In Augusta, ideas become bills but not inevitable law Past session saw 1,692 measures introduced, but only 619 passed

AUGUSTA – With summertime emptying the House and Senate chambers, in the silence one can almost hear the echo of ideas from the past session.

There were 1,692 to be exact – some new, many recycled and a few doomed from the moment they were assigned an official number.

Of those ideas – introduced as bills – 619 passed, 840 failed, and 233 were carried over to the next session.

While their subject matter varied widely, from abortion to workers’ compensation, they all – save for a few – had one lawmaker primarily responsible for their fates. Some, mostly freshmen, submitted no bills; others more than 30.

“I saw an awful lot of people with an awful lot of ideas, but I don’t think many of them got passed,” said freshman Rep. Robert Duchesne, D-Hudson, who had both of his bills signed into law by the governor.

While Duchesne’s perfect record might be laudable, measuring a lawmaker’s effectiveness goes beyond how many of his bills were signed into law. Duchesne’s successful bill protecting the job security of volunteer firefighters, for instance, can be far easier to pass than a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Duchesne and his Democratic colleagues, who hold a slim majority in both houses, predictably had an easier time passing legislation than did their Republican or Green party counterparts, according to an analysis by the Bangor Daily News.

Conservative Rep. Brian Duprey, R-Hampden, passed one of his 13 bills this session – a scaled-back version of his fetal homicide bill that makes it a separate crime to commit an act of violence against an unborn child. Abortions are excepted.

“I know I am in the minority, and I enjoy making the other side squirm,” Duprey said, when explaining his motivation for submitting controversial legislation, oftentimes aimed at limiting gay rights or access to abortion. “It makes people stop and think, and that’s always a good thing.”

Although on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Rep. John Eder, G-Portland, had similar motives – and success rates – in raising issues in the Legislature.

Eder, who passed two of his 23 bills this session, said he looked for progress on environmental issues such as limiting automobile emissions, ensuring universal health care and establishing a living wage in Maine.

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” said Eder, the Legislature’s only Green lawmaker, attributing his difficulty in passing bills not to his party affiliation but to the progressive agenda he shares with some more liberal Democrats. “I’ll bring some of these back, in different forms, next time.”

As in Eder’s case, the failure of a bill to pass doesn’t necessarily mean the death of the issue it raised. Many – such as Eder’s emissions tax credit – are incorporated into other bills, such as those submitted by members of a relevant committee or those with bipartisan support.

“Whether it has my name on it or somebody else’s doesn’t really bother me,” Eder said. “I’m not in it for the ego, and my constituents know I’m an effective advocate for their issues.”

Like Duprey and Eder, most lawmakers don’t expect all of their bills to become law. Some they sponsor at a constituent’s request, others are “place holders” for bills still being developed.

At session’s end, many other bills found themselves in a state of purgatory after being carried over to the next session, when lawmakers presumably will revisit the ideas.

As in sessions past, veteran lawmakers were more likely to submit bills than were their less experienced counterparts, some of whom, particularly in their first session, prefer first to familiarize themselves with the system.

In his fifth legislative term in Augusta, Sen. Joe Perry, D-Bangor, passed seven of his 19 bills, most of which dealt with tax reform.

“The ones I thought would pass passed, so I guess you could say I’m 100 percent,” said Perry, the Senate chairman of the Taxation Committee.

Perry later amended his statement to say he was disappointed with the failure of one bill – a long-term investment strategy that would devote 2 percent of state revenue to an endowment fund.

“It made too much sense,” he said. “No one would support it.”