House lawmakers voted 96-52 to indefinitely table debate after House Republican leader Ken Fredette introduced a motion to pre-empt any action on the impeachment order. For five years now, the Republican has slung crude insults at his adversaries, heaped abuse on the media and offended many with his brass-knuckle tactics and off-the-cuff remarks.
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While the best known of these are actions by the governor that led a charter school operator to withdraw a job offer from Maine House Speaker Mark Eves, Chipman mentioned others.
“While some members of the Legislature were obsessing for months over this foolishness, I have been working on the real issues that matter to the Maine people”, LePage said.
At Thursday’s business breakfast, LePage made an apparent reference to the criticism of the racially charged controversy, saying of drug dealers: “I don’t care what color they are – if they are dealing drugs in this state, we need to take them off the streets”.
That order summarizes eight charges of misconduct, from using threats to rescind the Speaker of the House’s part-time job offer at a charitable organization to conducting a secret investigation of the Maine Human Rights Commission.
It was the first time an move to impeach a Governor has ever been brought to the House floor. Asked for comment in June, LePage told reporters, “it’s a free country”. While he openly says he threatened Good Will-Hinckley charter school into rescinding their job offer to Eves, for instance – now the subject of a lawsuit – an earlier investigation did not determine if those threats were illegal.
In an interview with radio station WVOM on Tuesday, LePage said there are no grounds for his impeachment, but that he likely won’t deliver his annual State of the State address in person before the Legislature because of it.
“I can’t say that I blame the Governor” said Senator Mason (R-22), “liberals in the House of Representatives have been playing political games, distracting lawmakers from addressing real issues by raising the specter of impeachment”.
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The state attorney general, Democrat Janet Mills, already declined to investigate LePage’s conduct. “Maine people deserve to hear the governor’s vision for the state and his proposed solutions”.
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Also, the Republicans control the Maine Senate, where any impeachment trial would be held.
