Latest news with #Fecteau
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Care workers gather at Maine State House to join call for wage increases
Jun. 5—AUGUSTA — Shawna Ferris said her finances are stretched so thin that she's had to purchase heating oil 5 gallons at a time. Ferris, a 44-year-old from Mattawamkeag, was one of dozens of direct care workers who joined House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, at a State House news conference Thursday to urge lawmakers and the governor to approve cost-of-living increases for Maine's direct care workforce as part of the state's new two-year budget. "Their pay should reflect the hard work these people put in every single day," said Fecteau, whose mother is a direct care worker. Direct care workers include nursing home employees, people who staff group homes for those with mental health or intellectual disabilities, in-home respite care providers, and any number of jobs to help people with daily living tasks. Workers who joined the news conference held signs behind Fecteau that said "Quality Care Deserves Quality Pay" and "My Bills Went Up, My Pay Did Not. COLAS Now." The COLA increases vary by year, but are tied to inflation , and would have been 3.5% in 2025. The estimated cost to the state budget — through the federal-state Medicaid program — would be $84 million over the two years. But the state funding would also draw down $137 million in federal funds that would go to about 24,000 direct care workers. The workers are paid by the private employers, but the ability of the nonprofits to increase wages is directly tied to whether the state boosts Medicaid reimbursement rates to pay for raises. Ferris works in group homes for adults with intellectual disabilities, and she said the pay is so low that she is struggling to earn enough to pay for groceries. "Every penny counts," said Ferris, who makes $20 per hour working full-time. "I have never thought about leaving my job, because I love my job so much and the clients depend on us. But I have thought about picking up a second job." The low pay is contributing to a severe shortage of such workers as employees are lured away by higher wages in less demanding service sector jobs. Shannon Marquis, who operates a group home for adults with intellectual disabilities for the Independence Association in Brunswick, said people are going to leave the direct care workforce if they don't get raises over the next two years. That means group homes will close. "You can make more money at McDonald's right now than what we can pay," Marquis said. "The pay does not match the quality of services that the people provide. If there's no money for raises, where are these people going to go?" Ferris said she does everything from cooking and cleaning to helping clients with daily hygiene, and helping them with their medications. When she can, she helps them become more independent, such as training her clients to call the doctor's office for medication refills. A 3.5% COLA was set to go into effect as part of Maine's Medicaid budget in January but was canceled by Gov. Janet Mills, with administration officials saying that budgetary constraints led to the COLA being nixed. The Legislature this session passed a 1.95% COLA increase to make up for part of the loss of the 2025 COLAs, but there's no COLA increases in Mills' budget proposal for 2026 and 2027. Fecteau hopes Mills will agree to provide the full COLA increase for 2026-27, plus restore the 3.5% COLA for 2025, and that the measure passes the House and Senate. Fecteau said that, based on his conversations with Mills, he doesn't believe she is opposed to the concept of giving the workers COLA increases, but is concerned about how to pay for it. "If we are able to find a way forward, I think the governor would back it," Fecteau said. BUDGET CONSTRAINTS Mills' office provided a written response to questions about the COLAs Thursday, saying the financial pressures on the state have only worsened since the governor proposed the budget. "With state revenues leveling off — and cuts likely coming from the president and Republicans in Congress, including for critical programs like Medicaid — the governor strongly believes the time for hard budget decisions is here and now," it said. "As a result of these budget constraints, the Department of Health and Human Services was unable to distribute the January 2025 COLA increase and proposed suspending COLA adjustments for the biennium. However, the department has focused on prioritizing funding to maintain current rates and to avoid cuts to rates. That is why the governor asked the Legislature for additional funding to cover the budget gap in the current fiscal year, along with $122 million to stabilize MaineCare moving forward." With the COLAs, nonprofits should be able to pay their workers $18.31 per hour, or 125% of the state minimum wage of $14.65 per hour. A separate bill by Fecteau that would have been more generous to direct care workers, mandating that they be paid 140% of the minimum wage, stalled in this year's session, and was carried over to the 2026 legislative session. The Maine Center for Economic Policy, a progressive think tank, has estimated that 23,500 hours per week of home care for older adults went unserved in 2024 because of the workforce shortage. Arthur Phillips, economic policy analyst for the Maine Center for Economic Policy, said that "we need to stop balancing budgets on the backs of our most essential, and undervalued, voters." The proposal has attracted bipartisan support, with Rep. Jennifer Poirier, R-Skowhegan, backing the COLA increase. Poirier works as a community living coordinator for Living Innovations, a nonprofit provider for adults with intellectual disabilities. "It's extremely difficult to recruit and maintain staffing," Poirier said. "We need to restore the full COLAs in the budget." Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court restores voting privileges of censured anti-trans Maine Republican lawmaker
The U.S. Supreme Court has restored the voting privileges of Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, who was censured and barred from voting in the state House of Representatives after she outed and deadnamed a transgender student athlete. Keep up with the latest in + news and politics. Libby and six of her constituents sued Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau and others over the censure, claiming it had interfered with her work as a legislator and violated her constituents' voting rights. The high court Tuesday granted her request for a preliminary injunction that restores her vote while the lawsuit proceeds. The court's vote was 7-2, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the minority. Lower courts had refused to intervene in the case, citing the doctrine of legislative immunity, which protects lawmakers from certain legal actions. 'Not very long ago, this Court treaded carefully with respect to exercising its equitable power to issue injunctive relief at the request of a party claiming an emergency,' Jackson wrote in her dissent. 'The opinions are legion in which individual Justices, reviewing such requests in chambers, declined to intervene — reiterating that 'such power should be used sparingly and only in the most critical and exigent circumstances.'' 'Those days are no more,' she continued. 'Today's Court barely pauses to acknowledge these important threshold limitations on the exercise of its own authority. It opts instead to dole out error correction as it sees fit, regardless of the lack of any exigency and even when the applicants' claims raise significant legal issues that warrant thorough evaluation by the lower courts that are dutifully considering them.' Libby had posted a photo of a trans female athlete on Facebook in February and deadnamed her. Libby has frequently denounced the presence of trans girls and women in female sports. 'It is fundamentally unfair to allow biological males to compete in girls' sports, yet that is what's happening in Maine,' she wrote in one Facebook post. She has also praised Donald Trump's executive order that threatens to take federal funding from any state that allows trans girls and women to compete alongside cis females in school sports. A few days after she posted the photo of the athlete, the Maine House voted 75-70 to censure Libby, with Democrats in favor and Republicans against. That meant she couldn't vote or speak on the House floor unless she apologized, which she refused to do. Libby defended her post as free speech, but Democrats said it was wrong to target the student. 'There is a time and place for policy debates,' Fecteau, a gay Democrat, said at the time. 'That time and place will never be a social media post attacking a Maine student. Maine kids and all Maine people deserve better.' Fecteau said he had not asked Libby to deny her beliefs but merely wanted her to apologize to the girl. He had previously spoken to Libby and asked her to remove the post, but she refused. It has been shared widely and helped spur a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills. At a White House meeting in February, Trump demanded that Mills comply with his executive order, and she said she'd see him in court. She recently won a settlement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture that restored Maine's school meal funding, which the USDA had frozen because of her support for trans youth. The Trump administration is still pursuing other legal action against Maine. Libby praised the high court's action in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Emergency bill would restore full MaineCare payments to hospitals
May 7—AUGUSTA — A bipartisan group of Maine lawmakers launched a last-minute attempt Wednesday to free up $118 million in MaineCare payments to health care providers that were delayed until late June after a previous proposal collapsed. But the emergency measure immediately faced an uphill climb. Senate Republican leaders continue to oppose the proposal, and an effort by House Democrats to skip the committee process and public hearings and move right to floor votes generated opposition from Republicans, including a co-sponsor. House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, sought to fast-track the bill, which had three Republican co-sponsors, by suspending the rules that require bills to be referenced to a committee for a public hearing and work session before any votes by the full House or Senate. The maneuver caught Republicans by surprise and prompted one of the Republican co-sponsors to object. A majority of the House members supported the bill, but it was sent to the Senate without the two-thirds support needed to enact the emergency measure and immediately provide the funding. The Senate did not take up the bill Wednesday. "I'm sure there's a lot of confusion happening right now — I know for me there is as well since we were not told anything like this was happening," said Rep. Amanda Collamore, R-Pittsfield, a co-sponsor of the bill. "What is concerning to me is that we are usurping the tradition and the rules of our body by not allowing the public to have a chance to speak on a bill. ... I do not support this not being sent to committee and waiving those rules." Fecteau, however, said Democrats were seeking to waive the rules because similar proposals have already received public hearings and been debated in committees and in each chamber has part of two separate budget bills, and he didn't want to consume valuable committee time or scarce resources, including nonpartisan staff time. "The rationale was, if this bill was going to be introduced, it should just have an up-or-down vote, since the policy matter at hand has already been debated in both chambers," Fecteau said. Initial votes in the House did not bode well for reaching the 101 votes needed to enact the bill as an emergency. The House voted 69-63 to waive the rules, and a Republican effort to kill the bill failed by a 85-55 vote. Senate Republican leaders, who previously blocked an emergency bill to pay MaineCare providers, do not appear to have changed their position. Those senators demanded other reforms to MaineCare before supporting the funding. MaineCare is the state's version of Medicaid, the public health insurer for people with low incomes. "Nothing has changed and the (D)emocrats are still not willing to reform a program that is completely broken," Senate Minority Leader Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, said in a text message. The MaineCare funding is already included in a budget bill approved by lawmakers and signed by the governor. But the funding will not become available until June 20, because most Senate Republicans withheld their support, preventing the budget from taking effect immediately as an emergency measure. In addition, there is also an effort to block the approved budget from taking effect through a people's veto campaign. If conservative activists secure the required signatures and file them with the state, the funds allocated in the budget will remain frozen until a statewide referendum in November. Until the funding becomes available, health care providers are receiving reduced reimbursements for services they continue to provide — a scenario putting many providers and services at financial risk, especially in rural areas. PROVIDERS EAGER FOR RELIEF Jeff Austin, a spokesperson for the Maine Hospital Association, said his members are eager for financial relief — even if it's only by a few weeks. "It's been very difficult," Austin said of the impact of curtailed reimbursements to his members. "It's a significant amount of money in a short period of time. So, shaving off even a couple of weeks of the pain would be helpful." Rep. James Dill, D-Old Town, submitted the after-deadline bill to restore full MaineCare payments to health care providers as soon as the bill is approved by two-thirds of the Legislature and signed by the governor. Dill said he brought the bill forward in response to concerns from constituents, including health care workers who are worried about layoffs and patients worried about the loss of services. He hopes to convince opponents to support his bill, which would allow health care facilities to access funding that has already been approved by the Legislature and endorsed by the governor. "They realize the money is just sitting there," Dill said. LD 1948 is co-sponsored by three House Republicans: Collamore and Reps. Amy Arata of New Gloucester and Dean Cray of Palmyra. But, even if House Republicans join Democrats in supporting the measure when it comes back form a second vote in that chamber, it still faces hurdles in the Senate. Republican leaders in the Senate have demanded a series of amendments that would cap enrollment and seek work requirements for able-bodied recipients, among other things. House Republicans had already voted in support of the MaineCare funding during previous negotiations after winning a concession from Democrats to reform General Assistance, a safety net program that is mostly funded by the state. "I just felt that with it passing once in the House we could just (act on) this one piece because everybody in there either knows somebody, has constituents or has facilities in their district that could be hurt badly by not getting this funding," Dill said. Dill hopes to pick up the four votes needed in the Senate to reach the two-thirds threshold needed to enact the emergency measure and then win over House Republicans who objected to fast-tracking the bill. "I will talk to a lot of (my co-sponsors) again and get them to go along with it," he said. Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
An anti-trans lawmaker brings a Supreme Court case that she absolutely must win
The Supreme Court has been asked to decide a case that combines two of the most charged issues in the US at the moment: trans participation in sports, and attacks on voting rights. The case's inciting incident came in February, when Laurel Libby, a Republican elected to the Maine House of Representatives, wrote a Facebook post criticizing a transgender athlete who won a statewide pole vaulting championship. In that post, Libby did not blur or otherwise obscure the high school student's face, and she named the student and her school. In response, Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat, asked Libby to remove the post due to concerns 'that publicizing the student's identity would threaten the student's health and safety.' When Libby refused, a majority of the state house passed a resolution censuring Libby — that resolution reiterated Fecteau's concern that shining such a spotlight on a high school student 'may endanger the minor.' It also highlighted a study showing that 'transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence.' Thus far, all of this is fine as a constitutional matter. While Libby has a First Amendment right to speak out against trans rights, government entities like the Maine House also have a right to express their own viewpoints on controversial issues. And that includes formally denouncing statements by individual lawmakers that a majority of the legislature finds repugnant. But Maine's House rules also provide that Libby 'may not be allowed to vote or speak' on the House floor until she apologizes for the conduct that resulted in her censure. She refused to do so, and thus has effectively been stripped of her ability to vote on legislation since last winter. This also means that her constituents are effectively stripped of their representation in the state house, because their duly elected representative cannot vote on bills. That is not allowed. Indeed, The Supreme Court's decision in Bond v. Floyd (1966), which involved the Georgia House of Representatives' decision not to seat a duly elected lawmaker — ostensibly because he spoke out against the Vietnam War — is almost directly on point. Bond held that the First Amendment 'requires that legislators be given the widest latitude to express their views on issues of policy.' The same rule should apply in Libby v. Fecteau, which is now pending before the Supreme Court. One of the most well-established principles under the First Amendment is that offensive speech must be protected. Because the First Amendment protects against government censorship, virtually all free speech cases involve speech that is sufficiently offensive to government officials that they decided to sanction it. If the freedom of speech did not apply to speech that many Americans find repulsive, it would be worthless. Even if the First Amendment does not apply to speech that is somewhat menacing to a minor — itself a dubious proposition — stripping Libby of her voting rights does more than simply strike at her right to free speech. It punishes her constituents by stripping them of their right to representation. Indeed, the Maine legislature's actions would be less offensive to the Constitution if it had simply expelled Libby from the state house altogether. At least in that circumstance, the people of her district could elect someone else to cast votes on their behalf. Libby's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on this case by Tuesday, when the Maine House convenes for a floor session. That won't happen, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who oversees emergency requests to her Court that arise out of Maine's federal courts, set a May 8 deadline for the state legislature to respond to Libby's arguments. There are legitimate reasons why the Court might not weigh in on the Libby case anytime soon. The case arises on the Court's 'shadow docket,' a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices used to be very cautious about deciding prematurely before President Donald Trump's first term. Some of the justices remain concerned about overuse of the shadow docket, and may wish to give an appeals court more time to consider the case. But some court needs to intervene. Regardless of what anyone thinks about Libby's attack on a high school student, allowing lawmakers to strip their colleagues of their ability to vote on legislation would set an alarming precedent that could easily be used by authoritarian legislators to stifle dissent. What is the specific legal question in the Libby case? For now, no court has weighed in on whether it is constitutional to strip Libby of her ability to vote or to speak on the House floor. A federal district judge denied relief to Libby on the grounds that the legislature's decision to sanction her is protected by 'legislative immunity.' An appeals court issued a brief decision denying Libby an emergency order immediately reinstating her voting rights, but the case remains pending before that court. The principle of legislative immunity is well-established. As the Court said in Powell v. McCormack (1969), it is intended to ensure that 'legislators are free to represent the interests of their constituents without fear that they will be later called to task in the courts for that representation.' Imagine, for example, that the Maine legislature enacts a tax on the sale of beets. If this tax is illegal, a beetroot farmer might file a lawsuit against the state's taxing agency seeking to be reimbursed for paying it. But they cannot sue the state lawmakers who voted for the tax. Those lawmakers are shielded from liability, and the farmer's suit lies against the state officials who actually collect the tax. While this framework protects lawmakers from being hauled off into court, it is not intended to render illegal legislation — or, in the Libby case, an illegal sanction imposed on a lawmaker — entirely immune from judicial review. In the Powell case, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a duly-elected member of Congress that the US House refused to seat, in large part because of corruption allegations against that lawmaker. Though legislative immunity might have prevented that unseated lawmaker, New York's Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, from suing the actual members of Congress who voted to unseat him, the Court allowed his suit to proceed against the House Sergeant at Arms — who was responsible for paying House members. 'Although an action against a Congressman may be barred' by the Constitution, Powell concluded, 'legislative employees who participated in the unconstitutional activity are responsible for their acts.' A similar rule should apply in Libby. Though Libby's suit against Fecteau should be precluded by legislative immunity, she also sued Robert Hunt, the clerk of the Maine House who is responsible for tallying votes cast by representatives. She seeks an injunction requiring Hunt to count her votes. The district judge, for what it is worth, claimed that Bond and Powell do not apply to the Libby case because, in both of those cases, a lawmaker was removed from a legislature entirely, while Libby was merely sanctioned until she apologizes. But this distinction should not matter. Powell established that 'legislative employees' like Hunt can be sued for 'unconstitutional activity' generally, regardless of whether that activity results in someone being removed from their job as a lawmaker. Moreover, it's not hard to imagine how lawmakers could abuse the power to strip away a colleague's voting rights. The Bond case, for example, involved state Rep. Julian Bond, a prominent Black civil rights activist who was elected to the Georgia House shortly before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enfranchised Black voters in the Jim Crow South. Though his colleagues claimed that they refused to seat him because of his views on the Vietnam War, Bond's race almost certainly drove many of his unreconstructed colleagues to lock him out of office. The Maine House's decision to strip Libby of her voting rights is also evocative of a more recent incident, where Tennessee's Republican-controlled House voted to expel two Black Democratic lawmakers under circumstances which strongly suggested that their race motivated this expulsion. (The legislature backed down after both lawmakers were reelected.) Libby, who was sanctioned for bullying a teenager, hardly occupies the same moral high ground as Julian Bond. But the same constitutional principles that applied in Bond should apply in Libby. Otherwise, any lawmaker who is in the minority within their legislative body could be targeted by colleagues who want to silence them and to disenfranchise their constituents.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Maine's battle over transgender athletes reaches Supreme Court after state rep is censured
On Feb. 25, Maine Democratic lawmakers in the state House voted to censure Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby for posting two photos of a transgender high school student after the student won the Class B girls' state championship in pole vaulting. Libby's censure, approved in a party line 75-70 vote, revokes her ability to vote or speak on the state House floor until she accepts 'full responsibility for the incident and publicly apologize(s) to the House and to the people of the State of Maine.' Libby asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on her behalf. The censure is one more example of the ongoing battle between the federal government and Maine over transgender athletes participation in girls' sports. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi referenced the transgender student Libby had posted about in a news conference in mid-April, saying, 'Maine's leadership has refused to comply at every turn, so now we have no other choice. We are taking them to court.' She added that her office is also considering whether to 'retroactively pull all the funding that they have received for not complying in the past.' In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Libby described the lead-up to being censured. Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau emailed and called Libby on Feb. 18, asking her to take the post down. 'In addition to risking the young person's safety, your post violates one of the long held political traditions of 'leaving kids out of it,'' Fecteau wrote in his letter to Libby. Libby responded to the accusations on Fox News, saying lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have posted photos of minors, 'many, many, many times, including Speaker Fecteau,' but 'because it highlighted a policy that they did not want Maine people to really see, that was the real reason behind it.' The 'real reason' Libby believes she was censured is that she drew attention to 'a policy that most Mainers do not agree with — biological males in girls' sports." During their phone call on Feb. 18, Libby said she asked Fecteau if he would 'support policy that stops discrimination against Maine young women in sports,' and the House speaker did not answer. Libby has maintained that she will not apologize for the post. On March 11, Libby filed a lawsuit against Fecteau with Melissa DuBose from the Rhode Island U.S. District Court, since every district judge in Maine refused to take it. DuBose ruled in favor of Fecteau, as did the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. On Monday, Libby announced on X that she had filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, claiming her constituents 'must not be deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed representation.' The Supreme Court will likely confirm if they will hear the case by Monday, May 5. The lawsuit quotes dissenting House representatives, who criticized Fecteau's resolution as 'a mockery of the censure process' that 'set(s) a standard ... that the majority party, when they're displeased with a social media post that upsets them, can censure a member of the minority party.' Responding to an X post with screenshots from the lawsuit attached, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote, 'Maine has fallen. This is pure lawlessness.' Similarly, former Alabama state Sen. Phil Williams called Libby's censure 'the most galling, unconstitutional thing I have ever heard of,' per his post on X in February. On the other hand, fellow Maine state Rep. Tiffany Roberts, D-South Berwick, told the Maine Morning Star it would 'send a dangerous message that decorum is optional, that accountability is negotiable and that consequences for our actions can be erased with a simple procedural vote,' if the House ended the censure. Rep. Daniel Sayre, D-Kennebunk, agreed with Roberts that the censure should not be undone. 'I wish that a member of this body had not violated the privacy of a minor, but one has,' he said. 'I wish this violation had not touched off a vast outpouring of hateful threats, but it has. I wish these threats had not created real harm to a child, their family, their school and their community, but it has.' Meanwhile, Libby has been vocal online that she 'will not be silenced' by the censure, even if she cannot vote or speak on the floor.
