Maine House, Senate GOP acknowledge strength in united front

AUGUSTA – Republicans in the Maine House and Senate are making greater strides toward unity this year as they confront a proposed governor’s budget that contains more than $46 million in new tax increases.

While munching on slices of pizza at GOP state headquarters in Hallowell, representatives and senators mixed it up for a casual get-together that is likely to be a prelude for far more serious discussions in the months ahead. House Republican leader Joseph Bruno of Raymond said Wednesday that the Tuesday evening meeting had generated nothing but positive response from the 61 members of his caucus.

“And I’m not sure that people had those kinds of feelings a month and a half ago,” he said.

Always Republican, but not always together, the House and Senate GOP caucuses had almost as little in common with each other as they did with Democrats two years ago when budget positions divided party members. At that time, Republicans held 71 seats in the 151-member House. Hoping to broker a compromise with majority House Democrats, they signed onto a state budget that included language to issue state bonds on a new $33 million psychiatric facility in Augusta.

Senate Republicans, on the other hand, saw no reason to borrow money to build the new hospital while the state envisioned a surplus of more than $340 million. With only 14 members in the 35-member Senate, Republicans in that chamber had no chance of winning their position. In the end, House Republicans supported the budget with the bond issue, while Senate Republicans stood on principal and opposed the measure.

“We just felt very passionately that we were doing the right thing in the Senate,” said Sen. Mary Small, a Bath Republican who now serves as Senate GOP floor leader. “The House took a different approach. I think they felt that they needed to compromise to get something passed. It was a difference of opinion.”

Two years more and another election have produced a decisively new dynamic among the Legislature’s Republicans. The GOP’s House minority numbers have forced Republicans there to seek out stronger alliances with their Senate counterparts who split the Senate 17-17 with Democrats. The 35th seat is held by Sen. Jill Goldthwait, an independent from Bar Harbor. While Republicans may not be able to gain much ground on partisan bills in the House, their counterparts in the Senate could try to influence Goldthwait to help them kill legislation passed by House Democrats.

Wasting no time in building the kind of relationships necessary to produce that kind of a united front on key issues such as the budget, Bruno said the pizza party was the first of many meetings House and Senate Republicans will hold together.

“I see a real spirit of cooperation here,” Bruno said. “We helped get a lot of these senators elected and we feel that we share an agenda. I think we’re more unified than we have been in years. I don’t remember the House and Senate working this closely together so early in the session. Senate leadership reached out to us and it meant a lot, especially when we’re in such a minority.”

Most of the Republicans already agree on one objective: the need to oppose a 26-cent per pack hike in the cigarette tax and a half-percent increase in the state’s food and lodging tax. The budget debate is expected to drive this session of the Legislature as King enters the last half of his second and final four-year term determined to close a $253 million structural gap in his budget with tax increases.

“Last year, when we left the 119th Legislature, the governor said he could live with a $200 million structural gap,” Bruno said. “Well, he got it, and now his simple solution to solve the problem is to raise taxes. We don’t agree with that.”

“After coming off one of the largest surpluses in history, it’s pretty hard to go back the next session and say we need to increase any taxes,” Small said. “It seems to me that the cigarette tax is an easy one because it attacks such a small segment of the population, many of whom have a very low income. The governor went after the small pockets.”

Even if House and Senate Republicans don’t march to the same drummer on all votes, GOP leaders said they plan to work off the same game plan to ensure that everyone understands the party position on the issues before them.

“If nothing else, it will allow both caucuses to have access to the same information,” Small said. “We may not always be in agreement, but we’ll always have the same facts. We already have pretty much the same goals.”