureaucrats exercise mor…
Maine’s Constitutional Officers, including the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer, are not elected by the people. Instead, the state has Soviet-style commissars installed by the elite of the political party in power. This is due to a flaw in Maine’s…
During tomorrow’s House session, legislators will tackle a 40-page calendar. Those pages are largely filled with bill references to committees, legislative sentiments, and ‘In Memorandum’ tributes. The work on the calendar as written should go smoothly and quickly…
Maine’s Office of New Americans is a state sanctioned cabal of non-governmental organization gate keepers and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion radicals. The Office was created under Hannah Pingree by order of Governor Janet Mills. Gov. Mills appointed its first Directo…
Secretary of State — and announced gubernatorial candidate — Shenna Bellows has officially notified the House of Representatives that anti-gun activists have now collected enough valid signatures to place the ‘Red Flag’ law on the ballot. The law if enacted by r…
A Hallowell Democrat has introduced a bill to expand the use of overseas absentee ballots for local elections. In last year’s federal and state elections, absentee ballots swung the Second District congressional race and gave Democrats the majority for the 132nd Maine…
A Winterport Republican has introduced a bill that limits the immunity of the state’s education system. The bill’s public hearing on Monday afternoon comes in the middle of a political storm sweeping across Maine schools that includes a recent sexual assault in Buxt…
Tomorrow the legislature gavels in for a day of work in the Governor’s new special session. Both the House and Senate have light calendars. The goal is to probably wrap things up in time for committees to start at 1pm. There will be the usual administrative paper shuf…
Struck by how quickly Augusta has changed, I look back to when I got my start in the capital. In 2018, I was a freshman member of the 129th Legislature. My first day I found a note on my desk from Terry Hayes. She was a former legislator who had held my seat before me.
You get a censure! and you get a censure! and you get a censure! Action in the House seems to be shaping up like an old episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Tomorrow starts a prefabricated special session called by Gov. Janet Mills to finish the work that 132nd Legislatur…
The Maine state government is Frigged Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR, as the military acronym is politely known). It’s obvious to anyone paying attention. There are no checks and balances, rules are ignored or misinterpreted. Waste, fraud and abuse rule the day. The…
The next and perhaps final phase of the budget battle is starting to gear up in Augusta. This week the House and Senate are scheduled for session days on both Tuesday and Thursday. The fact that the legislative calendars for tomorrow appears to be basically boilerplate …
The Maine House and Senate spent the second half of Tuesday passing different versions of the state’s supplemental budget between the chambers, but again failed to enact the measure by the time the session came to an end that evening. At issue was LD 209, largely a bi…