Commentary

In her now celebrated exchange with Alabama’s Solicitor General, our newest Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, eviscerated his argument that our Constitution is and should be “colorblind.” Rather, she declared, the intent of those who framed 14th and 15th amendments was to be “color conscious” in safeguarding the civil liberties of the 4 million enslaved Black people freed by the Civil War.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency caved to Chesapeake Bay-state governors and agricultural interests by failing to enforce the Clean Water Act or impose sanctions on recalcitrant states for violating mandates to reduce bay pollutants. Instead, the annual meeting of the Chesapeake Executive Council with the EPA administrator and bay-state governors turned into a self-congratulatory session where for the third time it was acknowledged that bay states will miss a vital cleanup deadline. The required pollution reductions were set in 2010 when the EPA gave states 15 years to comply. All speakers acknowledged that these reductions would not be met by 2025. Critical bay-choking nutrient reduction would be missed by wide margins — only 42 percent of nitrogen and 64 percent of phosphorus.

Historians may well mark the decade that just passed as one of the most tumultuous Baltimore has ever experienced — with a housing market crisis, civil and racial unrest after the death of Freddie Gray, a mayoral resignation amid political scandal, and a pandemic. On top of all of that, the past 10 years ended with the city’s seventh-straight decade of population loss, based on the 2020 Census. Baltimore actually stands alone among all cities in the East Coast for population declines. Among all cities greater than 400,000 in the U.S. in 2010, only four out of the 40+ in that category lost any population at all. What do we need to do right now so we don’t have the eighth decade in a row of population loss by 2030?

This month, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases that pose the starkest threats ever to affirmative action in higher education. Central to those cases, involving admissions programs at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, will be the value of campus diversity, which is the sole justification for affirmative action that the court has endorsed. The notion that racially diverse student bodies improve campus intellectual life has been roundly attacked by both liberals and conservatives. But the Roberts court should not be quick to dismiss diversity’s value and dismantle affirmative action. Because we have evidence that diversity works.

There was an almost surreal detachment last week between what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was announcing about the Chesapeake Bay, and the tone of the presentation. The substance of the annual meeting on Oct. 11 of the Chesapeake Bay Executive Council, an advisory committee of Bay region governors and the EPA, was bleak: After decades of effort and billions of dollars spent, the most recent Bay cleanup plan was going to end far from meeting its goals by the deadline of 2025.

It is clear that transit-oriented development holds a host of benefits for the Washington region and the people who call it home — many of whom want to live in communities that are walkable and dense, and thus don’t require car ownership. It’s also clear, however, that TOD hasn’t always been equitable in impact. Speculation on its added value has pushed rent prices up around these developments and, by consequence, long-term and low-income residents out.

I was lucky enough to grow up on the Tred Avon River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My childhood was simpler than that of kids today. We didn’t have cable TV, smartphones or Wi-Fi. I spent much of my time beachcombing, fishing or boating with my dad. The water was my playground. That never changed. I now live in Baltimore, a city I partly chose for its access to the Chesapeake Bay. And today, the thing I love most is being threatened by plastic.