AUGUSTA, Maine — Members of the Maine House overrode vetoes with a total budget price tag of $60 million last night in a marathon session of lightninglike votes.
The House action came in response to 64 line-item vetoes in the budget delivered to lawmakers yesterday morning by Gov. Paul LePage.
After rejecting the governor's budget proposal, lawmakers enacted their own $6.7 billion two-year budget with veto-proof majorities in both houses earlier in the week.
Lawmakers may have thought that they could declare victory in the battle over the state budget, but LePage was not pleased with large sections of the tax and spending plan — in particular those areas that provided government assistance to legal noncitizens that he prefers to describe as illegal aliens.
LePage's message to the Legislature? It's not over.
"For five months they wasted our time and it's time that I'm going to waste a little bit of their time and frankly, they ought to be sitting back and seeing what's really happening," LePage says.
With that, the governor proceeded to use his line-item veto authority to reject 64 budget lines totaling $60 million affecting a wide variety of programs and initiatives — including some of his own.
LePage has long supported and advocated for more spending on mentally ill Mainers, the elderly, domestic violence and increased drug enforcement. Yet he vetoed spending for budget lines that funded all of those initiatives to create an inconvenient evening for lawmakers.
Unlike other bills LePage has returned to the Legislature, line item vetoes only require a simple majority to be overridden by lawmakers. Still, because nearly all of the line items were in both budget years, the process that began shortly after 8 p.m. lingered on into the evening despite House Speaker Mark Eves' best efforts to move things along.
"We will be going through these relatively quickly," he says.
Rather than a roll call vote, which could potentially trigger floor debate and bog the process down, Eves ordered that votes be taken through a process known as a division vote in which lawmakers pushed buttons indicating whether they supported or opposed LePage's line item veto.
As soon as enough votes were recorded to indicate whether more than 50 percent of the House was voting against sustaining the governor's veto, the speaker would close the vote.
Before too long, Eves had worked his rhythm up to a point where LePage's vetoes were being thrown out at a rate of about two every minute.
At one point, the process was just moving too fast for Rep. Jeff Timberlake, a Republican from Turner who had difficulty keeping up.
"Is there any chance we can take a second because I just got this and as fast as you're going I haven't had a chance to mark it up to how I want to vote each one, I can't keep up," Timberlake says.
Members of the House rejected requests from two lawmakers who wanted roll call votes and finished overriding all of the vetoes at around 10:12 p.m.
The override process now moves to the Senate later this morning.