LD 2003 Post-Mortem: Nice Guys Finish Last

Speaker Fecteau played a good game of negotiating and pretending to compromise — but he never let go of the key provision that federalizes housing policy in Maine. With that club in hand, Fecteau and his flunkies won’t rest until they achieve their ultimate goal: the eradication of single-family neighborhoods, deemed by Leftists to be inherently racist.

While it’s true that the deck was stacked against GOP legislators from the beginning, that’s no excuse for their timid demeanor since this showdown began.

They should have raised vigorous objections, on the record, every time a new amendment was presented without a public hearing. Of course, they would have been overruled by the Democrat committee chairs, but so what?

Try this for a change:

Pound the table metaphorically — or maybe, just maybe — ACTUALLY pound the table on behalf of the Mainers who are being stripped of their liberties and their livelihoods by the swamp critters.

Can you imagine if the shoe were on the other foot? If majority Republicans were bending and breaking legislative rules to jam one of their bills through?

The Democrats would be on the warpath, raising loud objections at every opportunity, posting angry outbursts on social media, staging protests at the Statehouse. In short, they would have made a big deal out of it. They would have made a stink. They wouldn’t have been “civil.”

Just four Republicans spoke in opposition to the bill in the House, and only one of them mentioned the most dangerous provision: inviting swarms of DC-based Housing and Urban Development (HUD) lawyers to dictate housing policy in Maine.

It was the same story in the Senate.

NONE of the GOP legislators addressed the Left’s endgame: subsidized housing for the legions of illegal aliens who continue to pour across the southern border and board buses for Maine. Janet Mills will continue to disperse these “new Mainers” across the state, all the better to turn red legislative districts blue in future elections. 

And let’s not forget Mills’ chums clapping their hands like trained seals: the country-club, Chamber of Commerce types who just love the cheap labor that’s streaming across the border.

The Maine Peoples Alliance gave Republicans all the ammo they needed to rip the shroud off the Slums-to-Suburbs bill and show the public what it really is: an attack on the entrenched “systemic racism” Leftists allege stains the state that Joshua Chamberlain called home.

LD 2003 is all about eradicating “white privilege” in Maine. It’s about “affirmatively furthering” Maine’s commitment to “race-conscious housing programs” (see pages 6 and 7 of the housing commission’s report).

You know what we’re talking about here: all those lily-white bastions of bigotry from Medway to Lubec to Corinna to Dover-Foxcroft. You know, those rural areas populated by Deplorable caucasian oppressors maliciously flaunting their white supremacy while they lock out the oppressed BIPOCs. 

Sadly, not a single Republican legislator picked up the MPA ammo and fired it. None of the Rs were willing to hammer the Left for its radical re-imagination of Maine as The Way Life Should Be.

In closing…

Don’t get your hopes up too high, but there’s an outside chance Gov. Mills may veto the bill, given the strong opposition of the Maine Municipal Association. In a strictly political calculation, Mills may conclude that in a close re-election contest, she can’t afford to have the MMA alienated.

Whatever the outcome, the sad saga of the “affordable housing” scam underscores the reality that Maine’s descent into statism won’t be arrested in one or two or three election cycles. It will require much more than electing candidates with Rs after their names.

It requires recruiting and training a grassroots army of activists to be on the front lines of the culture and political wars, not just in election years, but year in and year out for as long as it takes.

From the local school board, town council, and county commission all the way to the Colosseum on the Kennebec, we are training culture warriors who will fight fire with fire and take no prisoners. We believe Maine is worth fighting for.

That’s what Maine First Project is committed to, and that’s what sets us apart. We’re in this for the long haul.

Thanks for being in the trenches with us. It means a lot to me.

Soldier on!

Together, we will recover and restore Maine to the Way Life Should Be.