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Democratic legislative leaders have reached an agreement on a number of key supplemental budget fixes, including restoring pension tax breaks for retirees and an increase in pay for education technicians.

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, met with Democratic leaders on Friday and reached consensus on several provisions, his office said Saturday.

The deal comes nearly a week after Democrats on the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee voted to recommend a supplemental budget that removed $60 million from the states highway budget,rolled back tax relief for pensioners and reduced aid to dairy farmers.

The committees vote taken at nearly 3 a.m. on April 6 and overriding the objections of Republican members drew the ire of Gov. Janet Mills and prompted her to urge fellow Democrats to reconsider the ill-advised changes. Republicans criticized Democrats for making a significant change in the dark of night without public notice.

Jackson said the supplemental budget recommended by Democrats on the committee makes a number of critical investments in our state from housing and maintaining the 55% threshold for public K-12 education funding to support for victims of mass violence events.

However, its clear that lawmakers must also keep our promises on tax breaks for retirees, dairy farmers and transportation, he said in a statement Saturday. In addition, we need to take steps to bolster retention and recruitment efforts for state workers, protect funding for York Hospital, and raise wages for education technicians and critical school support staff. There seems to be a consensus on a number of key issues and an agreement for them to be addressed as soon as possible.

The provisions outlined by Jackson are expected to be taken up by the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee in the coming days.

They include fully restoring the pension tax break for retirees passed last July. This would increase the annual income tax deduction from $30,000 to $35,000 for all retired Maine residents and include language to increase the deduction to the equivalent of the maximum Social Security benefit in the following years.

Jackson said lawmakers will vote to increase support for dairy farmers to at least 25% of the newly identified cost of production, an initiative that received unanimous support from the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee. It will benefit 146 dairy farms that participate in the program and 14,000 workers.

Lawmakers will have a chance to vote to increase wages for ed techs and support staff, and to support a new compensation and classification system that closes the state employee pay gap for executive branch workers.

Democratic leaders also reached consensus on protecting current funding for York Hospital. The hospital rate reform included in the current supplemental budget benefits most hospitals in the state but would result in the loss of critical funding for York Hospital. Lawmakers are expected to vote on language to ensure the hospital remains unharmed by rate reform and maintains its current funding level.

Lawmakers also will vote on whether to restore an agreement on roads and bridges that was recently altered in the supplemental budget. Last session, Democrats and Republicans worked together to find consistent funding for the chronically underfunded Highway Fund to ensure the safety of road and bridges, according to Jackson.

Mills presented two budget proposals this session in response to predictions from nonpartisan revenue forecasters that the state will take in $373 million more in tax revenue this year and next than originally anticipated. Her latest spending plan would increase the state budget to $10.41 billion, up from the current $10.3 billion.

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Democratic legislative leaders reach agreement on supplemental budget fixes - Press Herald

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said the percentage of White voters who identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic in 2020 was 52 percent. It was 42 percent. The article has been corrected.

Democrats are heading into the general-election campaign without the party identification advantage that they enjoyed four years ago, according to a study released Tuesday, driven partly by changing views of Black and Hispanic voters.

The Pew Research Center survey of more than 10,000 registered voters found the country was about evenly split between the major parties, with 49 percent identifying as Democrats or saying they lean Democratic and 48 percent identifying as or leaning Republican. Those results are from the nonpartisan groups latest reading, in August. By comparison, Democrats held an advantage in party identification throughout the Trump administration, including a 51 percent to 46 percent edge in 2020.

Republicans gains in party affiliation largely occurred in the first two years of Bidens presidency and are echoed in many other polls. But they mark a break from Democrats advantage on this basic measure of party affinity through most of the past three decades.

The Pew survey provides a comprehensive look at how each partys coalition has shifted from the mid-1990s to 2023. Since 1996, the share of U.S. registered voters who are Hispanic has grown from 4 percent to 13 percent, while the share who are Asian has grown from about 1 percent to 4 percent. In 2023, 44 percent of Democratic-leaning voters were non-White, as were 20 percent of Republican-leaning voters.

Democrats recent losses have been concentrated among Black and Hispanic voters, Pew found. The share of Black voters identifying as or leaning Democratic fell from a high of 91 percent in 2016 to 88 percent in 2020 and 83 percent in 2023. Among Hispanic voters, Democratic identification fell from 68 percent in 2016 to 65 percent in 2020 and 61 percent last year.

Those declines are less dire for Democrats than other recent data, including 2023 Gallup polls that found 66 percent of Black adults leaned Democratic, along with 47 percent of Hispanic adults, both record lows. Both surveys suggest President Biden has substantial work to do in reassembling his winning coalition from 2020 this November. A February Pew survey found Bidens favorability rating among Latino adults fell to 37 percent, down from 44 percent last July, while Trumps favorability with Latinos increased from 28 percent to 34 percent over the same period.

The Pew survey found a 63 percent majority of Asian voters leaned Democratic in 2023, unchanged from 2020 but down from a high point of 81 percent in 2018. Among White voters, 56 percent leaned Republican while 41 percent leaned Democratic, close to their 55 percent-42 percent margin in 2020.

The report noted that while gender, race and ethnicity and religious affiliation have long been political dividing lines, there also have been profound changes in some cases as a result of demographic change, in others because of dramatic shifts in the partisan allegiances of key groups.

One of the biggest shifts has been among White voters without college degrees, who made up a majority of the electorate in the 1990s and are still the single largest group of voters across education levels, race and ethnicity, according to the report. While this group was evenly divided between the parties as recently as 2007, they shifted toward Republicans during the Obama administration and were key to Donald Trumps victory in 2016. In 2023, White voters without degrees leaned Republican by a 30-point margin, 63 percent to 33 percent.

White college graduates have shifted gradually in the opposite direction: 58 percent leaned Republican in 1994, but today 51 percent lean Democratic.

In another long-term shift, Republicans now hold a 25-point advantage among voters who live in rural counties, up from a six-point advantage in 2000. Democrats maintain a 23-point advantage among voters in urban counties slightly narrower than in 2016 while suburban voters have been closely divided since the turn of the century.

The survey found a modest gender gap, with women leaning Democratic by a seven-point margin and men leaning Republican by six points. Marital status appears to matter more: Married women were about twice as likely to lean Republican as women who had never married (50 percent vs. 24 percent), while married men were 22 points more likely to lean Republican than those who had never wed. Parents of children under 18 were also significantly more likely to identify as Republicans than those without children, regardless of voters age or gender.

Pew found continued Democratic strength among younger voters, with 66 percent of those ages 18 to 24 and 64 of those ages 25 to 29 identifying as or leaning Democratic. Those results contrast with recent polls suggesting that Biden and Democrats have lost ground with younger voters.

Polls of younger Americans attitudes can vary for a wide variety of reasons: Many are not registered to vote, the group pays less attention to politics, and they tend to be harder to reach in polls. Pew found just over half of voters under age 25 identified with either the Democratic Party or Republican Party about half instead said they are something else or independent, with 28 percent leaning Democratic and 20 percent leaning Republican. Other polls have found that younger Americans are more critical than older Americans of Israels and Bidens handling of the Israel-Hamas war that began in October, after Pews survey was conducted.

The Pew study also provided a detailed look at the degree to which religious groups differ in their political views. Republican identification was strongest among White evangelical Protestants (85 percent) and Mormons (75 percent), while Democratic identification was strongest among Black Protestants (84 percent), atheists (84 percent) and agnostics (78 percent). The survey found that Catholics overall leaned Republican by a 52 percent to 44 percent margin, a shift from recent years when the group was closely divided between the parties.

The survey was conducted Aug. 7-27, 2023, among 10,124 registered voters who are members of the Pew American Trends Panel, which was recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points; error margins for party-leaning estimates from prior years ranged from 0.7 to 1.5 points.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

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Republicans close gap with Democrats on party identification, Pew survey finds - The Washington Post

As more progressive Democrats implore the Biden administration to suspend its pipeline of military aid to Israel as a means of compelling a course change in Gaza, lawmakers and analysts say the law offers several tools for doing so.

U.S. leverage over Israel owes in large part to the $3.3 billion in annual security assistance Washington provides to the Jewish state, making it the largest recipient of American military aid. Israels growing isolation on the international stage fallout from the staggering number of civilian casualties and an emerging famine in the Palestinian enclave has only underscored the importance of its relationship with the United States, observers say.

The fury being felt by some lawmakers came through this week as they grilled senior national security officials during congressional budget hearings. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) lamented to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that we are the ones supplying Israeli forces with the bombs being used to destroy homes and hospitals and refugee camps.

The U.S. government provides an extraordinary amount of weaponry to Israel, said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, noting that the Biden administration has authorized more than 100 arms sales since Oct. 7, including through emergency means that bypass congressional review. And so, he said, all of that gives the United States a lot of potential leverage, either by outright withholding or blocking transfers, or through the credible threat of doing so.

If President Biden wished to take such a step, he would not need new legislation. There are a lot of laws on the books, said Sarah Margon, director of foreign policy at the Open Society Foundations, that can be used to restrict and condition security assistance in whole or in part.

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Analysis | Progressives want to cut military aid to Israel. Here are the options. - The Washington Post

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Texas Democrats in Congress are appealing to colleges to set aside financial aid funds for students who have not been able to complete the new FAFSA form because their parents do not have Social Security numbers.

Errors in the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which launched this year, have prevented parents without Social Security numbers from adding their financial information. The problem has disproportionately affected immigrant families.

A majority of Texas Democrats in the U.S. House signed an open letter Monday, calling on the states colleges to track how much money went last year to students whose parents do not have Social Security numbers, and to ensure a similar amount remains available until June 1 or until the federal government confirms it has forwarded to the colleges all the financial aid records they have from students affected by the error.

We are greatly troubled about the disparate discriminatory impact this will have on thousands of Texas students seeking financial benefit being foreclosed to them due to nothing other than the immigration status of their contributor, said the letter, which was spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas.

In Texas, about one in four children has at least one parent who is not a U.S. citizen. Students must be U.S. citizens or have legal immigration status to apply for federal financial aid.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board extended the state priority deadline to submit the FAFSA to April 15 to acknowledge the technical challenges students from immigrant families have faced. But Texas colleges offer aid on a first-come, first serve basis, which means they could run out of funds by then and before many immigrant students can be considered to receive financial aid.

Adjusting priority deadline policy alone is not sufficient, the lawmakers letter said. An institution which only adjusts its deadline policy may still find that it has awarded all of its available funds before the institution even receives the [Social Security Number]-burdened students [financial aid records].

For four months, the U.S. Department of Education has been working on fixing the FAFSA error. Feds in mid-March announced a technical update that allowed students with parents without Social Security numbers to submit the form. But in the same announcement, they revealed two more bugs affecting the same group of students.

Parents without Social Security numbers have to enter their financial information manually, while other contributors can have the IRS pull their information directly from their tax filings. And those parents get an error message when the name or address they put down does not exactly match what their child entered.

Of the 13 Texas Democrats in Congress, ten signed the letter: Crockett; U.S. Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett of Austin; Joaquin Castro of San Antonio; Colin Allred of Dallas; Veronica Escobar of El Paso; Sylvia R. Garcia, Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston; and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth. They join a growing number of lawmakers who have intervened in the rollout of the new FAFSA, which Congress mandated in 2020 to streamline the form and make it easier to complete.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

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Texas Democrats call on colleges to set aside financial aid money for immigrant families affected by FAFSA glitch - The Texas Tribune

Democrats, seeking to tie abortion restrictions to former President Donald J. Trump and Republicans, again laid the blame for limits on reproductive rights at Mr. Trumps feet, saying the former presidents statement on Monday calling for abortion restrictions to be decided by states was part of a pattern of extreme lawmaking.

In the video he released, Mr. Trump said that states should decide through legislation and make it the law of the land, and in this case, the law of the state. A handful of Republicans disagreed, saying he did not go far enough by not endorsing a federal ban or discussing it at all. But Democrats, who have identified reproductive rights as a top campaign issue this year, argue that Mr. Trump effectively did endorse a total ban by leaving the decision to states who will implement one and that, if re-elected, he will enact a total ban on the procedure something Mr. Trump has not specifically said he would do.

In a blistering 604-word statement, President Biden said via his campaign that Mr. Trump was responsible for creating the cruelty and the chaos that has enveloped America since the Dobbs decision, referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The president said that his opponents abortion stance has created a crisis of his own making. Mr. Trump, he said, is lying about the number of Americans who support abortion restrictions and scrambling to craft a message around his record.

Heres what Donald Trump doesnt understand: When he ripped away Roe v. Wade, he ripped away a fundamental right for the women of America that the United States Supreme Court had affirmed and reaffirmed for 50 years. As a fundamental right, it didnt matter where you lived, Mr. Biden said in the statement.

The president also challenged Mr. Trumps false statement that Americans widely support restrictions on abortion and said the former president made a political deal to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade in exchange for support from anti-abortion voters.

Trump admits as much in his statement today, Mr. Biden said. Having created the chaos of overturning Roe, hes trying to say, Oh, never mind. Dont punish me for that. I just want to win.

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Biden and Other Democrats Tie Trump to Limits on Abortion Rights - The New York Times