Earmarks are back and — as I cover Maine’s congressional delegation for the Portland Press Herald — I’ve been tracking how the requests for the Pine Tree State have progressed through the appropriations process for the better part of a year. Now the omnibus federal funding package has finally passed and Maine’s members — Sen. Susan Collins (R), Sen. Angus King (I), Rep. Chellie Pingree (D) and Rep. Jared Golden (D) — got just about everything they asked for.
An overview is in this article for the Press Herald. Some background on Pingree’s influential appointment to a House subcommittee chairship can be found here.
Some other recent Congressional coverage includes this story on King and Collins’ support of postal service reform; this interview with King where he sounds the alarm about likely Russian cyberwar attacks on US businessesand this feature on how Democrats are hoping Collins votes for Biden’s first Supreme Court nominee even though they don’t need her to do so for it to pass.
Earlier, Golden introduced this bill to partially unshackle Maine’s native tribes from certain constraints placed on them by the 1980 Settlement Acts.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.