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| 📷 Former President Donald Trump speaks as he announces a third run for president at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on, Nov. 15, 2022. (AP photo by Rebecca Blackwell) |
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🔨 Here are the initial Maine reactions to Thursday's historic indictment.
◉ Former President Donald Trump was indicted on federal charges over classified documents. It is a historic first for a former president. It also comes as Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination, including in Maine, where a poll released last week gave him 45 percent support in his party among an increasingly crowded field.
◉ A spokesperson for Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the office was withholding comment until the indictment describing the charges against Trump is unsealed. That may come next week around his Tuesday court appearance in Miami.
◉ Both King and Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who also sits on the intelligence panel, co-sponsored a bill last month that would overhaul the classification process. Collins had not commented on Trump's indictment by Friday morning, but she repeated during a Thursday event with Punchbowl News before the news broke that she would not support him in the primary.
💊 Here's how lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on contraception.
◉ Last week, Gov. Janet Mills signed into a law a bill from Sen. Eric Brakey, R-Auburn, that will allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control over the counter, an idea that united anti-abortion Republicans including Brakey as well as abortion-rights Democrats, passing without roll-call votes in each chamber.
◉ It has been a long journey on the idea for Brakey, who first proposed a bill like this in 2017 during the tenure of former Gov. Paul LePage. Abortion-rights groups were cool to that bill and Brakey's original one this year in part because it limited the types of birth control that would be available in this manner.
◉ By the end of the process, the group of drugs was expanded to not just include birth control pills and patches, but also rings and injectable contraceptives. In a tweet this week, Brakey credited Rep. Sally Cluchey, D-Bowdoinham, a fellow member of the health insurance panel, for helping to craft the end product. |
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What we're reading
⌚ Maine Democrats delayed a key vote on an abortion-rights bill.
🛢️ Irving Oil may be sold. Here's what it would mean for Maine, and here's your soundtrack.
🎒 Go inside Hermon's library book controversy with school board candidates.
🌫️ The Quebec wildfires will erode coastal air quality over the weekend. |
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