Commentary

Maryland employers are desperate for new employees. Our state now has the highest number of available jobs it has seen in the past five years. And yet the unemployment rate for June went up slightly, to 6.2 percent, up by 0.1 percentage points from a month earlier. More than 250,000 jobs are listed on the Maryland Workforce Exchange, according to Maryland Department of Labor Secretary Tiffany P. Robinson.

We’ve come long way from the all-white, all-male judiciary that looms large in portraits on the walls of Baltimore County’s ceremonial courtroom, where the investiture ceremony was recently held for Susan Chambers Zellweger to the District Court for Baltimore County. A hundred lawyers and judges, a dozen family members or so, and a couple of politician types attended to watch Ms. Zellweger, a longtime public defender, be sworn in.

Employers can play a vital role in ending the pandemic once and for all – if they take the initiative. In June, a federal court in Texas dismissed a suit brought by employees challenging the right of their employer, a hospital, to require vaccination against COVID-19 as a condition of continued employment. The judge held that no federal law protected the employees, who cited no valid medical necessity or religious justification for their refusal.

Both 2018 and 2020 were record-breaking years of women running for and being elected to political office. In fact, my mom was among those women, running for the Democratic Central Committee in my district. Seeing headlines that celebrated the record-breaking success of women and hearing stories about the women who ran, it’s understandable to think that women are being represented, or at least we are going in the right direction. But then I look at Maryland, where the representatives, the senators and the governor are men.

As Gov. Larry Hogan wades into national issues with increasing frequency, he should check if Maryland is leading by example before plunging into the deep end. Recently, in an opinion piece for USA Today, Hogan made waves saying Washington is asleep on cybersecurity and America is vulnerable to attack following the highly-publicized Colonial Pipeline ransomware hack.

One of the most promising aspects of Mayor Brandon Scott’s 36-page plan for preventing crime in Baltimore is labeled as an “initiative to come” when it should already be in place. Check that: It should have been in place years ago — when Scott was still in grade school.  It’s simply this: Prepare inmates coming out of prison to return to the city and live a law-abiding life. Get them ready for successful reentry while they’re still locked up.

Creating a more equitable society has been a topic of discussion for several years in our country, a goal that most people support even if they may differ on the way to make that happen. After all, our Founding Fathers wrote that “all men are created equal” but then created a country where millions of Africans were enslaved and women were not permitted to vote or participate in many areas of civic life. Moving toward greater equality has been the work of this country for almost 250 years.