Commentary

One of Donald Trump’s greatest achievements in office was his remaking of the American judiciary with the appointment of three outstanding Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lower court judges who defend the Constitution from the federal bench each day. But now, with just a few bizarre social media posts, Trump has repudiated that entire legacy.

In last month’s midterms, Republican House candidates have won about 54 million votes and Democrats have taken about 51 million — translating into a three percentage point advantage for the GOP. Some votes are still uncounted, but Democrats are not positioned to pull ahead in the final tally. Yet readers have bombarded me with tweets and emails, questioning whether these vote totals accurately measure which party Americans preferred in 2022.

When Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, signed a major Infrastructure bill in 1956, he was 65 years old — definitely a senior. And when Ike, as he was affectionately nick-named, left office in 1961, at age 70, his approval ratings throughout the country were sky high. Everyone still “liked Ike,” as his early campaign buttons suggested. Eisenhower was venerated for being a senior; I remember the word “grandfatherly” being used. President Ronald Reagan, too, was respected for his age. Today, sadly, many young people believe President Joe Biden, who just turned 80, is over the hill. When he won the passage of his own critical infrastructure bill in 2021, he received nothing like the credit Ike was given.

This week, a group of determined women who have worked quietly behind the scenes to change the face of Maryland politics gathered at a woman-owned brewery in Prince George’s County. If they got a bit rowdy, there was good cause to celebrate. For 10 years, through Emerge Maryland, they have trained 175 Democratic women to run for office, with 17 more women getting ready to begin their training in 2023. This year the hard work yielded some great victories, among them Brooke Lierman, who will be Maryland’s first female comptroller, and Jessica Fitzwater, who eked out a narrow victory for county executive in purple Frederick County. Both are graduates of Emerge Maryland’s first class in 2013.

Sexual assault should be illegal, and marriage should be no defense — it’s an ideal the U.S. has been working toward since the 1970s, when states began outlawing marital rape. In Maryland, loopholes still exist that let people get away with assaulting their spouses. Fortunately, efforts to close those loopholes are intensifying. In the February Zoom hearing about this proposed repeal, faces were somber. Advocates talked about the gruesome ways people have found to exploit these loopholes. Under current Maryland state law, marriage is a total defense to fourth-degree sexual assault — even if the spouse is injured in their intimate areas, even if the contact is abusive, even if the married couple are living apart in a trial separation.

The support that Maryland voters gave to Question 4, the cannabis legalization issue, reminded me that major policy change often happens in a way that feels more like running a marathon, rather than a hundred-yard dash. Back in the last century, as my students like to say — actually, it was 1988 — I gave a speech to a joint meeting of big-city mayors and chiefs of police in which I proposed that the country should consider the decriminalization of drugs, including cannabis. The overwhelming response to that speech was a combination of scorn, derision and dismissiveness.