In November, voters overwhelmingly rejected issuing a $25 million bond for a new prison in Machias and for repairs to the Maine Correctional Center in South Windham.
The signal, Augusta could assume, is that Mainers don’t want to build a new prison so soon after a facility was constructed in Warren, especially since Warren was billed as capable of housing most, if not all, of Maine’s medium- and maximum-level inmates.
Voters’ signal must have been missed because the Legislature has before it a bill that would expand the Maine Governmental Facilities Authority cap on issuing securities for correctional facilities from $85 million to $104 million.
The additional $19 million would be used to build a new prison in Washington County.
Voters rejected this notion less than five months ago. Given the speed at which lawmaking proceeds, the bill was probably drafted almost immediately after the Nov. 5 prison bond was rejected.
Is that the way government works? Ignore rejection at the polls and re-word statute to expand ability to borrow anyway?
Maine has a small population that is already struggling to meet costs. Last fall’s prison bond was rejected because Mainers just can’t afford the cost. The financial picture is worse now and this back door prison funding attempt is offensive.
A decent man
Sen. Patrick Moynihan, who died Wednesday, is considered a legend in politics, a visionary whose commitment to the American people made him an enormously popular four-term senator.
He earned such heartfelt admiration because his fundamental character trait was basic decency.
Early in his career, in the mid-1970s, Moynihan pushed the United States to be more assertive in the world. His moral code included protection of innocents and the underprivileged, and he was unafraid to challenge notorious dictators like Uganda’s Idi Amin.
As late as last June he reasserted his belief that the United States must trumpet freedom, this time against extremists in the Mideast.
A student of history, Moynihan took seriously the pattern of oppression that led to violence in the 19th and 20th centuries, and he worried that without real effort the pattern would continue in the 21st.
In addressing Harvard University graduates last year, Moynihan cautioned, “the terrorist attacks on the United States of last September 11 were not nuclear, but they will be.
“Separately, terrorism and nuclear weapons are the weapons of non-Western weak. If and when they are combined, the non-Western weak will be strong.”
That strength was evident following the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, and Moynihan suggested that our resolve must not falter.
“We are committed, as the Constitution states, to “the Law of Nations,” but that law as properly understood. Many have come to think that international law prohibits the use of force. To the contrary, like domestic law, it legitimates the use of force to uphold the law in a manner that is itself proportional and lawful.”
He could not have known we would be at war nine months later, but his rationale was sound.
“Democracy may not prove to be a universal norm. But decency would do.”
This, spoken by an utterly decent man.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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