As promised this week, our governor, Paul LePage, delivered a written State of the State address to the Legislature as opposed to in-person remarks that have become the norm. The reason, as he explained on a talk radio show, is that delivering an in-person State of the State to a roomful of Legislators that just recently debated whether or not to impeach him was “just silliness.”

And so, the written State of the State came to pass. And considering all the brouhaha that local, state and national media — including the Rachel Maddow Show (will he or won’t he deliver the address IN PERSON?!) the actual State of the State address, like an over-hyped sequel to a summer blockbuster, was something of an eight-page disappointment: A lot of bluster and anything with substance has already been said before.

Here we see LePage accusing the Legislators of playing “political games that have nothing to do with the Maine people.” But the governor conveniently ignores the game he played when he withheld voter-approved bonds for the Land for Maine’s Future program in order to expand the state’s timber harvesting to pay for heating assistance. (”This is how it works. It’s called leverage,” LePage explained in 2015.)

“If you stop the gamesmanship, we can work together to accomplish great things,” writes LePage, who admitted his involvement in the rescinding of a job offer to a political opponent from Good Will-Hinckley School, and who is alleged to have forced out the president of the Maine Community College System.

In between railings against socialism that sound positively Nixonesque (and LePage uses the words “socialism” or “socialist” a dozen times to describe his nemeses in the Legislature and the media), the governor returns to basics. Kill the income tax by 2021, kill the “death tax,” lower energy costs.

Not unsurprisingly, the state GOP responded by showing its support: “I applaud Gov. LePage’s priorities in the recently released State of the State Address,” said Richard Bennett, Maine GOP chairman. “Reforming welfare, growing Maine’s economy, fighting the scourge of heroin and other destructive drugs on Maine’s streets, and lowering the cost of living for Maine people are goals that everyone in Augusta should share.”

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The Democratic House leadership also responded: “The people of Maine expect to hear from their chief executive each year about the state of our state. They show up and do their work every day and he should do his job too,” said Sara Gideon, D-Freeport. “But what he’s done instead is rehash dubious arguments about his unsuccessful referendum, avoid his own responsibility for the hiring of drug agents and fail to make concrete proposals that will improve the lives of Mainers.”

LePage returns to his Law and Order roots, advocating for more enforcement to combat Maine’s heroin epidemic. And while he acknowledges the need for a “multi pronged approach,” all that’s discussed is hunting down out-of-state dealers and putting them decades behind bars. That’s noble. But for all the tough talk on fighting drugs, there’s little about treating the addiction.

LePage’s solution for taking on the drug problem hydra is to cut off the head. Read your mythology to see why that doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, we’ll have to content ourselves with the governor’s promise that he’s developing a plan to fight the drug scourge on all fronts.

His approach to combating poverty is similarly narrow. We do support some of his common-sense proposals, including requiring able-bodied adults to seek work before qualifying for welfare benefits and placing limits on where TANF, EBT cards and SNAP benefits can be used.

But we strongly object to a proposal that would require drug testing for all welfare recipients, not just those suspected of, or who have admitted to, prior drug use. Let’s put aside the fact that it’s been tried before in other states — in Florida, to be exact — and hasn’t worked.

The presupposition implied is that if you’re on welfare, you’re probably abusing drugs. Your punishment for being poor is the humiliation of a drug test.

Better the innocent should be punished than the guilty go free.

Perhaps someone should be testing the governor’s urine. With his harebrained schemes (such as nominating himself education commissioner), one can’t help but wonder.



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