On the third day of this new year I decided to go up to Augusta on my midweek day off work. Two things were happening that Wednesday that seemed worth the trip. One was that it was the opening day of the Second Regular Session of Maine’s 128th Legislature. The other was a gathering of the Alliance for the Common Good in the State House Hall of Flags.

Any visit to the seat of Maine’s governance is time well spent, if only to experience its confirmed actuality, its physical presence, that here is where real people come together in a history-rich architecturally stunning setting in order to define what being a state should accomplish and protect. Just wandering the halls is instructive as to how governing is all about the politics of a real face to face interface between individuals.

Especially on opening day, faces familiar from media coverage or one’s local politics rush by on their way to conducting business at hand or can be seen holding impromptu meetings one-on-one in doorways or on staircase landings. Despite all its staid historical trappings, or perhaps buoyed by that recognition of our shared history, there’s something about the place that embodies the hopefulness of an ever dynamic democratic rule of law.

Timed to coincide with the legislative start of “the People’s business,” various participating advocacy groups in an Alliance for the Common Good set up information tables in the second floor rotunda and gave speeches in front of the central staircase to the House and Senate chambers and hallways to the office of the governor.

As the People’s representatives came and went in a sustained hustle and bustle, the unelected grassroots representatives of a progressive constituency did their best to give voice to issues about which passing politicians might inform themselves. A number of those wearing a legislator name tag did stop by to listen or to convey support. Several candidates for 2018’s open elective offices, state and federal, lingered to hear speeches and engage in conversations with constituents such as myself.

Though not unfamiliar with citizen activism, I always appreciate being reminded of all the organized efforts made by those that feel our dominant two-party system needs constant scrutiny and oversight by average people concerned with improving upon a status quo satisfied with simply making sure the often disappointing performance of our governance just keeps on keeping on without any real visionary direction except towards winning the next election.

Issues of concern represented at the alliance centered around a focus on water sovereignty and its commonality as a means of connecting the dots of other political fronts. Environmentalism, tribal rights, fair trade, economic democracy, energy self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, marijuana legalization, a People’s Veto, opposition to an East/West Corridor, formation of a State Bank, and ending corporate welfare all shared a citizen soapbox directed at a politics that all too often turns a deaf ear to bottom-up empowerment.

Intolerant of the Legislature’s inability to overcome our current governor’s adversarial stand against any progressive change, Maine’s electorate has repeatedly made an end run around a more and more dysfunctional system in order to make their voices heard. Even when such citizen initiatives have succeeded at the ballot box, the expressed wishes of the electorate are time and again nullified by the flagrant tampering of legislative pushback. On the matter of voter approved Medicaid expansion our governor openly threatens a patently unconstitutional noncompliance.

Just before the speakers began I stopped at a table manned by two supporters gathering signatures for a People’s Veto of legislation passed to delay or repeal the 2016 ballot measure approving implementation of ranked-choice voting. After stating that I’d already signed their petition at the most recent election’s polling place, they informed me that gathering signatures in that traditional manner was now threatened by a bill, being considered in a hearing held that very day, that would prohibit such activity. Each of us agreed how that would create a major barrier to real grassroots empowerment as, confirmed by our common experiences in the difficulties of petition drives, polling places have proven to be the most advantageous venue for locally organized grassroots signature campaigns. One place, plenty of obviously active voters, and no issue of intruding upon them at an inopportune time. The real issue being attacked is that citizen initiative enabled direct democracy is now routinely circumventing representational control to an unprecedented degree.

One of those two People’s Veto supporters later stood at the speakers’ microphone. Halfway through his remarks he disclosed that he’d just been warned that signature gathering in the Hall of Flags for his petition was prohibited. As those of us gathered there in the State House’s patriotic tribute to those who served to protect our democratic freedoms, the sound of establishment wagons circling against a bottom-up exercise of those freedoms couldn’t have been more pronounced.

Politics as usual is increasingly unusual. Us against Them has now metastasized to where the only bi-partisan consensus among those elected is that the electorate is their enemy.

Time for a far healthier body politic.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.