Word was handed down by the Secretary of State's office yesterday that four citizen-initiated referenda were approved for the November ballot, including a referendum on providing medical marijuana, a proposed veto of the school consolidation bill passed last session, and two tax measures written and supported by the Maine Heritage Policy Center and Maine Leads, a pair of conservative interest groups.
These two groups had also submitted a petition for a third referendum which would have deregulated Maine's health insurance industry, but every single signature was rejected due to a mistake in the signature gathering process. Apparently, the pages on which the legislation was printed were presented out of order, making it difficult for signatories to judge the full intent of the referendum.
Even if the petitions had been printed correctly, other signature collection and administration mistakes would have invalidated 9,509 signatures, according to the Secretary of State's decision, dropping the number below the 55,087 needed to secure a spot on the ballot.
All of these measures will make for an interesting election in November, but the campaign for the new TABOR referendum may be the one to watch. Will Mainers resent the fact that these groups are trying to push a piece of legislation that's already been rejected once, or will they feel that the state fiscal and political situation has changed enough (or has failed to change) so that this kind of blunt tax reform is advisable? We'll start to find out soon.
You're right. The Pro-TABOR
You're right. The Pro-TABOR folks, and the property tax cap folks before them, keep coming back to the table with new proposals that are essentially the same thing dressed up differently. In every case they are efforts to limit the scope and size of government and to in some way restrict the governments ability to take an ever increasing amount of the average Mainers honestly earned incomes. What you're missing is that each of these elections is close and usually won through the use of distortion and fear tactics, principly driven through media campaigns funded by public service union money and misused municipal contributions, washed through "non-partisan" groups like the MMA.
The truth is that after each election, left Liberal Democrats at all levels of government appear in front of television cameras, mopping their brow, thanking the voters for "trusting the process" and avowing that they have "gotten the message", but then going right back out and spending more money and growing the size of government. It's a classic con and the only real question is what happens first: the voters either see through the scam or government in this state gets so top heavy that the entire economy of the state collapses.