The BDN Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, and does not set policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Daily COVID-19 cases have been down. State revenues are up. Maine has more than $1 billion in additional federal relief funding to figure out how to spend. Vacationland is heading into a critical summer season with easing pandemic restrictions and rising vaccinations.
In the Maine Legislature, this should be cause for celebration — and, yes, some vigorous policy debates and difficult decisions about how to best position Maine for the future. But with all the encouraging developments out there, it’s almost like some lawmakers didn’t get the memo.
As part of the Legislature’s return to the State House, an unnecessary fight over face masks has been escalating.
Lawmakers won’t be meeting at the Augusta Civic Center anymore, ditching their pandemic location, but Democratic leaders used their majority on the Legislative Council to keep the mask requirement in place. Republican lawmakers may not like it, but that’s how the Maine Constitution and legislative rules work.
There was a vote about masks, and there was an outcome. When legislators pass laws, the Maine people don’t get to pick and choose which ones to follow (at least without consequences, that is). Lawmakers don’t have some sort of special immunity to pick and choose which legislative rules to follow, either.
That didn’t stop a group of seven conservative members of the Maine House of Representatives, six Republicans and one Libertarian, from entering the State House on Monday without masks, despite being told by a Maine Capitol Police officer that masks were required by leadership. They were then stripped of their committee assignments and replaced by Democrats. Some Republicans are expected to continue to violate the rules this coming week.
Kicking people off committees and giving their seats to Democrats all but invited Republicans to frame it as a partisan power grab. Moving forward, Democratic leadership needs to be clearer about the consequences ahead of time, and keep them proportional to the violation. This shouldn’t go nuclear. The Legislature has more important things to do.
First and foremost, however, there’s an easy way to avoid further escalation: lawmakers should follow the rules and wear masks.
If Republicans want to criticize the mask wearing policy, and how it remains more restrictive than guidance from the U.S. CDC and the state of Maine, then they can keep making that argument. Like Michael Cianchette wrote in his weekend column for the BDN, “every day, Republicans could have stood on the floor of the chamber and made a motion to overrule the mask mandate. Every day, they would have been voted down. And every day, they could’ve taken their argument to the Maine people.”
Until the mask requirement is changed, however, it’s a rule that members of the Legislature have to follow. Democratic society is predicated on people following a shared set of rules, even rules they don’t like — and working to change the rules they don’t like through an agreed upon process. For many people, that may seem theoretical. But it shouldn’t be theoretical for the people who make our laws.
As another BDN columnist, David Farmer, said this week, “Decorum is an important part of the guardrails that keep political disputes from careening into a ditch of pettiness and distraction in the State House.”
Losing a Legislative Council vote to the majority party is a democratic result that flows in part from not doing well enough in the last election. So follow the rules, make your arguments to the Maine people and do better next time.
Things are moving in the right direction heading into another Maine summer, but not everyone is moving at the same speed. Many people are breathing easier, but there are still big decisions to be made. Lawmakers shouldn’t waste legislative oxygen fighting over mask rules.
