December 1, 1973
Page 39053
A NEW BREED IN MAINE'S LEGISLATURE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in recent years – with the emergence of such concepts as revenue sharing and the new federalism – there has emerged a renewed interest in the capacity of State and local government to respond to the problems of the mid-1970's.
Ever since my own service in the Maine Legislature from 1947-51, and my service as Governor from 1955-59, I have had great confidence in the potential for service at those levels of government.
My confidence has been reflected over the years in the work of the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations.
Recently, one of Maine's thoughtful political reporters, Jim Brunelle, has written a perceptive article on the evolution of the Maine Legislature since 1945. It supports my optimism on the subject. I ask unanimous consent that his article, appearing in the Maine Sunday Telegram on November 25, 1973, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
A NEW BREED IN MAINE'S LEGISLATURE
(By Jim Brunelle)
When Thomas R. LaPointe was born in Portland in 1945, there were only 14 Democrats among the 151 members of the Maine House of Representatives.
One year later a lanky, loose-limbed and Lincolnesque young attorney from Waterville ran successfully for the House and began a political career that would start Maine on the road to becoming a genuine two-party state.
Tom LaPointe was nine when Edmund S. Muskie became the first Democrat in 20 years to be handed the keys to the Blaine Mansion and he was still a teenager when in 1964 the Democrats regained control of the legislature after a half century in the cold.
Today, a state legislator in his own right, LaPointe is representative of a new breed of lawmakers who are young, thoughtful and possessed of a greater variety of interests and drive than their predecessors.
Because this new breed is largely unfettered by the chains of partisan imbalance which restricted the political development of Maine for so long, it has brought important change to the state legislature and to its ability to respond to public needs.
Today's legislator is more serious, harder working, better informed and generally more representative. He is less moved by the spokesmen of corporate interests, less dependent upon lobbyists for information and technical assistance and less of a "party man" in strictly political terms.
The new lawmaker doesn't look upon the legislature so much as a place to celebrate the status quo as an arena in which to bring about meaningful change.
"I think it's possible to get things done," says freshman LaPointe. "If you analyze the forum and look at the people in it, if you're honest and do your homework, you can affect the decision- making process. It's a very long and slow process – I'd say three steps forward and two backward – but if you work at it, you can accomplish something."
While too young to recall first-hand the developments which set the process in motion, LaPointe and many of his colleagues – both Republican and Democrat – are the beneficiaries of the state's newly emerged two-party system.
To understand the legacy, a brief history is called for:
Muskie's elevation to the governorship was pretty much of a surprise to everyone, including Muskie, who, although he became an immensely popular state leader was never fully able to transfer political legitimacy to Democratic candidates further down the line.
Despite some minor erosion, Republicans maintained impressive majorities in both houses of the legislature. Democrats were still viewed as rather barbaric and dangerous, generally unsuited to looking after the public's business.
It fell in 1964 to Barry Goldwater to open the gates to the barbarians. And there were many in Maine who were convinced that a major disaster had befallen the state when the Goldwater Debacle, as it came to be identified, swept the Democrats in control here.
Nobody knew just how they would behave in power, but the Republican minority braced for the worst. At the very least they expected to be treated shabbily and at most to be forced to look on helplessly as the state treasury was plundered.
State House veterans – some Democrats included – seriously wondered if the legislature could carry on without the services of Harvey Pease, the crusty old GOP house clerk who had dominated the House for more than three decades and who knew as no one else just how the legislative machinery was manipulated.
Everything went on quite normally after the barbarians were seated.
"It turned out that the Democrats performed no differently than the Republicans," recalls one observer who survived the transition. "There was no real change at all "
To be sure, old guard Republicans later complained about a "lamentable breakdown in decorum" under the Democrats, but the worst example they could cite was "the unprecedented practice," which was finally stopped, of senators observing a coffee break in their seats while the Senate was in session.
Such fussy outbursts hardly obscured the real significance of the takeover: the discovery by Maine voters that Democrats were no worse than Republicans in running things at Augusta.
Thus the Goldwater legacy.
When Tom LaPointe decided to run for political office last year, the legislature was a logical place to start.
"I'd toyed with the idea of running for city council, but that seemed more like a lottery than anything else, with 13 people running for a single seat," he recalls. Although 23 Democrats were vying for 11 legislative nominations in Portland, the odds seemed infinitely better.
He ended up sixth in the field, running better than a number of incumbents.
A native of Portland, LaPointe joined the Marines after graduating from Cheverus High School. A back injury during training in North Carolina resulted in a medical discharge and a quick end to his military career.
La Pointe was a sociology major at the University of Maine in 1970 when Nixon invaded Cambodia. He joined a protest strike with other students and by the time the fuss was over so was his academic career.
"We became so busy I just never went back to school," he says. "I had little less than a year to go and I’ll probably go back once this legislative thing is over."
A camping enthusiast, LaPointe has worked as a recreation staff planner for United Community Services, director of Camp Gregory at Gary and a member of the Model Cities recreation task force in Portland.
LaPointe was somewhat befuddled by the legislative labyrinth when he took his seat last January.
"There were times when I asked myself, 'What's going on here?'" he recalls. "It took a total immersion process for me to understand it."
His immediate problem was to identify and establish contact with a constituency.
"I had considered the idea of writing a newsletter, but I couldn't really get a handle on that because there are 60,000 people in the city of Portland. How do you send a newsletter to 60,000 people?"
On a legislator's salary, you don't, so LaPointe did the next best thing. He started mailing copies of proposed bills to groups and individuals he felt might have an interest in the measures.
Given LaPointe's particular interests, his "mailout constituency" evolved from recreation and camping groups, consumer organizations, the poor and the elderly. Where the porkbarrel interests of past legislators centered largely on roads and bridges, the new breed focuses on social program grants.
This is only one of the ways in which the Maine Legislature today is a far different body from the one that Barry Goldwater shook up nine years ago.
Owen Hancock, a Casco Democrat who served in the House in the early 1950s and then skipped 20 years before returning to the legislature two years ago, recently talked about the differences.
"In the first place, it's so much more sophisticated now, both in terms of membership and the type of bills that are being introduced.
"And the people back home are much more aware of what's going on and are much more interested. Before, if you got three or four letters a week, you'd be doing pretty good. Now you get a minimum of three or four a day, plus phone calls, telegrams and petitions."
LaPointe, on the other hand, is surprised that citizen participation in the legislative process is not higher. Shortly after his election he had an answering service attached to his home phone to handle calls from constituents while he was away.
"I thought I'd be swamped with calls," he says. "In fact I wasn't and I reluctantly discontinued the service because it was very costly. I must say that I'm sadly disappointed with the lack of feedback I got in the legislature."
The seeming inconsistency between Hancock and LaPointe on the matter of citizen participation may be one of degree. Hancock undoubtedly is getting a lot more inquiries from the folks back home than he did in the old days and LaPointe is not getting enough to suit a legislator who perceives a much broader-based constituency than his predecessors.
Hancock and other more seasoned legislators are hearing new voices these days. If, as legend holds, lawmakers once doffed their hats when passing the executive offices of Central Maine Power Co., their courtesies today have a broader reach.
The corporate influence has been significantly diffused in Augusta with the advent of effective lobbyists or the newly-emerged special interests: environmentalists, consumers, women, the poor and the elderly.
The trend revealed itself rather dramatically in the 1969 session when a lone environmental lobbyist, hired on an experimental basis by a number of conservation groups in the state, shepherded piece after piece of landmark legislation through the session and watched them pass by stunningly lopsided votes in both houses.
The industrial lobby – a phalanx of high priced and experienced agents of the big landowners, paper interests and the like – would hold daily seminars on the east portico of the State House to plan counterstrategy, usually to no avail. These veranda sessions eventually became little more than mutual morning-after commiseration for powerful lobbyists unused to being on the wrong side of a juggernaut.
It was not a lasting condition, of course, and there is evidence that the pendulum may be cutting back, but the days when the legislative minions of CMP, Great Northern, Maine Central Railroad and others were given more to dictation than persuasion are apparently past.
"I feel there is a need up there for a citizens lobby to offset the insurance companies, the banks, the private utilities and those sorts of interests," says LaPointe. "Still, I can't say that the industrial lobbyists have bothered me a great deal, or even that they've bothered with me.”
One reason why the constituency of the new lawmakers is different is that there have been significant changes in the way the legislature has come to view itself.
It is gradually abandoning some long-held myths about itself, myths which allowed former strengths to ossify into fatal weaknesses, locking the legislative function into a 19th century mentality ill-equipped to deal with contemporary problems.
There is, for example, the myth of the "citizen-legislator," the idea that a person should serve in the legislature out of a sense of public duty rather than for any monetary consideration involved.
This particular myth, wholly noble in concept, ruled out the payment of "professional" salaries to lawmakers and guaranteed that candidates always would run for the honor rather than the wage.
The trouble with this theory is that is has restricted the honor of serving in the state legislature largely to the citizen who can afford to serve; that is, to the person of independent means, the retiree, the self-employed and the specially endowed.
For the most part, people of ordinary means, and working people in particular, have been effectively barred from serving in Augusta.
The situation is slowly changing as more and more people come to accept that an underpaid legislator is not necessarily a good legislator.
Ten years ago legislators were paid $1,600 per biennium, plus modest expense allowances for food, lodging and transportation. This has gradually increased to $3,500 per biennium and somewhat more generous expense payments.
The effect has been to open the legislature to a broader range of citizenry. But there's still plenty of room for improvement: even with the recent increases, Maine places 42nd among the states in terms of legislative salaries.
Representatives like Tom LaPointe still hitch rides with friends to and from the legislature. Married earlier this year, he isn't sure whether he'll be able to afford to run for reelection, even though his "game plan" had called for three terms.
"It takes time as well as effort if you want to be an effective legislator," he says.
In a one-car family, he figures his wife, a social worker, usually needs the vehicle more than he does and for his normal around-town trips he uses a bicycle.
A special citizens committee created by the 106th Legislature is currently studying the problem of legislative salaries and is expected to recommend major pay hikes so that the Tom LaPointes of the future will be guaranteed the time needed to make the effort for effectiveness.
Another area in which new attitudes have helped to pave the way for a better legislature – certainly a better informed one, at least – is staffing.
“One of the problems is, that you have 2,000 bills," says LaPointe. "You set some sort of workload for yourself, your own bills and your own committee activities. But you don't have a chance to study all the ins and outs of each bill and you don't have the staff to go do a lot of research for you. The information gathering process for the individual legislator is very limited."
For years – again, probably because of the pervasiveness of the citizen-legislator myth – Maine's elected representatives resisted proposals to increase their staff capability beyond the merely clerical, viewing such proposals as extravagant and wasteful of the taxpayers money.
It was false economy. Without adequate staff of its own, the legislature has depended to an inordinate degree upon special interest lobbyists to provide free research and bill drafting services.
The lobbyists, of course, have been only too happy to accommodate. It is no exaggeration to say that Maine's statutory laws have, in the main, been drafted by lawyer-lobbyists representing special corporate interests throughout the state.
These "free" services have undoubtedly been furnished expensively to the citizens of Maine over the years, a fact all the more painful because they were cultivated in the name of economy.
This year, however, the lawmakers took a small but significant step in the direction of independence. They hired a dozen legislative aides at the opening of the current session, assigning half to research and bill drafting projects for various joint standing committees and making the rest available as personal assistants to the legislative leaders of both parties.
The experiment, while modest, was well received.
Frankly, I don't know how I ever got along without an aide," says Senate President Kenneth J. MacLeod. "Now, when I need some answers, I put my man to work and get clear, objective responses."
If nothing else, the addition of new staff resources has been good for egos of Maine legislators.
Odd as it may seem to the coastal observer, the self-esteem of our elected representatives often needs bolstering.
How they view themselves is a matter of some public importance. Despite frequent explosions of rhetoric and much bluster, the average lawmaker is deeply conscious of his own insignificance. He knows he is too often at the mercy of department heads, executive ,bureaucrats and the ubiquitous lobbyists.
If through a little staff assistance he can be made to feel a measure of real independence from these groups – if only for purposes of obtaining "clear, objective responses" to some of the 2,000 bills he must vote upon – the chances are he will be a better and more self-assured representative of the people's interests.
Another change in the Maine Legislature has come in the social atmosphere which surrounds its activities.
The traditional American view of state capitals as cauldrons of booze, broads and bribes has never really suited Augusta, although it is true that the night life was a good deal livelier a few years earlier than it is today.
A decade ago the Augusta House – that venerable hostelry which opened its doors the year the legislature first met in Augusta – was still the hub of social and political life outside the State House.
The Augusta House is padlocked now and gone with it are the famous "legislative assemblies," the lobbyist hospitality suites, the song fests, the nightly pilgrimages from room to room in search of boozy camaraderie.
Today's lawmakers are scattered to the numerous motels of Augusta, and while there may be a degree of merrymaking in the bar at the Senator Hotel, the newer legislator is most likely to be found in his own room quietly prepping for the next day's round of issues.
Finally, a significant change has taken place in the matter of legislative ethics.
Ten years ago the legislature routinely approved a code of ethics for itself in which lawmakers were pledged to reduce "to a minimum" any collision between their private interests and official duties. It was left up to the individual to determine conflicts of interest in his own mind.
Few bothered to read the code in the years following its adoption and virtually nobody gave any serious thought to its provisions. Recently, however, the legislature has displayed a heightened consciousness of the ethics question and many lawmakers – particularly of the new breed – are trying to come to grips with it, although at the risk of provoking many of their older colleagues.
Tom LaPointe has wrestled with his conscience over the thorny issue of conflict. His wife, Claire, is a social worker with the state department of health and welfare. When the Part I budget came up for a vote in the House, LaPointe asked to be excused on grounds of a potential conflict; he would, in effect, be approving his own wife's salary.
"Everybody thought I was crazy," recalls LaPointe.
Unfortunately, the citizen legislature tends to resent such individual displays of conscience, regarding them as self-serving and reflecting unfavorably upon the integrity of the legislature as a whole. There have been instances in which one chamber or the other has become prickly over such requests and refused to allow a member to excuse himself from voting on grounds of potential conflict.
There are signs – the highly-publicized Sewall case being only one – that the legislature is giving more serious thought to the question of ethics, a matter almost never raised in the past.
The fact that it is being mooted at all represents significant change. Ten years ago, it simply would never have occurred to a legislator whose wife was on the state payroll to excuse himself from voting on the state budget.
These, then, are some of the elements of change in the Maine Legislature:
A lessening of corporate influence. Emergence of "people's lobbies."
A more enlightened attitude toward salaries and staff assistance.
Opening of the legislative ranks to more working people, women and young people.
Mostly, however, it is the development of a healthy two-party system in Maine which has had the greatest effect on the legislature. The exercise of raw partisan muscle is no longer feasible, and the art of politics therefore has taken on a subtler, healthier meaning.
Ed Muskie would scarcely recognize the arena he helped open up for Tom LaPointe and his colleagues.