Northeast
Maine state budget vote descends into debate over trans athletes and Laurel Libby's censure
The Maine state legislature voted on its biannual budget Thursday night, but the session was delayed by a prolonged debate over transgender athlete inclusion and the censure of Republican Rep. Laurel Libby.
Libby, who was censured by Maine’s Democratic majority and Speaker Ryan Fecteau for a social media post identifying an underage trans athlete, proposed several amendments to the state’s budget via a loophole in the state legislative policy.
Libby submitted 10 floor amendments to the budget Tuesday before the deadline to do so, which isn’t prevented by a censure. So, Libby was permitted to speak and present those amendments during Thursday’s session. One of those amendments was not related to the budget, but was a proposal to keep trans athletes out of girls sports.
However, when Libby did speak to present her amendments, multiple Democrats protested, instigating a debate with Republican representatives.
“During that floor amendment presentation process, there ended up being a floor debate … between the Republicans and Democrats regarding my censure. So, there was essentially a second vote regarding the censure, reaffirming the Democrats’ commitment to silencing my voice and my vote,” Libby said.
The Maine State House at dawn, Jan. 3, 2024, in Augusta, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
In addition to Libby’s proposal to ban trans athletes from girls sports, she proposed multiple budget bills that would have lowered taxes and government spending. These proposals included a repeal of a tax on solar energy, a repeal of free community college and a repeal of a recent 1% payroll tax.
But Libby’s amendments were not even considered, and Democrats moved to have the amendments indefinitely postponed.
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“I was not able to speak to them, to advocate for them and push for the benefit that they would bring to Maine people,” Libby said.
Ultimately, the budget that passed did not include any Republican input. The Maine House approved the $11.3 billion spending plan by a 74-67 vote along party lines. The Senate passed it 18-17 with two Democrats joining Republicans in opposition.
Libby was censured Feb. 25 because of a social media post of hers that identified a minor by name with a photo. Libby’s post pointed out that a transgender track and field athlete had taken first place at a Maine girls pole vault competition after the athlete competed as a boy just one year earlier.
“It’s a remarkable double standard as there are public photos of this individual in many places, on social media and even some posted by his school. And, so, yes, this post went viral, but this was an individual who participated in a public event, who publicly stood on a podium and accepted a championship medal that rightfully belonged to the girls standing on the second-place spot,” Libby previously told Fox News Digital.
Libby filed a lawsuit against Fecteau and Maine House Clerk Robert Hunt, which seeks to have her voting and speaking rights restored.
Libby represents more than 9,000 constituents in Maine’s House District 90, and six of them have signed onto the lawsuit as plaintiffs because the censure has prevented her from carrying out other legislative actions to serve those constituents.
“The speaker’s actions did not just disenfranchise me but disenfranchised the thousands of constituents that I represent, and that’s the bigger picture here; the fact that the speaker, in his eyes, retaliated against me because he doesn’t like what I have to say,” Libby previously told Fox News Digital.
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The Democratic Party will retake control of the state house in battleground Pennsylvania after winning a special legislative election on Tuesday that grabbed national attention.
Democrat Dan Goughnor, a police officer, easily defeated Republican Charles Davis, a fire chief, in a district southeast of Pittsburgh.
And Democrats also won a special election to fill a vacant Republican-controlled state Senate seat on the other side of Pennsylvania, in a district that President Trump won by 15 points last November. But the GOP will keep control of the state’s upper chamber, with a 27-23 majority.
The Pennsylvania State House had been deadlocked, with Republicans and Democrats both controlling 101 seats prior to Tuesday’s election.
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Democrats had lost their razor-thin majority in January after the death of state Rep. Matt Gergerly.
People gather outside the Pennsylvania Capitol. The “No Kings Day” protest, organized by the 50501 movement on Presidents Day, was part of a nationwide demonstration against the Trump administration and Elon Musk. (Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The House race is the fifth straight special election that Democrats have won so far in 2025, despite the party performing dismally in public opinion polling since losing control of the White House and Senate, and failing to win back the House majority in the 2024 elections.
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The party’s favorable rating sank to all-time lows in separate national polls conducted this month by CNN and NBC News. Those numbers followed a record low for Democrats in a Quinnipiac University survey in the field in February.
Additionally, the latest Fox News National poll, which was released last week, indicated that congressional Democrats’ approval rating is at 30%, near an all-time low. And Democrat activists are irate over their party’s inability to blunt President Donald Trump’s agenda.
In the state Senate election, Democrat James Andrew Malone, the mayor of East Petersburg, narrowly topped Republican Josh Parsons, a Lancaster County commissioner, in a race called by the Associated Press on Wednesday afternoon.
“Obviously we are disappointed in the numbers. We are still reviewing them, but it appears we will come up a little short. We will have a further statement tomorrow,” Parsons wrote in a social media post late on Tuesday night.
The race was to fill the red-leaning seat in Lancaster County that was left vacant when GOP state Sen. Ryan Aument stepped down in December to work as state director for newly elected U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, a fellow Republican.
The Pennsylvania State capitol building in Harrisburg. (John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a leader among the Democratic Party’s progressive base, took to social media Tuesday night to celebrate the victories.
“This is how it’s done. Run everywhere. Run down ballot. Focus on local elections ASAP – from school board to councils to state legislatures. We build from there,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, wrote Tuesday night that “Democrats are on a roll in state legislative races in 2025, from flipping red seats to defending one-seat majorities. Republicans should be on edge.”
And Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin characterized the victories as voter pushback against the sweeping and controversial moves made by Trump in his opening weeks back in office.
Martin called the wins “a shockwave to the system and the way Republicans have run our government. Republicans everywhere should be afraid.”
Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin speaks with Fox News on Dec. 12, 2024, in Washington D.C. Martin was elected DNC chair on Feb. 1. (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
But Republicans note that Democrats enjoyed a slew of special election victories in 2023 and 2024 before suffering serious setbacks in last November’s elections.
“Democrats are motivated and Republicans need to make sure our voters get out in the midterms, but the idea that a state legislative election is a direct harbinger of the midterm elections is a ludicrous idea,” Matt Gorman, a seasoned Republican strategist and veteran of numerous presidential campaigns, told Fox News.
Veteran Republican consultant Dave Carney told Fox News that “past elections have no impact on future elections.”
“It’s happy talk. If we had won, we’d be bragging too,” Carney, a veteran of numerous presidential and statewide campaigns for over four decades, said.
But he warned that “Democrats on the left spend so much more money on special legislative elections, particularly in the off-years, than we do, that they have a built-in advantage… Our party needs to wake up and take these special elections as seriously as we do the ones in November.”
Regardless of their predictive value, the contests in Pennsylvania will likely give the Democrats a much-needed boost ahead of next week’s more high-profile showdowns — a statewide Supreme Court election in battleground Wisconsin and two special congressional elections in bright red districts in Florida.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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A 16-year-old has been charged with several hate crimes in a gang attack on a Black teenager at a subway station this week, the police said.
The attack happened at 8 a.m. Monday at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, according to the police. The victim, 16, who has not been identified, was on his way to school when he was approached by a group of people, a police spokeswoman said. The group punched and kicked the boy, taunted him with racial slurs and removed one of his shoes, the spokeswoman said.
On Wednesday the police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with the attack. He faces five criminal charges, including hate crime robbery and hate crime gang assault in the second degree. The police did not release the name or ethnicity of the boy who was charged. The case is being investigated by the Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force.
Hate crimes on the subway, in line with broader trends, are down. The number of hate crimes in the system dropped 32 percent in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to police statistics. Data shows that crime on the subway has declined overall, though perceptions of criminality remain persistent: Barely a majority of riders, 56 percent, said they felt safe on the subway, according to a survey released in January.
That may be related to the increasingly random nature of subway crime and a series of high-profile violent episodes. The examples last year included a train conductor who was slashed late at night on an A train in Brooklyn in February. In December, at the same station in Coney Island where the teenager was attacked this week, Debrina Kawam, 57, died after being set on fire in a random early-morning attack on a parked train.
Nine days later, a man pushed Joseph Lynskey onto the tracks in front of a train at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan. He narrowly survived. People were pushed onto the tracks at least 25 times last year. (While riders might believe that young people are responsible for most violent crime, recent data finds that the average person charged with violence on the subway is 32 years old, compared with 24 nearly two decades ago.)
Officials at the M.T.A. have acknowledged that the rise in random attacks is concerning. Last year 1,000 members of the National Guard began patrolling the subways, on orders from Gov. Kathy Hochul. They were supported by officers from the State Police and the transit authority. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch also assigned more than 200 police officers to patrol platforms and subway cars, and reassigned hundreds more from administrative jobs to transit patrols, which allowed the department to place two officers aboard every train that runs overnight, Commissioner Tisch said.
Boston, MA
ISU World Figure Skating Championships 2025: Boston-based Americans Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov produce epic skate for home crowd
Sometimes gold is more of a feeling – and less of a placement.
It felt that way Thursday (27 March) evening inside TD Garden as the Boston-based pairs team of Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov delivered one of the most chilling moments of the entire ISU World Figure Skating Championships week, bringing their home crowd to its feet.
And nearly blowing the roof off of this famed arena’s ceiling.
“It means everything; all of the hard work we’ve been putting in,” a breathless Mitrofanov said after. “We feel happy to make everyone so proud… everyone from the Skating Club of Boston, everyone who was affected by the crash.”
Hearts have been heavy in the skating community since the tragic Flight 5342 crash at the end of January, which included lives lost of many skaters, coaches and family members in the U.S. – a collection of them from Boston.
Efimova and Mitrofanov held up photos of those Boston Club members lost in the crash, including 1994 pairs world champions, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who were coaches at the club.
“It feels like a family; we’ve all come together. We’re very blessed to train there,” Mitrofanov said. “Probably half the crowd [tonight] was from Skating Club of Boston.”
Efimova and Mitrofanov were excellent from the start of their Je Suis Malade free skate, opening with a solid triple twist as they settled into the program. But from there they went from strength to strength, hitting one element at a time.
After Efimova was called for an under-rotation on the back end of their side-by-side jumping combination, they delivered in fierce form, nailing a throw triple loop and earning positive GOEs (Grades of Execution) on all three of their lifts.
It was their final lift that was most spellbinding. The crowd was on its feet seconds before the music stopped. Boston had just witnessed two of its own deliver on the world’s stage.
When did you realise how special the program was? they were asked.
“At the end,” a smiling Mitrofanov said.
“I forgot about the crowd, actually,” Efimova added. “Misha turned me around at the end to be like, ‘Watch!‘”
“This is a precious experience for us; to know that we have this within us,” Alisa continued. “I feel like the best is still to come.”
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