Maine Governor Paul LePage and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Maine's Governor LePage is a political party of "one", reports The New York Times.

Maine's Governor LePage

Maine's Governor Paul LePage and the New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are like dysfunctional bookends. 

Of course, if the two Republicans were really bookends, we could put both of them in a drawer or behind a pile of files, so they would be out of harm's way. Nevertheless, both LePage and Christie apparently thrive on creating controversy.

If Lepage and Christie were a vaudeville act, they'd be like Alphonse and Gaston, both trying to enter the political arena through the same door. Obviously, the two men can hardly fit in the same back seat of a car, never mind make a political entrance through the same door.  

Gov. Chris Christie with his nemesis "Bridgegate"

Both men are in over their heads with political controversy.  

Nevertheless, in fancifully political delusional thinking, each believes there's enough political capital to support their ambitious goals. 

Christie wants to be President of the United States.  Oh paaaaleeeze..!!..like electing a Macy's parade balloon. Bridgegate, the George Washington Bridge traffic jam controversy, will follow
Christie, like the dust hanging over the Charlie Brown "Pig Pen" character.

On the other hand, LePage wants to run the state of Maine like he's a dictator. His tyrannical gubernatorial behavior continues to upstage his entire administration.  Governor LePage is the prototype for Humpty Dumpty.  His behavior exemplifies the last line of the rhyme.  "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put LePage together again."

New Jersey has Macy's parade balloon and a prophetic nursery rhyme is leading Maine. These political bookends really should be sold off in a yard sale.

Nevertheless, Maine is now at a political crossroads. The legislature has joined in an unprecedented decision to slam dunk the state's budget, proposed by Governor Paul LePage. 

Rather than debate the governor's tax reform and budget, the state's legislature decided to write its own version of the budget. When the governor vetoed 64 line items in the legislature's budget, it caused both the House and the Senate to quickly override every veto. As a result, the governor then vetoed the entire budget.  No problem!  Today June 30, the Maine legislature voted to override the governor's veto, again. 

“When you’re sitting there poking the yes button every 15 seconds to override 128 vetoes, it’s hard to feel like you’re contributing a lot to moving the state forward,” said State Senator Roger J. Katz, a Republican (from Augusta) who has been an occasional LePage ally, but more often a critic. “The atmosphere here is one of depression,” he said.

Moreover, Maine's governor used his executive power to systematically fire a litany of state officials, without apparent cause. 

Now, the Maine legislature is considering actions to fire the governor by launching impeachment proceedings.

This political acrimony is totally unprecedented for Maine. In fact, Maine's Governor LePage doesn't "get" that his behavior has now passed the point of no return. He's a political Humpty Dumpty.

Governor Christie is no better off.  Unbelievably, Christie thinks he's qualified to be president of the United States!  What he doesn't get is that his support for LePage, during the governor's Maine re-election campaign, put him into bad company. It's like your mother told you, when your high school friends caused trouble. "Be careful who your friends are...."  Governor LePage and Governor Christie are bad company.  Stay away from their cafeteria lunch table.   

The New York Times Reports:

AUGUSTA, Me. — When Paul R. LePage, Maine’s combative governor, was seeking re-election last year, he told voters that his days of intemperate remarks were over. At a debate, Mr. LePage, who is of French descent, memorably said: “Even a Frenchman can be taught to cool down.”

And he can apparently heat up again, too.

In the last few weeks, Mr. LePage’s pugnaciousness has surprised even his critics, and prompted some to raise the specter of impeachment.

In a standoff that began with differences over tax policy, Mr. LePage has alienated just about the entire Legislature, including his fellow Republicans and erstwhile allies. He has called them names and gone on a veto spree, canceling a record number of bills in a flurry that would rival any Maine blizzard; in turn, the Legislature has responded with an override spree, reviving many bills unanimously.

On Monday, Mr. LePage is expected to veto the $6.7 billion, two-year state budget; the Legislature will return Tuesday, when it is expected to override the veto.

But the governmental dysfunction has become a sideshow to an even bigger controversy over Mr. LePage’s actions regarding a charter school for at-risk youths. The school had hired Mark Eves, the Democratic speaker of the House and a LePage foe, as its next president, starting Wednesday. Mr. LePage said Mr. Eves was unfit to lead the school, and threatened to withhold more than $500,000 in annual state money unless the hiring was rescinded; the school, a nonprofit fearing the loss could threaten private matching funds and lead to its closing, did so.

Mr. Eves accused the governor of blackmailing the school and threatened to sue him.

The governor’s actions have infuriated many who say he overstepped his executive authority; a group of Democrats and independents in the Legislature is researching how and whether to impeach him. Democratic leaders are taking a cautious approach, but have said nothing is off the table. An anti-LePage rally is being planned here for noon on Tuesday.

“Things have gone way off the rails, and there’s a real question about whether he’s fit to govern,” said Phil Bartlett, chairman of the state Democratic Party. “I support legislators getting to the bottom of this and making sure there’s accountability.”

Lawmakers say they are exhausted and frustrated.

For one thing, Maine’s problems, like its lagging economy, are not being addressed.

Mr. LePage declined an interview request. But Rick Bennett, chairman of the state Republican Party, defended the governor as a change agent, someone who provided “a disruptive energy,” in a good way, and who had “shaken Augusta to its roots.”

“He doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who don’t see the urgency for reform that he does,” said Mr. Bennett, who described the atmosphere as “acrid.”

The animosity dismays many who are proud of Maine’s tradition of civility and bipartisanship.

“Right now, we have an absurd, vitriolic, vindictive state of affairs,” said Amy Fried, a political scientist at the University of Maine.

Mr. LePage was emboldened by his election in November to a second term. While he failed to win a majority, he exceeded expectations by winning 48 percent of the vote, five percentage points ahead of his Democratic challenger. Republicans also recaptured control of the Senate, with 20 of 35 seats, and trimmed the Democratic majority in the House to 78-68 (with five independents).

“The governor could claim a mandate and had a tremendous amount of political capital, but in the last six months it has seemingly slipped away,” Mr. Katz said.

The problems began with Mr. LePage’s desire to eliminate the income tax by increasing and broadening the sales tax. 

But, he failed to engage his own party in advance, and Republican legislators balked.

Among them was Senator Tom Saviello. “The governor is a businessman, a former C.E.O. whose method is to do what he wants,” Mr. Saviello said of Mr. LePage, who was the general manager of a 14-store discount chain. “But I have to figure out what’s best for the people of Franklin County.”

Mr. LePage also has refused to release money for bond issues approved by voters. And he declared that he would veto every bill sponsored by a Democrat until Democrats supported his proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate Maine’s income tax. Democrats said the governor had no plan for filling the $1.7 billion hole that eliminating the income tax would create.

In mid-June, after the Legislature passed a budget that did not include his tax-cut proposals, the governor showed off a Christmas tree outside his office. It was adorned with the pictures of legislators he said had loaded up the budget with wasteful spending projects, often called pork. He produced a pink plastic pig and squeaked it.

And he extended his veto threat to include any bill sponsored by Republicans, saying they had conspired with Democrats to pass the budget.

“I want to show that for five months they wasted our time, and this time I’m going to waste a little of their time,” said Mr. LePage, who went on to veto 64 line items in the budget.

Mr. Bennett, the Republican Party chairman, said Mr. LePage felt justified in taking these steps because the budget “didn’t reflect the reason he got re-elected.”

The effect has been to unify the Republicans and Democrats.

“Right now, the Legislature is united in lock step and opposed to the governor,” said Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine. “They view this as an institutional fight rather than a partisan fight.”

All of this set the stage for the fury that erupted last week when Mr. LePage threatened to halt state financing to the Good Will-Hinckley charter school if it allowed Mr. Eves to become its president.

“Speaker Eves has been an ardent foe of charter schools for his entire political career; then he turns around and gets hired to run a charter school — whose board is chaired by Eves’s own State House employee — for a cushy job worth about $150,000 in total compensation,” Mr. LePage said in a statement explaining his actions.

The school said in response that the board chairman to whom the governor referred does not serve on the board that had hiring authority and had recused himself “from any even tangential involvement in considering Speaker Eves’s application.” 

It said the school conducted a rigorous national search for a new president and that the votes of its board of directors in hiring Mr. Eves were unanimous.

Mr. Bennett said that the governor had discretion over the use of the money in question and that he was well within his legal rights to withhold it.

Representative Jeffrey Evangelos, an independent, was among those who began researching impeachment proceedings last week on the grounds of abuse of authority, misuse of assets and unbecoming conduct.

“You can’t leverage state assets to intimidate a private entity,” he said.

The state’s biggest newspaper, The Portland Press Herald, has called for a House investigation of the Eves affair and said that, unless new information emerged justifying the governor’s action, he should be impeached and tried by the Senate.

So far, more than a dozen independents and Democrats have joined the impeachment effort, Mr. Evangelos said, but many more are holding back.

Mr. Katz, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, said on Friday that he expected the committee and the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability to begin an investigation of the episode.

He added with a sigh: “Summer can’t come soon enough.”
Correction: June 30, 2015

An article on Monday about the conflict between the governor of Maine and the State Legislature misstated, in some editions, the amount of a budget shortfall that Democratic lawmakers say would be created by a plan to eliminate the state income tax. It is $1.7 billion, not $1.7 million.

Governor LePage and Governor Christie are political bookends. 

Americans who want to know what kind of a US president Governor Christie would be should take a look at Maine. Both men are political failures.

Drinking the Chris Christie Kool-Aid

Anybody who believes the New Jersey Governor Chris Christie didn't have information about the intentional George Washington Bridge lane closing, an antagonistic act attributed to political retribution, must be drinking Republican Kool-Aid laced with Tinkerbell dust.

Of course, there's a distinct line between knowing about the lane closing and directing the obstruction. Nevertheless, if something walks like a duck, it's usually is related to the family, said Dick Cheney. Also, you can't put lipstick on a pig, says Sarah Palin, by claiming Christie didn't have knowledge when he clearly had to have known about the closures. All of which is to say, you're the company you keep. Governor Christie was among those people who admitted to closing down the George Washington Bridge lane leading to Ft. Lee, just because the city's mayor didn't endorse the governor's re-election campaign. Therefore, he's guilty by association.

New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait describes six reasons why Christie is guilty. If the daunting investigation proves anything in a way to taint the New Jersey governor, the scandal will be more damaging the the myths concocted against the Clinton administration during the Whitewater investigations. Nothing of substance was ever found in the witch hunt to incriminate the charges brought up against the Clintons, although a some of their friends were threatened with prison in hopes they would somehow turn states evidence, which never happened. In the case of Governor Christie, it seems to me, the outrageous behavior his arrogant staff took to close the Ft. Lee bridge lane was indicative of a deeper problem within Christie's management style. In other words, he's a Tony Soprano style bully.

Here are Chait's six reasons to believe Governor Christie is guilty:

The New York Times reports that David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who oversaw punitive lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, had evidence that Chris Christie knew about it. The Times quickly changed its wording to reflect that fact that Wildstein merely says “evidence exists” that Christie knew.

The wording change prompted a familiar Chinese fire drill of reporters, after having rushed to proclaim Christie’s political demise, to mock the Times and caution that Christie may survive this yet. And he might! Sometimes people who appear very guilty turn out to be innocent. (See: Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.) But usually, people who appear very guilty turn out to be guilty (Julie's note, as Dick Cheney said, if it walks like a Duck...). And Christie appears very guilty.

1. Wildstein is claiming evidence exists that Christie knew. He would look bad if such evidence does not come to light.

2. Wildstein spent time with Christie while the lanes were closed. If you had been ordered to close traffic lines for punitive reasons, and you saw the governor, wouldn’t you either tell him about it, or else already know he approved? Undertaking an action like that without knowing the governor approved it, and without having any desire to take credit, seems like an implausible motivation.

3. Christie has changed his story about when he knew about the lane closings. Having first asserted he learned on October 1, Christie later claimed he learned earlier, though would not say when.

4. His campaign manager is pleading the fifth.

5. Carrying out petty retribution is fully in keeping with the pattern of Christie’s governing style of using petty retribution.

6. Allegations of abuse of power predate even Christie's governorship. Chait keeps mentioning the report in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s campaign book about the Romney campaign vetting of Christie, because he  find it mystifying that others aren’t taking it as seriously as I am. It’s not that partisan enemies are ginning up accusations. Republican Mitt Romney wanted to nominate Christie, but took a look at the vetting file and ran the other way:

More than once, Myers reported back that Trenton’s response was, in effect, "Why do we need to give you that piece of information?" Myers told her team, "We have to assume if they’re not answering, it’s because the answer is bad".

The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.)

Everything here is circumstantial. Christie definitely comes off as the kind of politician who would order a stunt like this. Possibly he didn’t do it. Possibly he did, but it will never be proven. His best-case scenario now appears to be an absence of a smoking gun, and convincing voters not to believe the subordinate pointing a finger at him. It doesn’t look good.

Chait leaves an open door to the potential for Christie to find a way out of the mess he's created for himself. But, if "what goes around comes around" holds true, then the mythical scandals of the Clinton years will come home to roost, if Christie is ever nominated as leader of the Republican Party.

Anybody who really believes Governor Christie is innocent in Bridgegate, the deliberate lane closing, must be drinking Republican Kook-Aid laced with Tinkerbell dust.

Governor Chris Christie Traffic Jam is Closing His Career Lanes

Americans may be ambiguous about Governor Christie's insincerity and truthfulness when it comes to his three months late apology for "bridgegate", the closing of exit lanes off the George Washington Bridge leading to Fort Lee New Jersey, because people on his staff wanted to cause a traffic jam.

But, Americans are not ambiguous about traffic jams. Democrats who want Governor Christie exposed for being a political bully, who engages in abuse of power whenever he might be able to get away with it, should keep their sights on the angst caused by traffic jam, rather than on the politics.

In all the rhetoric about how Governor Christie was either potentially not involved, not informed or innocent about the outrageous bridge lane closings, for what's been called "retaliatory" reasons, the apologies just don't seem genuine. Governor Christie nevr "got" the issue. It's about traffic, stupid!

When first asked about the incident, Governor Christie responded with outrageous bravado, saying something like he was the person placing the traffic cones. Lesson in traffic scandals 101 - never try to make bravado out of traffic jams.

Dear Governor Christie, for what it's worth, the correct answer should have been this: "Whadddya mean, lanes closed to Fort Lee?  Who did this?  I want answers! Heads will roll about this!".  Instead, Governor Christie said he was the person putting up the traffic cones.

This issue resonates with people because it's about being stuck in traffic on a bridge. It's a nightmare to which we can all relate.

Especially on September 11, 2013.

My prediction is that the traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge on September 11, 2013 is closing the lanes on Governor Christie's political ambitions to become president of the United States.

If Christie thinks he was smug about putting up cones on the George Washington Bridge, then he should consider practicing how to perfect this skill.

Maybe, he'll one day be directing traffic on the George Washington Bridge - and his bravado statements might prove to have been a self fulfilling prophesy.