The return of John Martin and a few features of the incoming Legislature

By Paul Mills

He’s back. The legendary John Martin has returned from political purgatory.

The man termed by friends and foes alike including former Gov. John McKernan as “the father of the modern Legislature,” will soon be reclaiming his seat after a two-year hiatus.

Martin will no doubt be called upon to offer advice to the 58 State House newcomers who in another few days will elevate their forearms to take the oath of office. After all, the turnover in Maine’s Legislature is one of the highest in the nation. Its Senate will feature the second highest partisan shift in America, the House tied for 10th. When I ran into Martin recently I asked him to offer some advice to the large number of his newly-elected colleagues.

“Don’t let yourself be led by only one side of an issue. Study the issues, ask questions and take your time,” he advised. “If you want to be successful as a legislator, you need to learn the rules of the Legislature using the legislative staff and fellow legislators. Becoming an effective legislator will not occur overnight, but you can still play a major role in the future of the state.”

Martin’s return to the House is a landmark event in part because he will just now be surpassing the previous Maine House longevity record. This was set by Lewiston’s Louis Jalbert, who left the lower chamber after 19 terms in 1984. (Counting Martin’s eight-year Senate service from 2000 to 2008, however, the Eagle Lake Democrat already holds the record for overall legislative service.)

Martin’s inauguration comes just 50 years after his own first election to the Legislature in 1964. The span between his initial service and his return this year is unusual but by no means unprecedented.

Take, for example, William Hanson of Machiasport. His swearing in for an eighth term in 1955 occurred 62 years after he first crossed the State House threshold in 1893. At 89, Hanson was one of the oldest persons ever to serve in any Maine Legislature.

The span between Hanson’s first and last House terms was also earmarked by time out from 1911 to 1913 to be secretary of the state Senate – the only occasion in his lifetime his fellow Democrats controlled that body – along with 45 years as town meeting moderator and 28 years as the local postmaster. Hanson, like Martin, was occasionally consulted on the question of what it takes to be an effective legislator. A frequent champion of Washington County fishing interests, Hanson offered this prescription for legislative success:

“The successful legislator is not necessarily the orator who talks on all questions. Give me the fellow who talks when he has something to say, the fellow who makes himself a favorite with his colleagues, the fellow who states his views in simple terms and in a few words. He’s the one who gets results. Legislators get suspicious of a man who talks too much,” Hanson said.

Police officers will outnumber the lawyers

Perhaps befitting the tone of the recent election, current or former police officers will in the new Legislature outnumber attorneys. Among those with backgrounds in law enforcement are two former county sheriffs, Oxford County’s “Skip” Herrick and Cumberland County’s Mark Dion, also an attorney. They will join former Deputy Sheriff Scott Cyrway of Waterville, Dixfield Police Chief Dick Pickett, former State Police Officer Paul Davis of Sangerville, Kevin Battle of South Portland and others.

The outnumbered attorneys besides Dion – who straddles the distinction of belonging to both groups – include Augusta’s Roger Katz, Saco’s Barry Hobbins, Newport’s Ken Fredette, Bangor’s Aaron Frey, Waterville’s Henry Murphy Beck, and Brunswick’s Ralph Tucker.

Freshman legislator but veteran jurist

Tucker, who won a first term as a Democratic House candidate from Brunswick, has the distinction of becoming only the third former full-time judge to be elected to the Legislature in at least a century. Besides his seven years on the District Court bench, Tucker also put in 11 years as a worker’s compensation commissioner. This was a quasi-judicial position to which he was named after an 18-year career with a law firm that concentrated on employee rights, particularly those on the payroll of Bath Iron Works.

The footsteps in which he will be treading include Franklin County’s John Benoit, elected as a Republican to three terms in the state Senate. Benoit sought a legislative seat in 1994 despite – or perhaps because – he had failed to win confirmation by the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee in 1990 for a third term on the bench. In a “if you can’t beat them join them” move, Benoit by his second legislative term became a member of the same committee that had been the Waterloo of his judicial career.

Some 14-years after leaving the Legislature, Benoit, now a Manchester resident, still flickers in the public spotlight with frequent letters to the editor of newspapers in Kennebec County on various issues of the day.

Before Benoit, the only former full-time judge to have won election to the Maine Legislature since at least 1914 – if not earlier – was Portland’s Lauren Sanborn, a Republican who served three terms in the state senate from 1941 until 1947. He’d been a Cumberland County based Superior Court Justice from 1918 until 1925 and also served two terms in the House from 1913 to 1917. A one-time South Portland superintendent of schools and trustee of Bates College, obituaries at the time of Sanborn’s death in 1953 noted his advocacy of laws to tighten up grounds for divorce.

Donning a political hat isn’t all that unusual for judges outside Maine, however. For in at least 38 states the electoral process is a typical means by which judges themselves are chosen. It’s also the means by which Maine since 1856 has chosen its probate judges and the method for nearly 20 years in the late 19th century it also chose its municipal court judges.

Both former Judge Tucker and former House Speaker John Martin are technically “freshman” members of the Maine Legislature – meaning they’re entering the State House without having been members of the immediately preceding legislative session.

They both, however, in this era of high turnover and term limits, bring intriguing and experienced backgrounds to what promises to be a challenging time in the history of lawmaking in Maine.

Paul H. Mills, is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.