Janet Mills

Oh, well gosh, yeah. He tweeted and blasted me all over social media, insisting that I bend to his will. There was some nastier language than that. Oh yeah, he came up one morning when he was in a foul mood and blasted me again. I thought, I just ignored it because I don't get engaged with the President of the United States on tweet and social media. My mother always said, don't get into a pissing match with a skunk, right?

Same thing. But that exchange was really strange. It was jaw-dropping for me, because when the president of the United States, no matter what the issue is, when he says to you, I, we are the federal law, you go, no, no. I mean, I'm an American citizen, and I'm a lawyer, and I read the Constitution. You are not the law. The Constitution says that you have to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,

Not invented, created or amended by tweet or executive order or press release. You're not the law. So it was jaw-dropping to me. And when I said, he said, are you going to follow my executive order? I said, I'm going to comply with state and federal law. When he said, I am the law, I said what any American citizen would say. I'll see you in court. And so a little while after that,

He told his department of agriculture to stop funding main schools, which meant 170,000 school kids would go without the school lunch program. I thought, well, that doesn't make any sense. So we went to court and a Republican appointed judge, a federal judge appointed by a Republican president, gave us a ruling that said, no, you can't do that. You can't stop funding school lunch programs because you disagree with state policy on transgender athletes. It didn't make any sense.

Se on vaikeaa, ja näemme sitä joka päivä. Vastuullinen heippaaminen Jyväskylän ja Yhdysvaltojen puolustuksesta. Järjestäjät eivät olleet häntä vastaan. Yhdysvaltojen puolustus ei ole häntä vastaan. Se on se, mikä huomaa minua suurin piirtein. Yhdysvaltojen puolustus ja kongressi ovat anneet heidän oikeuksiaan.

They're ceding to him the will to issue taxes and tariffs and whipsaw the economy, which is dangerous to everybody. It's hurting our people, hurting our economy. The authority to just undermine health care, undercut women's rights to reproductive health care, those kinds of things. And then to just sort of take a military action in another country, Venezuela, and take out the leader and not explain

Why you're there and what your plan is to run another country. That's insane. And I've called upon Susan Collins to hold hearings. You know, she's the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the all-powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. So hold hearings. Find out what the game plan is. Find out how they plan to run another country. Even the oil company said, we're not going to invest there. It's too risky. So what's the plan? You know, taking these

dramatic and risky actions without consulting Congress, as he should have, without consulting the American people about a dangerous action and sending ICE agents into American cities and harming people in these cities, giving them quotas to make arrests and handing them a dark outfit and a gun and a mask and setting them loose on the American people.

It's not just fancy words that matter, it's deeds, it's results, getting results. And so, you know, in the area of minimum wage, for instance, I've been there and drafted minimum wage legislation for farm workers, for instance, and been there on prevailing wage legislation for working people, giving them prevailing wages on publicly funded construction jobs and things like that. I've had to make decisions. And when you're in public office, you do have to make decisions and not just

utter platitudes or talk policy in the general sense without backing up with the action. So I think, you know, regardless of age, you look at what somebody's done. What have they accomplished? How have their acts portrayed their deeds, portrayed their philosophy and their positions? And I think my acts as governor, for instance, delivering progress for many people on health care on day one,

I expanded Medicaid, healthcare to 100,000 people. I expanded school lunch programs, free school lunch to all public school kids. We created free community college for all recent high school grads. Very popular with younger people. I've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in housing. Look, I have grandsons who are in their early twenties and getting married or planning to get married, start a family. Good jobs they have, but they can't afford a house in Maine.

And so I want to help that generation to child care. We've created another six thousand plus child care slots in me through my actions. We keep moving along that line. But governor, I apologize on those two things I mentioned. Is it that I'm trying to read between the lines? Is it that you don't support a twenty five dollar minimum wage or that you think it's an unrealistic thing to promise?

I think it's worthy of debate and I plan to go to the Senate to talk about what the minimum wage should be. It darn well shouldn't be 7.25. That's insane. And many states still go by the federal minimum wage, including I think New Hampshire. That's insane. Our minimum wage today is like $15.10. It just went up. We have a graduated minimum wage increase. And maybe that should be on the federal level too. Maybe it should be geared to the CPI or something.

geared to an objective criteria, so you don't have to go back to Congress every few years or every 20 years, for crying out loud, and say, what should it be today? What is the price of living? But we also have to bring prices down. I truly think that affordability is not just a talking point in a campaign, it's a moral imperative. That includes the cost of healthcare, the cost of car repairs, the cost of groceries. And this president has done nothing but damage the economy,

and bring up the price of goods when he campaigned a little over a year ago, saying he was going to bring down prices and not have any foreign wars or foreign military actions. Well, that's BS as we know now. So I'm going to fight in the US Senate to bring down prices, bring down the cost of healthcare, and get rid of those crazy whipsawing tariffs, the uncontrollable tariffs that are affecting the cost of housing.

Well, I haven't heard his specific proposal on banning corporate landlords. Okay. That's new to me, and nor has he ever presented that to the legislature. And I've worked with the main legislature, members of both parties for years now, to create solutions to the housing problem. One interesting thing we've done, for instance, was to put money towards mobile home parks, which is one-eighth of our housing in Maine, mobile home parks. And the people who live in them, many of them have lived there for

decades and decades. And when these corporate interests come in from out of state and want to buy up a mobile home park and turn it into condoized housing units or something different, I've been there to protect the people in those mobile home parks and help them buy their own park with some ingenuity, with some creative financing and with some state money. We've done that three times. So that's the kind of creative thinking I do, working with the legislature,

to solve or address the housing problem. It's not just landlord tenant. It's keeping the big equity firms out of our mobile home parks to turning our properties into, you know, mini malls and fancy condos for rich people. So would you be up for keeping them out with legislation? No. And another thing we've done is to encourage first home buyers. And this is a key need for young people in Maine.

So we upped the tax on the real estate transfers. There's so many people coming to Maine and buying houses for over a million dollars. So we increased the tax on those sales of over a million dollars and put that into a home fund that helps renters get out of renting an apartment and get to buy their own home. And that's the kind of creative progress we've been making in Maine.

So more market based solutions that are positioning people to be able to make these choices on their own, it sounds like. Sure. We put money towards encouraging lower interest rates from mortgage mortgages and. Obviously, we put money into shelters and temporary housing as well and encouraging businesses in Maine to provide