AUGUSTA — Republican lawmakers savored small victories this week in a legislative session they said was marked by thwarted Democratic attempts to raise taxes and increase state programs.

On issues ranging from expansion of the sales tax to Workers’ Compensation changes and from reducing dioxin levels in Maine rivers to blocking a ban on strike-breakers, GOP legislators said their votes saved Maine taxpayers from a number of expensive Democratic initiatives that would have had a devastating effect on the Maine economy.

“I think we were extremely effective as a minority in taking away the issues of the majority,” said Rep. Richard Campbell, R-Holden.

Rep. James Donnelly, R-Presque Isle, added: “We used the strengths of the arguments and persuasion and we did not use coercion on our folks. We just targeted the facts, picked our battles and were, I think, very successful.”

Democrats picked up enough seats last year to command an 81-69 edge in the House and a 19-15 advantage in the Senate. Each chamber also claims one independent. Democrats moved quickly to consolidate their power, which gave the party the ability to stack many committees with an 8-5 bias against the GOP.

Many bills could be passed with a simple majority, but emergency legislation that takes place immediately or the Legislature’s efforts to override a veto from Gov. Angus King require a more compelling two-thirds vote.

Under those conditions, the GOP proved itself able to peel off moderate Democrats who refused to follow their leaders pursuing legislative initiative they claimed could have been contrary to interests in their districts.

In an even more dramatic example of GOP influence, Republicans raised such a ruckus over an unsuccessful $200 million plan to extend the state sales tax to dozens of currently exempt services and activities that House Speaker Elizabeth H. “Libby” Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, requested that her name be removed as lead sponsor of the legislation.

Another Democratic initiative to fund a massive Maine single-payer health plan by expanding the sales tax to food, home gas and electricity and a laundry list of other tax revenue sources was opposed by Rep. Ken Lemont, R-Kittery, who was instrumental in obtaining a 126-21 vote to kill the bill on the floor of the House.

Rep. Robert Cameron, R-Rumford, led a bipartisan effort to defeat a proposal banning use of chlorine-based bleaching chemicals to eliminate dioxin from paper mill waste water discharges. Cameron and King devised a less restrictive dioxin measure that limits but does not ban discharges. Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Pendleton, R-Scarborough, hammered away from the floor to defeat a bill that would have forced employers to pay lawyers’ fees when injured workers prevailed in Workers’ Compensation cases.

“These were all things we felt would add to the economic disadvantage that the state is in right now,” said Senate Minority Leader Jane Amero, R-Cape Elizabeth. “For us, we will certainly be reminding people that this was the agenda that the Democrat majority brought forward. Had it not been for Republicans working with the governor, the overall tax burden in this state could have gone from eighth or 10th to No. 1 or No. 2.”

‘The big lie’

Republicans are not particularly proud of the way they were outmaneuvered by King and the Democrats in a rather unorthodox approach to passing the next state budget early in the session. Traditionallly, budget enactment does not occur until the end of the session when the existing state spending plan is about to expire. Urgency then requires the Legislature to give the bill emergency status and thereby force lawmakers to reach a consensus budget to gain the necessary two-thirds support for enactment.

Only in 1991 did this approach fail, resulting in a prolonged impasse between then-Gov. John McKernan and the Democratic majority in the Legislature over Workers’ Compensation revisions. The profound disargreement led to the shutdown of state government.

An issue passed two years ago by a then-GOP-controlled Senate came back to haunt Republicans this year when with the support of Democratic lawmakers, King announced he would not put a $130 million income tax cap plan in the budget.

During a press conference early in the session, the Republican caucus was asked if it would refuse to vote for a state budget that did not contain the income tax cap. Only Sen. Jeff Butland, the former Senate president from Cumberland who sponsored the bill and held King’s feet to the fire for enactment, replied affirmatively.

That was all King and the Democrats needed to lay the groundwork for what Republicans immediately rejected as “the big lie.” In the weeks that followed, Democratic President Mark Lawrence D-Kittery, and House Speaker Elizabeth Mitchell maintained Democrats wanted to approve a consensus budget, but charged Republicans with not negotiating in good faith by insisting on inclusion of an income tax cap.

“This session will best be remembered for what we didn’t do,” Amero said. “We did not honor our promise on the income tax cap and, happily, we did not drastically change the Workers’ Compensation system, or expand the sales tax or create a lot of new entitlement programs.”

With King’s help, Democrats were able to push a budget through the Legislature in March to meet the deadline for the enactment of a bill requiring only a simple majority.

Donnelly admitted his caucus was disappointed the Legislature had been “robbed of the ability to work together toward two-thirds passage on the budget,” but he remained philosophical about what he described as his party’s “ability to frame the issues” before Democrats could lay out their agenda.

“We kind of boxed-in a lot of issues so strategically that we were able to make sure that municipalities were taken care of for full funding of the tree growth tax reimbursement and boosting General Purpose Aid to education at a level higher than that recommended by the governor,” he said.

Other Republicans, like Campbell, are less likely to forget about King’s budget romp with the Democrats, and remain a little stung by the governor’s reversal on an issue such as the income tax cap that was supposed to be behind them.

“The Democrats just kept feeding him information to the point of where he actually expected a shutdown over the income tax cap – which was never a position of this caucus,” Campbell said. “When we sat down to negotiate the budget, the governor kept saying, ‘You Republicans must negotiate – you must give us a proposal.’ It was as if it was assumed that we wouldn’t be bargaining in good faith before we even began bargaining. Very interesting.”

The wait for ’98

One thing many Republicans agree on is that Democrats have given them some fairly clear-cut issues that should be easy to exploit in the 1998 legislative races. At his Bangor home for only a few days since the Legislaature recessed, Rep. Tarren Bragdon said this session has already changed some cynical perceptions of Maine Republicans.

At 21, Bragdon is the youngest member of the GOP caucus and is already being discussed as a potential leadership candidate in a Legislature that now limits its members to four consecutive terms. He’s looking forward to running for re-election in a campaign that he says has left the GOP in a “very good defensive” position.

“Democrats started making mistakes in their budget when the priorities they set early on proved to be detrimental,” Bragdon said. “Democrat or Republican, everybody on my committee knew the money wasn’t there for many of these programs that were proposed. It was all very political.”

Sen. Richard Bennett, R-Norway, said Republicans won’t have to point out problems created by the false sense of urgency to quickly push committee reports out to meet Democratic leadership’s May 31 deadline; which actually arrived on June 1.

Bennett, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, said other legislative committees either weren’t prepared to meet when they were scheduled or had juggled bills into completely different timetables at the expense of people who had traveled great distances to attend the sessions.

“You can breed discontent by not even making an effort to build consensus on the most important piece of legislation to come out of the session – which is the budget,” Bennett said. “Turning up your nose at consensus is bad policy and will haunt them in the years ahead.”

Rep. Henry L. Joy, R-Crystal, agreed, saying the Democratic leadership’s “push-push” attitude toward the legislative process was a disservice to Maine residents.

“The same kind of fervor behind cramming the budget through persisted right until the very end, and I knew people from Madawaska who came down to testify before the Education Committee, only to find the committee had scheduled so many bills, they didn’t ge the chance to testify,” he said.

“That was a six-hour ride for nothing. They were also misled into thinking they could participate in work sessions, only to find they couldn’t.”

Three-term Rep. Debra D. Plowman, R-Hampden, added: “A lot of the people attending committees left with a very sour view of how we conduct business in the Legislature. If you don’t think people were stressed out during committee meetings, all you have to do is count the 12-1 reports that were turned around on the floor after someone discovered some new information that should have been brought up at committee but wasn’t because everyone was in such a rush. I know a lot of people who are already looking foreward to next year’s campaign.